Meet the Team – Kyle Brumbaugh

What draws someone to customer success

Kyle Brumbaugh wasn't looking for a job title when he joined CoApp. He was looking for a problem worth solving. The role of Head of Customer Success sounds reactive — respond to issues, manage relationships, keep people happy — but Kyle approaches it as the most proactive function in the company. If a customer is having a problem, that problem already existed before they called. His job is to get ahead of it.

That instinct toward early intervention is part of what makes Kyle well suited for his role at a company whose entire product is about early intervention. CoApp catches operational errors before they cause downstream damage. Kyle catches onboarding friction, configuration gaps, and workflow mismatches before they cause churn. The logic is the same; the domain is different.

The bridge between two worlds

One of the hardest things to get right in a technical startup is the translation layer between what customers experience and what engineers build. The people who run multi-location optical businesses are not thinking in terms of rule engine logic or browser extension APIs. They're thinking about staff turnover, billing denial rates, and whether the patient in room two has the right frame on hold. The vocabulary is completely different.

Kyle's role is to live in both worlds simultaneously. When a customer describes a workflow problem — "the alert keeps firing on valid OC measurements" or "the popup is blocking the submit button in this system" — Kyle has to understand what's happening operationally well enough to describe it precisely to Jack. And when Jack explains that the fix requires a new DOM selector pattern or a change to the rule evaluation order, Kyle has to translate that back into something a practice manager can understand and act on.

This isn't just a communication skill — it requires genuine technical curiosity. Kyle has spent enough time digging into CoApp's rule configuration and alert logic that he can spot certain classes of misconfiguration himself, before escalating to engineering. That depth makes customer relationships faster and more honest, because customers aren't waiting on a translation chain. They're talking to someone who actually understands what's happening in the product.

Honesty as a design principle

Kyle is direct about what CoApp can and can't do. In an industry where enterprise software sales often involves a long stretch of aspirational demo promises followed by a painful implementation reality, Kyle's approach stands out. If a customer's workflow has characteristics that CoApp doesn't handle well yet, he says so in the evaluation process, not in month six of a contract.

This honesty is partly temperament and partly strategy. A customer who buys CoApp with an accurate picture of its capabilities is more likely to succeed, more likely to expand, and more likely to be a reference customer than one who bought based on an overstated demo. Kyle understands that long-term retention is built on appropriate expectations and genuine value, not on closing the deal at any cost.

That philosophy also shapes how CoApp handles support. When something breaks or doesn't work as expected, the response is direct: here's what happened, here's what we're doing about it, here's when you'll have a fix. No deflection, no escalation theater. Customers who've experienced the opposite from other vendors notice the difference.

What he's building toward

As CoApp grows, Kyle's role will evolve from hands-on customer success into building the systems and processes that scale it. That means formalizing onboarding playbooks, defining what a successful deployment looks like across different practice management systems, and building the feedback loop from customer experience back into product development.

The goal is a customer success function that makes CoApp's product better over time, not just one that responds to problems when they arise. Every support ticket is a signal. Every configuration question is a UX insight. Every expansion conversation is a signal about what customers value most. Kyle's job is to make sure those signals reach the right people and shape what CoApp builds next.