Patrick Campbell wasn’t expecting to be an entrepreneur when he grew up, but after his first few jobs, he struck out on his own in 2012 to create a software company to help SaaS businesses optimize their pricing. Price Intelligently quickly evolved into a tech-enabled service that allowed him to grow, build a team, and ultimately launch ProfitWell.
ProfitWell is a free and powerful SaaS metrics product that automatically calculates MRR, ARR, churn, and other import financial measures for SaaS and subscription companies from their payments data. It is now used by over 35,000 subscription businesses. ProfitWell now offers paid products for managing churn, credit card failure, revenue recognition, and price optimization.
Patrick bootstrapped ProfitWell with no outside funding, but they grew fast to 100 employees before being acquired by UK-based Paddle for $200 million in 2022. He openly shares the story of how they started, grew, survived, and eventually sold the company—and how the acquisition is going one year after the acquisition.
Best quote from Patrick:
“Our view of what is now called product-led growth is that a free software product needs to be better than the paid competition. You probably shouldn’t try freemium until you are confident you have product-market fit.
“If it’s not better than the paid competition, there’s not a lot that you can do. We wanted people to feel bad for how much they’re getting for free.
“That’s very, very different than ten years ago when your free product could be bad because the expectations were so low. Now your freemium product needs great support, good design, and a product that really helps.”
In this episode, Patrick explains:
- How it grew in the early day as Price Intelligently, a tech-enabled pricing strategy service for SaaS companies
- How they bootstrapped for 10 years with efficient growth and savvy pricing
- Why Patrick thinks now that he should have raised some funding and why they didn’t at the time
- How they created ProfitWell and gave it away for free, then created upsell products to monetize their large and loyal user base
- How they grew fast with an extensive inbound media model with episodic content on top of their inbound middle-of-funnel content
- Why he chose to stay with Paddle and contribute to achieving the big vision instead of selling for cash and moving on
- What it’s like now for him and his team a year after their acquisition by Paddle, a UK company
ProfitWell Company Facts
- Founded: 2012
- Description: ProfitWell provides a suite of revenue automation products for subscription and SaaS businesses, including automated metrics, churn reduction, revenue recognition, and pricing optimization.
- Number of Employees: 100
- Funding: Bootstrapped with services at first then customer sales for 10 years
- Acquisition: ProfitWell was acquired by Paddle in May 2022 for $200 million in cash and stock
- HQ: Boston, Massachusetts
