Cory Brown Would Like a Little More Criticism

Cory Brown wanted more complaints. At Pronto Marketing, the agency he had co-founded with his father, customer satisfaction ratings regularly came in above 90 percent. He knew the service had room to improve. A reassuring score offered little help with the parts that needed work. For an operator responsible for customers after the sale, a detailed objection could be considerably more useful than another cheerful tick.

It is an awkward ambition to explain at a celebration. Everyone else admires the number; you would like to hear from somebody mildly annoyed. Brown’s reasoning was practical. A customer who explained a problem gave the team something to fix, and a chance to show that it was listening. Silence offered no such instructions.

That appetite for useful criticism runs through his working life. Now based in Bangkok, Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Simplesat. Its origins belong to the less photogenic end of entrepreneurship: managing service requests, trying out inadequate tools, and wishing the information in one system would speak to the information in another.

The family business came with a queue

Pronto began in 2008 with Cory and his father, Derek Brown. Derek had worked at Microsoft and knew the small IT businesses that would become an important part of the agency’s clientele. These companies could look after their customers’ technology. Finding time to execute their own marketing was another matter. Pronto offered ongoing help rather than a website handed over with a ceremonial good luck.

The father-son division was straightforward. Derek handled sales and business development. Once a client signed up, Cory was responsible for getting the website live and looking after the customer. This put him where the consequences of a sales promise eventually arrive: delivery.

By their 2018 conversation with consultant Todd Kane, the Browns described a business serving more than 1,500 clients. Work ranged from substantial website changes to small updates and broken forms. The request might be modest; the obligation was continuous. A recurring service business gets to discover, repeatedly, whether its customers still consider it worth paying for.

Working at that scale also meant opinions arrived through several doors. A founder might hear a complaint directly. A technician might pick up a remark. A survey might contain something else altogether. Brown’s later product would try to give this scattered knowledge a more dependable home.

The first customer was down the hall

Simplesat emerged from the agency’s own frustration. Brown was managing support teams and could not get a clear enough picture of what customers wanted from the feedback tools available. The team decided to build its own. An internal tool has a useful early audience: colleagues who will discover quickly whether it adds another chore.

Then came a promising request. Pronto’s customers wanted to use the tool with their customers. The problem had traveled beyond the office without requiring much explanation. In his account of the company’s beginnings, Brown described a specific internal need turning into a product for other small and medium businesses.

He also described the appeal of doing more with Pronto’s development team. He had been managing more than ten developers building internal systems. Software offered a way for their work to reach beyond the agency. Simplesat brought that interest together with a problem he had already spent time trying to solve.

Design was part of the work. Brown’s 2023 account recalls prototypes influenced by animation, video games, and Tinder’s swipe interaction. These are unusual companions for a business survey, which generally behaves as though enjoyment would invalidate the results.

The aim was to make answering feel approachable. He wanted honest, detailed responses, feedback gathered in one place, and a quick route back to the customer. More questions could produce a less flattering overall score while offering more useful information. For someone trying to improve delivery, that trade had an obvious attraction.

A complaint needs somewhere to go

The product’s early integrations show where Brown’s attention went next. In July 2018, Simplesat announced a two-way connection with Autotask, software used by managed service providers to organize their businesses. The point was to bring satisfaction information into the systems service teams already used, and make positive feedback easier to publish as testimonials.

This is a revealing detail in a founder’s story. Integration announcements rarely provide the sort of material that gets read aloud at dinner. Yet they expose an operator’s priorities. A useful response loses some of its usefulness if a manager must remember to visit an entirely separate place to find it.

Brown supplied a concrete example in a 2023 discussion with Vitally. At Simplesat, negative feedback creates an Intercom conversation attached to the customer, carrying the feedback details into the team’s unassigned inbox. Support staff handle it through the same queue where new customer conversations arrive.

The complaint acquires a destination. It becomes work somebody recognizes. For the person who sent it, this distinction is likely to matter more than the elegance of the reporting screen.

Keep the compliments, too

Brown’s interest in criticism has a companion: attention to praise. In that Vitally conversation, he explained that positive feedback identifies bright spots a company can build on. When customers appreciate a team going beyond what was expected, the response helps reveal which habits deserve repeating.

He also argued for staying focused after making a decision, rather than letting isolated comments send a team chasing every new possibility. Listening requires judgment about what to act on. Otherwise, the most recent opinion can become the entire product strategy, which is a lively way to run a company until Tuesday’s opinion arrives.

In November 2023, Brown hosted a closer examination of Simplesat’s own feedback practices with colleagues Elliot Fox and Hannah Logan. They discussed combining transactional satisfaction surveys with Net Promoter Score surveys, which can reach decision-makers who never submit a support ticket. Different questions encounter different parts of the relationship.

The conversation also covered connecting feedback to other business information and routing it toward follow-up, bug tracking, or feature requests. These distinctions explain the attraction of Brown’s work. The score is easy to notice. The more demanding task is deciding which person, problem, or decision it should lead to.

The founder takes the host’s chair

Brown has made space for other practitioners’ experience through Simplesat’s webinars. In June 2024, he hosted Kimberly McKellar, then VP of Customer Success at Gladly, to discuss how support teams could do more with the resources available. Their agenda included personalization, communication channels, and the division of work between people and automation.

The practical questions were familiar to anyone responsible for delivery. What information should an agent see before a conversation begins? How does a team add another contact channel without creating somewhere new for a customer to wait? What should automation handle, and where does a person add more value?

Later that summer, Brown joined Troy Dean on The Agency Hour. Their conversation returned to survey engagement, customer feedback, and the move from Pronto to Simplesat. The choice of audience made sense. Agency owners know the daily experience that shaped his product: doing the work, hearing the reaction, and trying to keep the relationship going.

His public profile also includes a less decorative responsibility. Simplesat names Brown as its security officer, responsible for data protection planning and awareness across the organization. A business asking customers for candid opinions has responsibilities for the information that comes back. Even a friendly survey eventually meets a policy document.

The old frustration gets new company

By 2026, Brown was applying his original objection to larger feedback platforms. In January, Simplesat publicly challenged cumbersome implementations and positioned itself around simpler day-to-day use. The company described features including single sign-on, AI analysis, and SOC 2 Type II compliance. The ambition was to serve more demanding operations while keeping the product manageable for the people running them.

In March, Simplesat offered migration help to customers of Delighted ahead of that product’s June closure. Brown framed the disruption as a familiar consequence of focused products being acquired and retired. In August, the company announced free rebuilding of survey programs for GetFeedback Direct customers facing a scheduled December shutdown.

“Feedback tools should make your life easier, not harder.”

Cory Brown / March 2026

There is a commercial interest in those offers, plainly enough: Simplesat would like the customers. There is also continuity with Brown’s earlier experience. A service team already has customers to look after. Rebuilding its feedback machinery becomes one more obligation competing for the same hours.

His April argument about AI support returns even more directly to the question of useful measurement. Brown urged teams to tag AI-handled conversations and compare satisfaction afterward with conversations handled by people. Faster resolution and lower costs leave a question open: how did the customer experience the exchange?

Simplesat’s stated direction now includes understanding service quality when an interaction involves a person, an AI agent, or both. The setting has changed since Brown was getting agency websites live. The need for a reliable account from the customer remains.

That gives his career a pleasingly awkward through line. He keeps building ways for people to tell a business something it may prefer to overlook. A service team might receive praise, a useful objection, or a problem it can finally put right. Brown’s contribution is to make room for the answer - especially when the answer spoils a perfectly agreeable score.