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 41 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
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.”
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…”
Campbell: Free software must outperform paid competitors to gain user adoption
“What a lot of people don't realize it has to be better than the paid competition. If it's worse than the paid competition, what ends up happening is people just, they don't use it, right? Because it's not worth it. Like their time, most of the time.”
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: Salesforce is built for manager reporting, not sales reps
“Salesforce isn't built for the sales rep. It's built for the VP or the director level, the reporting, making sure the AEs are doing their activities.”
Campbell: Next wave of SaaS focuses on 'Do It For You' automation
“This next wave of SaaS is basically focused on like, how do I enable you, Nathan, the ability to focus on your customer and focus on basically your product and your team, the three things that you should be focused on by basically taking all this other stuff o…”
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 …”
Campbell: Fewer than 40,000 subscription companies exist in the entire world
“There's less than 40,000 subscription companies in the entire world. It's not a lot. And that includes media companies, box of the month, SaaS, everything.”
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 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: 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…”
Patrick Campbell discloses he has Asperger's
“I have Asperger's, so that's another thing I don't think I've ever told you, and I've been more open about that recently”
Campbell: Startups must always implement founder equity vesting
“Founder vesting, like always do founder vesting, like always, always, always everyone should vest. I think like it will work if you don't do that, but I think that helps a lot.”
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 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…”
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: ProfitWell Retain revenue more than doubled in 2021
“So retain, we more than doubled in 20, 21.”
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: Tech-enabled services require bundling software with human services
“We quickly pivoted into a tech enabled service, which basically means you can't buy our software without our people and you can't buy our people without our software.”
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: 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 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: About 8,000 companies use ProfitWell
“We have about 8000, as you mentioned, companies using ProfitWell right now, which we're pretty pumped about.”
Campbell: ProfitWell has doubled or more than doubled revenue every year
“We have,
Doubled or more than doubled every year.”
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…”