The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 55 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Monetization and retention offer significantly higher revenue impact than acquisition
“We gather data on what they're spending time on, and we basically found that you know, there's way more impact on spending a bit more time on monetization, a bit more time on retention, compared to spending time on acquisition.”
Paddle Recommends SaaS Companies Change Prices Once a Quarter
“We recommend you change your prices once a quarter.”
Top SaaS Companies Generate 20%+ Revenue from Existing Customers
“What we see when we look at this across the 40,000 companies in our portfolio is that the highest performing ones, 20% of their revenue or more is from their existing customer base. Unfortunately, most the vast majority have zero or negative.”
Rivera: ProfitWell Offers Pricing Surveys but Skips Implementation
“They do a great job of offering some good survey services to figure out willingness to pay things like that, which a lot of folks take run with and use, but they don't really get into how do you implement this stuff?”
Campbell: Paddle assumes full legal tax liability for its software customers
“Tax is completely taken care of. Like, not like, Hey, we show you how much tax it's like, no, no, no. It's completely taken care of. Like if your tax gets messed up, we go to jail. Like you don't go to jail. We go to jail because we're the ones that are actual…”
Owens: Paddle has lost only 8 customers to churn in 7 years
“If we look at logo churn, we have Sort of 900 customers today. And like we've lost in terms of actual churn eight customers in seven years.”
Nostalgia Prompts in Cancellation Flows Reduce Churn by 10% to 25%
“Doing something as simple as that, as prompting them to think about the positive we've seen can reduce churn by 10 to 25%.”
SaaS Companies Offering 25+ Currencies Grow 25% Faster
“Adding multiple currencies, companies that do that grow 12% faster. Those that have a lot of currencies, 25 plus, grow 25% faster.”
SaaS Companies Using Tax-Inclusive Pricing Grow 15% Slower
“Companies that are, quote, tax inclusive, meaning they're just adding tax to their price, instead of showing it as a different line item, grow at 15% slower rates.”
Paddle Stops Selling to Every SaaS Company, Targeting a Tiny Subsection
“So at Paddle, for instance, we were selling to every SaaS company. We've stopped doing that. We are selling to only a very small subsection of the market right now, and we're basically saying no to everybody else.”
Average SaaS Category Has 15x More Competitors Than Five Years Ago
“Over the last five years. Average competitors in a given industry in SaaS is up 1515, 16 X.”
Early-stage founders focus entirely on acquisition while guessing on pricing
“And inevitably, we hear that people are spending almost all the time on that sales and marketing stuff, especially at the founder stage, right? Spending almost all their time, they mostly guest on their pricing work, and they're not really working to gather da…”
Price increases should emphasize product value rather than protecting margins
“Number one is, relate to the value delivered, not internal factors. Don't say, I gotta protect my margins. Say, hey, I know this hurts for you guys, but this is gonna help us fund improvement of our products, and we have this stuff coming on that's gonna incre…”
SaaS companies should define anti-personas to avoid poor unit economics
“There's a lot of customers that you can probably technically service, but they're gonna distract you, they're not in your core focus, the unit economics isn't there, so a lot of the time, you know, you might have personas that you can technically serve, but th…”
Qualitative buyer personas are insufficient for SaaS monetization strategy
“You probably have a persona that looks like this, very qualitative, what is this person's age, their firmographics, what you know, their seniority, stuff like that, I'm sure all of you probably have something that's at this level, but it's not enough. And the …”
Paddle data shows B2C subscription growth flatlined in late 2022
“And we basically saw that you know, growth in the B to C market basically flatlined starting late last year.”
SaaS companies should adjust pricing relatively often
“We do, in fact, recommend, you know, changing prices relatively often, and not making the same once in a generation thing.”
Paddle data shows B2B SaaS growth slowed significantly in mid-2022
“And what's interesting is that, you know, starting, say July, August last year, we actually started to see Growth slow down a lot in the B to B space.”
Owens: Paddle at least doubled revenue from 2020 to 2021
“It was really high. Like it was because it was a sort of a little bit of a COVID aberration. Because we were, we saw like the tailwinds of all of that. We at least doubled the business like kind of over that kind of period of time.”
Owens: Expanding Paddle to gaming is simpler than physical D2C e-commerce
“The step for us between do we do this for SAS business and do we do it for a game is sort of fairly short versus the step of like, do you do it for SAS business? Do you, versus do you do it for Glossier or like kind of like one of these sort of D to C e-commer…”
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: 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…”
Owens: Paddle might have raised at a $3.5B valuation two months earlier
“Two months earlier and we might have raised it like a three and a half billion dollar valuation.”
