A customer can be delighted with a company and still spend most of the relationship being asked for things. Attend this webinar. Renew that agreement. Help with a reference. Eran Baron noticed the pattern from inside the business. Companies were capable of maintaining years of contact without learning enough about the experience on the other end. The customer had become a very well-maintained address in a database.
Baron’s response was to become a founder. In 2022, he started Deeto with Golan Raz and Yossi Gelman. They brought experience from large enterprises and a shared interest in the knowledge sitting inside customer relationships. The name on the contract knew things the sales organization needed to hear. Getting those things into circulation became the business.
There is something appealingly unromantic about this origin. No improbable revelation is required. Anyone who has received a request for a testimonial before being asked a useful question can recognize the problem. Baron’s distinction was to approach it after years spent with the financial and operational consequences of how companies work.
Before the startup, the handover
In May 2019, XMPie founder Jacob Aizikowitz announced his retirement. His farewell letter named Baron, then senior vice president of finance and operations, as his successor. The two had worked together since 2003. The transition had been under way since early April, ahead of Aizikowitz’s final formal working day on May 31.
It was a handover with a substantial history behind it. XMPie made software for personalized communications and associated workflows. Xerox had acquired the company in 2006. Baron’s route to its leadership ran through finance and operations, the disciplines responsible for making the promises of a business survive contact with its resources.
The connection between that work and Deeto is easy to overlook. Personalized communication already asks a company to consider who is receiving a message and what might make it relevant. Customer advocacy adds another person to the exchange: someone whose experience can make the message credible. The recipient has a reason to listen that the vendor cannot simply award itself.
Baron later described his time at XMPie and Xerox as the setting in which he recognized the unused potential of satisfied customers. He had occupied the executive roles that see both the relationship and the spreadsheet. Deeto would bring those concerns together. A good customer experience might matter to the next buyer, provided somebody could arrange the introduction.
A buyer has different questions
The seller has a presentation. The buyer has a predicament. Those two things occasionally meet, though a calendar invitation offers no guarantee. Baron has made the buyer’s perspective a recurring subject of his public writing. His advice begins with a short instruction: “When you’re selling, think like a buyer.”
He argues for demonstrations that address the customer’s actual problem and for evidence from people who have already used the product. This changes the function of a reference. Rather than arriving as a ceremonial endorsement at the end of a sale, the customer’s experience can help a prospect work out whether the purchase makes sense in the first place.
Consider the questions a buyer brings to a complicated software decision. What happens during implementation? Will the promised benefit appear in a business like mine? Which difficulties did the demo skip? These are ordinary questions, and they are often easier to discuss with another customer. A sales representative can explain the intended journey. A customer has unpacked the suitcase.
Baron’s proposition depends on that difference in perspective. The customer has lived through the purchase, the setup and the daily use. Their account can contain reservations as well as praise. Its usefulness comes from relevance and detail. A cheerful sentence about excellent service may decorate a website. A specific account can help someone decide.
“When you’re selling, think like a buyer.”
Eran Baron
The conversation needs a way out
Deeto’s early problem centered on advocacy and customer references. Over time, the ambition widened. A customer’s account of using a product can matter to sales, but it can also tell marketing which benefits people actually describe, or tell a product team where expectations and experience diverge. One conversation may have several destinations.
That is where Baron’s operating background becomes especially relevant to the story. Departments can each have useful information and still leave the company poorly informed. Sales hears one account. Marketing collects another. Product receives a different fragment. The organization can be richly supplied with feedback and surprisingly short of shared understanding.
Deeto presented its expanded customer orchestration platform on January 20, 2026, with Baron among the featured speakers. The launch described a workflow that collects customer signals, organizes unstructured input, delivers relevant insight to teams and examines patterns over time. The intended audience extended across marketing, revenue, product and customer experience.
For Baron, that progression enlarges the original question. A reference helps with a buying decision. A connected body of customer experience can inform decisions throughout a company. The practical challenge is getting the information to someone while the decision remains open. An insight that arrives after the meeting is liable to become an interesting attachment.
An interview that changes its questions
Baron has also described a more immediate obstacle: willing customers can produce generic answers. The company asks them to contribute, they agree, and the resulting material reveals little of their particular experience. Consent to answer a question is only the beginning of an interview. The question itself still has to earn its place.
His account of Deeto’s AI Interview Agent starts with a change in approach. Instead of expecting every customer to respond to the same format, the system is designed to consider the person’s context and adapt its questions as the exchange develops. The aim is to draw out experience that a standard request might leave untouched.
This is an interesting job to assign AI. Much of the excitement around the technology concerns its ability to produce words quickly. An interviewer has a prior obligation: establish what is worth saying. A follow-up question can be more valuable than another polished paragraph, especially when the first answer is polite enough to be useless.
The ambition also leaves a demanding standard for the product. A customer story has to retain the meaning of the experience being described. Specificity matters because different buyers and different teams need different things. The same software purchase can be a successful commercial decision and an awkward implementation. Hearing both makes the account more useful.
The numbers still have to mean something
On July 1, 2025, Deeto announced a $12.5 million Series A led by Jump Capital. UpWest, TAL Ventures, Mertor and TAU Ventures participated. The company put its announced total funding at $17 million. For Baron, the round supported a broader plan for customer intelligence and AI agents.
Led by Jump Capital
$17M in total funding announced
The amount is a financing milestone. The more revealing detail is what the company intended to build with it. Its funding announcement connected customer stories with practical uses in sales and marketing, including personalized collections of evidence. It also described the next stage as customer intelligence infrastructure, making clear how far the plan had moved beyond arranging a reference call.
Baron’s own outreach experiments offer a smaller-scale view of his interests. He publicly described Deeto using Samplead to identify relevant details about prospects from places such as podcasts and social discussions. He reported a 17 percent reply rate and a 4 percent conversion from messages sent to meetings booked. Those figures describe his reported experiment, with its particular audience and approach.
The underlying point is modest enough to travel further than the percentages: relevance affects whether a message deserves an answer. Baron applied that idea to finding prospects as well as connecting them with customers. The symmetry is useful. A company selling the value of relevant experience has good reason to examine the relevance of its own opening line.
What the machine has to listen for
By late 2025, Baron was discussing AI and customer voice with the print industry community at Dscoop. A December session also featured HP Industrial Print’s Richa Pande and Dscoop’s Peter van Teeseling, with Roy Eitan hosting. His old industry and his new company had found a shared subject: how technology could help customer experience reach other people.
His public argument about AI has become increasingly concerned with the information beneath the output. If software can produce a report or marketing asset cheaply, the distinctive value has to come from somewhere else. Baron points toward firsthand customer knowledge. That position makes collecting and understanding experience a central part of the business, rather than a preliminary chore.
There is a useful continuity in the career. At XMPie, Baron worked on the business of communicating with people in ways relevant to them. At Deeto, he is building around what those people can contribute in return. Finance, operations and customer conversations meet at a familiar managerial question: what does the company know, and can it use that knowledge?
His aspiration is to make customer voice available across the decisions a business makes. That leaves plenty of practical work ahead: asking questions people want to answer, preserving what they mean and getting the answer to the right desk. Baron has placed a technology company around those jobs. The customer, after years of invitations to attend, renew and recommend, may finally get a worthwhile follow-up question.