Patrick Campbell
Founder & CEO, ProfitWell. On 5 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveanalystinvestor@Patticus ↗LinkedIn ↗patticus.com ↗
Campbell founded ProfitWell (originally Price Intelligently) in 2012, bootstrapping the subscription metrics software before selling it to Paddle in 2022 for over $200 million. A former U.S. intelligence community analyst and Google economist, he is widely recognized for his benchmark research on SaaS monetization, plan optimization, and churn reduction.
5shows
6appearances
97statements
14resolved
9supported
2contradicted
64%fully supported
32said about them ↓ Everything Patrick Campbell said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Campbell: Only one in ten companies do quarterly customer research
“Only one out of 10 companies actually do customer research or development on a quarterly basis.”
Campbell: SaaS startups face 16x more competitors than a decade ago
“Over the past decade, if you're building in tech, particularly in like SaaS or subscriptions, you now have 16 times the number of competitors if you started a business today than if you did 10 years ago.”
Campbell: 80% of marketing budgets target the top and bottom funnel
“80% of sales and marketing budgets
Tend to go to the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel.”
Campbell: Paddle will do for subscription revenue what Salesforce did for CRM
“We're going to do for The subscription dollar, what Salesforce did for the customer record where a dollar through paddle is going to be worth, you know, a lot more coming out of paddle than using infrastructure that, you know, is currently on the market basica…”
Campbell: Google gave me a $5K bonus before shelving my algorithm
“I made Google a ton of money, but the point I was trying to make was like, they gave me an award and like a 5000 dollar bonus. And they were like, yeah, we're going to shut this down.”
Campbell: ProfitWell used Amazon's backloaded 10/20/30/40 equity vesting for employees
“We actually have profitable. The one thing that we did is we did like backward bending vesting. So it was 10, 20, 3040. It's kind of like how Amazon used to do it. So like you only get a 10% of your shares allocated shares when you get over that one year cliff…”
Campbell: SaaS customers want pricing done for them due to trust gaps
“Pricing, there's a trust gap. Like there's a lot of products out there that have trust gaps where it's like, you can give them the tools to do the thing, but at the end of the day, they're like, can someone just do this for me? And help me understand like what…”
Campbell: ProfitWell lost a year of growth by not raising a seed round
“We should have raised money right there, at least a small seed fund or seed round or something like that in order to like, you know, accelerate that probably by a year. Like we probably lost a year by not raising a small round for that.”
Campbell: Quoting flat rates instead of percentages makes B2B sales significantly easier
“A percent cut feels punitive, but if I position it as a flat rate, that is essentially a percentage anyways, like that little mind trick, like makes the sales process so much easier.”
Campbell: ProfitWell Retain recovered $22M per month in subscription MRR
“The ego number is like the amount of dollars that go through all retained forms. That's the number I know. That's twenty two million dollars a month.”
Campbell: Bootstrapped founders should always keep basic M&A decks and data rooms ready
“I think you should always be ready to like run a process. And that means like, even if you're bootstrapped, have a deck, have like an overview, like memo or a deck or whatever it is have like some of your financials or a data room. Like you don't have to have …”
Campbell: Track and nurture potential acquirers on a dedicated board deck slide
“This is another thing that you should do is you should always keep potential acquirers, I would say, warm. So for the past number of years, we had like a slide in our board deck of like, here are the potential acquirers. And then basically like, where is the s…”
Campbell: ProfitWell rejected potentially more lucrative buyout offers to protect team
“And we did get other offers. Those other offers, they were not as compelling from a team perspective. They might have been more lucrative depending on how you look at it, but it was one of those things where the core of us as well as like myself wanted to keep…”
Campbell: SaaS firms spend under 10% on retention and zero on pricing
“When we looked at other pieces such as monetization, basically no budget, no time, no head count was going to pricing. And then ultimately retention was a little bit better about five to 10% of a budget.”
Campbell: Annual SaaS contracts achieve 30% better retention than monthly plans
“Your annual contracts will typically have 30% better retention overall compared to monthlies. And then quarterlies basically have typically a 20% better retention rate than those monthlies.”
Campbell: Flat discounts significantly outperform percentage discounts for SaaS upgrades
“Whole numbers, two months off one month off, 100 dollars off versus percentages, 15% off the whole numbers work substantially better. It's not even close in terms of the actual performance between those two buckets.”
Campbell: Value metrics surpassed feature differentiation in SaaS pricing in December 2020
“December of 20, 20 was the first time period where more SAS companies were using a value metric than using feature differentiation.”
Campbell: Plain text dunning emails outperform designed corporate emails for recovery
“Do not send highly branded designing emails. They don't work as well. Plain text emails that appear that they're actually from a human. They work really, really well.”
Campbell: SaaS pricing complexity must scale with sales touch depth
“It's a function, the complexity, you can get more complex the deeper your sales process is, less complex, you know, the more touchless your sales process is.”
Campbell: ProfitWell recovers customer acquisition cost in one to two months
“Yeah, we basically get one to two months recovery. I mean, there are definitely customers that we don't get that because they're paying us 50 bucks, and they're on the low end, and they're a little bit more touchless. Sure. But for, like, the target customer w…”
Campbell: ProfitWell has reached approximately $8 million in ARR
“Our latest public number is around, like, size is eight million in terms of ARR.”
Campbell: ProfitWell has secretly acquired a subscription analytics competitor
“We are buying another person in the space. The deal's closed and we're going to announce it within the next month or so.”
Campbell: AI will accelerate cybercrime growth beyond 7x in five years
“Basically cybercrime's exploding. And it's probably gonna accelerate even further with AI beyond this, like, seven X five year magnitude that I have in the spreadsheet.”
Campbell: Gas Station Portfolio Cost $30M and Yields Over $1M Annually
“So, it's thirty million in gas stations. I believe, I can't remember the exact cap rate basically what we're getting out of it, but we're getting I believe the caps are at like five and a half. And so we're not getting like an immense amount of income from tha…”
The other half of the tape: Patrick Campbell's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 29 times in 15 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shaan Puri 8Nathan Latka 8Sam Parr 4Tripp Brockway 1Scott Sambucci 1Peter Coppinger 1Jason Cohen 1Andrew Wilkinson 1
Statements about Patrick Campbell, by other people (3)
Parr: Ultra-successful founders spend heavily on life coaches to manage self-doubt
“You think that when you, quote, make it, you don't have doubts, and you don't spend money on foo-foo shit like a Life. You spend even more on that type of stuff because it's just still incredibly necessary.”
Sam Parr: Patrick Campbell bootstrapped ProfitWell to roughly $200M exit
“Patrick Campbell bootstrapped his company, ProfitWell to like a two hundred million dollar exit.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 15
My First Million 13
Lenny's Podcast 1
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2023 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 1 episode
2021 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Testbox Lets You Try Software Without Sales Calls, Landed 1st Customer, $2.7m Raised at $12m Post Money Cap
- Referral Program Software Growsurf Bootstrapped to $26k/mo in Revenue, Pricing Page Secrets
- SalesQualia SaaS Secret Weapon, Helping 35 Founders Scale Pipeline, $1m+ Run Rate
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Patrick's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ProfitWell | 2 | 41 | — | full record on Top Founders → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ProfitWell | 1 | 25 | 44% 4/9 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ProfitWell | 1 | 16 | 100% 1/1 | full record on My First Million → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ProfitWell | 1 | 15 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
 BIGDEALLEDGER | Founder & CEO, ProfitWell | 1 | 0 | — | full record on BigDeal → |