Owens: The ProfitWell acquisition likely wouldn't have happened two months later
“Two months later, I think the deal might not have happened like at all.”
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 …”
Owens: Paddle has roughly tripled its revenue year-over-year
“We've roughly three X revenue every year.”
Owens: Paddle charges a flat 5% fee across all volume
“So we charge a flat five percent across everything.”
Owens: Paddle's largest customer processes around $45M in ARR
“No, so, like, right now, and this is deliberate, the largest probably does, I think, in the region of, like, forty-five million ARR.”
Owens: Paddle avoids charging professional services fees entirely
“We don't charge professional services. We don't do any of that stuff.”
Owens: Software needs a business infrastructure equivalent to AWS
“We actually think that there is an opportunity for somebody to build kind of this almost sort of like the second most important piece of infrastructure that software company buys, which is sort of like the business infrastructure to AWS's technical infrastruct…”
Brockway: B2B SaaS Churn Up 1.5 Percentage Points Over 2.5 Years
“When you look at it from a B to B perspective this trend also continues mostly in the form of churn. So this chart's a little busy, but basically churn is up a whole point and a half relative to two and a half years ago.”
Checkout Conversion Rates Vary Up to 50% Based on Localization
“The buying experience is what we're normally thinking about and that does matter. And we see, like, we've seen rates vary as much as 10% up to 50% on a checkout.”
60% of Paddle's Software Transactions in Germany Use PayPal
“In Germany, most people like to use PayPal to buy software. Kind of blew my mind when I learned that, but 60% of our transactions from Germany are done via PayPal.”
Involuntary Churn Accounts for Around 40% of Total SaaS Churn
“Often it's like around 40% of total churn, and folks tend not to think about it.”
SaaS Companies Lose Up to 15% of Revenue to Payment Failures
“We look at this all the time with our customers, and we'll see folks missing out, both on the initial attempted payment, and then on subsequent attempted payments. Yeah, upwards of, like, 10% of their revenue, 15% of their revenue.”
Brockway: B2C SaaS Growth Flatlined in Recent Months
“What we've seen here is that growth is very much flatlined in, in the past couple months especially.”
Owens: Paddle lost 87% of its ARR when one $350K customer churned
“We got from like zero to 400 and then went back down to about like 50. Because we lost like a customer that was like contributing like 350 K and error. And then we had to then rebuild from 50 kind of back up.”
Owens: Paddle charges 5% plus $0.50 as maximum self-serve pricing
“Five percent and 50 cents is the kind of publicly available pricing. If you kind of self-serve sign up on the website, obviously there is a whole spectrum of customers. If you're doing a hundred million dollars a year, sort of the pricing does go down. If your…”
Owens scaled a previous software company to $3M-$5M ARR before Paddle
“So sort of pre paddle, I built a software company. And I really ran headfirst into the problem that we try and solve, scaled it to three to five million in ARR sort of, and ran into this problem where we were, we had a few 100,000 kind of people using these pr…”
Owens: Paddle's initial acquisition offer for ProfitWell was tens of millions lower
“It was several, it was tens of millions, like lower.”
Owens: Total Financing Including Debt Was Substantially North of $200M
“It was vast majority cash. Sort of, I actually think the number, if you include sort of like, we rounded it to like a whole number, but the actual number, including the debt was pretty like substantially north of two hundred million.”
Owens: Paddle charges no monthly or setup fees, taking only a percentage cut
“We monetize the transaction volume that flows through Paddle. We don't take a monthly fee. We don't take a minimum. We don't take a setup fee. We don't do any of that stuff. We only win when the customers win. So we monetize the payments that are coming throug…”
Owens says Paddle's founding equity split was roughly 70/30 or 75/25
“I think I don't even remember what the initial kind of equity split was. It was sort of like two thirds, one third or three quarters, one quarter or something like that.”
Owens invested roughly $100,000 of initial capital to launch Paddle
“It was probably because it was like in little chunks. As we kind of like built this stuff, it was probably call it a hundred K sort of to begin with.”
Campbell: ProfitWell and Paddle kept acquisition valuation opaque at "over $200M"
“We were a little non-specific, like over two hundred million. Cause also like we're continuing to work on a team. And so it's like, I don't know, there's some advantages in like being public. There's advantages in being opaque. We kind of chose translucent bas…”
Saric: Plausible's expansion MRR consistently offsets its monthly churn
“We're using Puddle, and now I'm in the dashboard, and I can see last month, we got expansion of expansion of RR of 400, and churn 400, so that was very even. This month, expansion of RR of 300, and churn of 100. So it's like, and then the previous month, which…”