James Kennedy
Co-Founder and CEO, ProcurementExpress.com. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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James Kennedy is the co-founder and CEO of ProcurementExpress.com, a purchase order and spend-management software platform launched in 2014. Within the MicroConf and SaaS startup communities, he is known for discussing pricing strategies and hosting The Gross Profit Podcast.
Everything James Kennedy said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kennedy: Software's exact dollar price rarely affects mid-market purchasing decisions
“I'm firmly convinced that the actual dollar value has very little to do with the buying decision, definitely in mid-market.”
Kennedy: All SaaS Economic Value Lies in Upsells and Cross-Sells
“Well, that was true for traditional products, but not for SaaS, because all of the value in SaaS is in the upsell and the cross-sell. So you've got to maintain that customer over time.”
ProcurementExpress institutes automatic 5% to 10% price increases every September
“New customers to come on September, we do our price increase. We normally say exactly that. It's like between five and 10%. Last year it was eight percent.”
Kennedy: SaaS customers tolerate price increases under 20% if deriving value
“The second thing is that I think really, you know, it's a rule of thumb that no one really cares as long as less than 20%, except for one group of people, and that's the group of people that weren't getting value from your product in the first place.”
Kennedy: 5% to 15% of paying SaaS customers are inactive
“So especially, I think it's a, maybe a little secret of SaaS is that there's, you know, inactive users. It can be anything from five to 15% of your Customer base may be paying you and are not getting value from the product.”
Kennedy: Price increase churn strictly comes from customers who never onboarded
“We do have a bump in churn after we do this, for sure. It does exist, but it's always the people who were just never onboarded in the first place.”
Kennedy: Blind price increases unintentionally force shifts in SaaS customer segments
“If you're just increasing your prices and you're not thinking about it, at a certain point, you change the nature of your customers. So you might go from prosumer to mid-market, you suddenly might go from mid-market to enterprise, and then that changes how you…”
Kennedy: Surging customer acquisition costs make bootstrapping ProcurementExpress impossible today
“If I was to start our product today, there's no way we would have enough money to compete with the other people like ourselves in the market, because the ACVs have become high enough to support more expensive marketing channels. They've pushed up Capterra, pus…”
Kennedy: Committing to annual price increases forces product teams to ship value
“Increasing the prices also pushes your team say, Hey, listen, I've got to write this email next year, a better price increase. So Let's think about that. What's going to be a no brainer when I write the email about, hey, they're charging us extra two bucks a u…”
Procurement Express Pays Partners Up to 40% Lifetime Revenue Commission
“We have a quite extensive partner network, and we do pay up to 30, 40% kickback, depending on, but that's a kind of, we look at that differently.”
Kennedy Would Reject a $3M Acquisition Offer for Procurement Express
“No, of course not, but I think Intuit are a great example of the type of, you know, they're a great example of types company that, like us, that serve SMBs, kind of look up to, you know, for sure, because of their partner strategy, you know, they've grown most…”
Kennedy: ProcurementExpress reaches $2M ARR with 25 employees
“Yeah, we did take an angel round actually, so we have like a five angel investors, yeah, in 2016, and but we have about 25 people, and we're in and around a two million ARR in revenue mark”
Kennedy: ProcurementExpress data shows late-2022 drops in corporate purchasing volumes
“I will say that, you know, price has become more of an issue. I think we've all seen that anecdotally and also in terms of Purchasing volumes has gone down. An average dollar sale in the system has gone down. Now all on aggregated data is BS. So maybe I could,…”
Kennedy uses 'lowest price increase ever' framing for SaaS price hike emails
“When we do a price increase, it's always some variation of this, which is, you know, What we're going to do for you in 2023 and our lowest price increase ever. So I'm not hiding the fact that we're doing a price increase. I personally love that line because it…”
Kennedy: Holloman Corporation paid Procurement Express $20k upfront
“Big customer early on called Holloman Corporation based out in Texas. They cut us a check for 20 grand, which I didn't believe was even possible at the time.”
Kennedy: Procurement Express doubled its revenue over the past year
“We've about doubled in the last year.”
Kennedy: Procurement Express converts one in twenty product demos
“It's one in 20. That's what we do.”
Kennedy: Procurement Express Monthly Gross Logo Churn Is 1% to 2%
“So what we're talking about is total number of customers to churn divided by our total number of customers is one to two percent.”
Procurement Express manages $3B in annual spend across roughly 300 customers
“Now we have about 300 customers all around the world, half in the States, half everywhere else, and we handle about three billion dollars in spend for those customers each year, and that's what we do.”
Kennedy: Procurement Express Operates from Rural South Africa
“We came here because we've always been You know digital nomads, if you like, for the last 1015 years, and when it came to settle down, we just wanted to be near, near, near family, and, but kind of had a world-class business, even from a small town like this, …”
Kennedy: Procurement Express Targets Businesses With $1M to $50M in Revenue
“Between one and fifty million in turnovers or typical customer.”
The other half of the tape: James Kennedy's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 9
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 9
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 7 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens James's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, ProcurementExpress.com | 3 | 12 | — | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, ProcurementExpress.com | 1 | 10 | — | full record on Top Founders → |