The Ledger
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Campbell: ProfitWell exec delayed signing employment agreement for a year
“Like we did like FACU didn't sign his employment agreement for like a year because we were like worried that we were going to have to like take the source code.”
Platforms like ChartMogul and ProfitWell only show misleading averages
“And if you go to these regular dashboards and KPI software, such as Chartmogul, ProfitWell, and so on, we use ProfitWell and we like them, but they don't show this kind of reality to us. They show the average only.”
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: Superior free software with great support drives outsized brand power
“If you can have a free product that's better than the paid competition and the support is good. Holy cow. Like it's an amazing thing for your brand and your market. So we made serious dedication that we wanted like great support, even though it was free. And s…”
Campbell: Value-metric pricing automatically bakes expansion revenue into SaaS models
“I think that you need to be charging based on where the value is ascribed in your product. So per seat, per contacts, per amount of data enriched, per et cetera, because it bakes in expansion revenue into your actual business model. So that even if you're not …”
Nathan Latka claims ChurnZero generates significantly more revenue than ProfitWell
“I mean, churn zero is much larger in terms of revenue than ProfitWell.”
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: 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 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: 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.”
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 …”
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: 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 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: 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 Retain revenue more than doubled in 2021
“So retain, we more than doubled in 20, 21.”
Owens: ProfitWell Retain charges a 4% to 6% take rate
“It's roughly between four and six percent.
Like it's still tiered right now.”
Campbell: Price Intelligently ACV was around $150K in 2018-2019
“I think the ACV was lower, like, closer to one 50, I think during that time.”
Campbell: Price Intelligently drove vast majority of early ProfitWell revenue
“In 2018, 2019, it was. The vast majority. So our revenue, like, cause we didn't start stepping on the gas for retain basically, or recognize our two paid like other products until probably 2019. So we had a trickle of revenue probably in 2018 from retain. We s…”
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.”
Campbell: ProfitWell reached $200K in sales within nine months completely unfunded
“Within nine, nine months, like I had closed probably about a 200 grand in, in, in sales. And I wasn't paying, I wasn't making anything. I was like, we had no, that was the funding in the business.”
Campbell: Price Intelligently margins are 55-60% versus 95% for Retain
“Like the margin on that business is closer to like 55, 60%. Then, you know, like retain the margin is like 95%.”
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…”
TestBox Landed ProfitWell as Its First Customer Buying Zendesk
“So, it was Zendesk, and it was a company called ProfitWell, who I think you've spoken to before in your podcast.”
Campbell: About 8,000 companies use ProfitWell
“We have about 8000, as you mentioned, companies using ProfitWell right now, which we're pretty pumped about.”
ProfitWell generates roughly $150,000 annual ARPU on Price Intelligently
“Especially on the price intelligence side, so our ARPU over there is probably around a 150,000 per year.”
Campbell: ProfitWell has doubled or more than doubled revenue every year
“We have,
Doubled or more than doubled every year.”
Campbell: ProfitWell scaled with zero paid acquisition before hiring marketing
“We don't spend, like, we literally just hired our first marketing person, like, a couple months ago. We had some outsourced spending, so if I had to actually quantify it was probably around 10 K a month, but that was for people. We were spending zero dollars o…”
ProfitWell's actual average MRR is between $1,000 and $2,000
“I think our average, our actual average is probably between one and two, not quite at two.”
Campbell: Price Intelligently represents roughly two-thirds of ProfitWell revenue
“The split, I'm trying to do the math in my head. It's probably about two thirds, one third.”
Campbell: ProfitWell's early $50/month software made under $1K MRR
“Oh yeah. Like probably under a thousand dollars MRR. Right. Like cause we got it out there and then you have to understand like at that time there wasn't this like indie hacker community. There wasn't product hunt.”
Campbell: I gained 100 pounds while building ProfitWell
“You know, I, I've gained a hundred pounds through this business so it's been one of those things, and I, like, it's not the business's fault. It's definitely my fault, but it's been one of those things where I think I definitely, like, sacrificed the body a li…”