Brainstorming Ideas with The $200M Man
Episode 519: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) are jamming with Patrick Campbell on trends that are doubling in popularity and the businesses you can start to pounce on them. Patrick also shares three product frameworks, the importance of freedom-inducing purchases, and what his research has revealed about the ultra wealthy.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(2:00) The Bezo's Number Framework
(5:30) Trends: Coral bleaching, School shootings, teenage abstinence
(12:30) More trends: French Bulldogs, sports betting, and other vices
(21:00) Philosophy: Don't innovate
(24:30) Patrick's tax strategy: Gas stations
(30:00) The 5 Phases of "I just sold my company"
(33:30) Freedom-inducing purchases
(36:00) Secrets of the wealthy: To-do lists and exercise
(39:00) How a researcher measures happiness
(41:30) The trap of chasing a "freedom number"
(45:00) Wealth, Status, Power
(50:00) Product Remix Framework
(55:00) Pricing strategy breakdown
(1:02:00) New bod, who dis?
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Links:
• Patrick’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/Patticus
• Paddle - https://www.paddle.com/
• Google Scholar - https://scholar.google.com/
• Bezo's Numbers - https://shorturl.at/dgJSV
• Casino affiliate - https://playnj.com/
• MyBodyTutor - https://www.mybodytutor.com/
• Price change email copy - https://shorturl.at/kqE49
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Check Out Sam's Stuff:
• Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That - https://copythat.com/
Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
• Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/
• Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant
• Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing
• Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/
• Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/
Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
• #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits
• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future
• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto
• #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett
• #218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates
• Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More
• How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More
10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell)
Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny | Amplitude—Build better products: https://amplitude.com/ | Dovetail—Bring your customer into every decision: https://dovetailapp.com/lenny
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Patrick Campbell is the founder and CEO of ProfitWell, which he bootstrapped and sold for over $200 million. In this special episode, we explore 10 big ideas from Patrick, including tips for hiring employees who align with your company values, creating winning pricing and retention strategies, determining the right time to raise money, and more. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale your SaaS business, this must-listen episode offers practical and actionable advice that will help you avoid missteps and think differently.
Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/10-lessons-from-bootstrapping-a-200m
Where to find Patrick Campbell:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Patticus
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickccampbell/
• Email: pc@patticus.com
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
Referenced:
• Douglas Atkin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doatkin/
• Patrick Campbell’s guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/saas-pricing-strategy/comments
• ProfitWell: https://www.profitwell.com/
• The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup: https://medium.com/craft-ventures/the-cadence-how-to-operate-a-saas-startup-436aa8099e8
• Edward Snowden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Snowden
• The Flywheel: https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel
• High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884
• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Bets-Making-Smarter-Decisions/dp/0735216355
• Powerful: https://www.amazon.com/Powerful/dp/1939714206/r
• The West Wing on HBOMax: https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GX5nwgQDNJZ6aoQEAAAHJ
• Notion: https://www.notion.so/
• Descript: https://www.descript.com/
• Coda: https://coda.io/
• KTool: https://ktool.io/
• Tweet Hunter: https://tweethunter.io/
• Apple Watch Ultra: https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-ultra/
• Loom: https://www.loom.com/
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Patrick’s background
(05:12) Building a team
(07:38) How ProfitWell handled a conflict using their guiding principle, the most charitable interpretation
(10:41) Why new hires need to fit in with the company culture
(12:19) The bootstrapping vs. funding debate
(13:38) When founders should think about raising funds
(18:08) When and how companies should make pricing changes to their products or services
(23:46) Strategic retention and tactical retention, and why the latter is often missed
(28:48) Why people don’t want to pay for a SaaS analytics tool
(29:56) The importance of mission metrics for shipping
(34:42) First-principle thinking, the “5 whys,” and Patrick’s alternative approach
(40:21) The importance of frequent customer research
(43:15) Simple strategies for doing customer research
(46:13) Understanding your competitors
(51:06) Why veterans make great hires
(54:08) Why local strategies are more effective for some companies
(59:21) Why the middle of the funnel is the biggest opportunity
(1:04:54) Lightning round
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Freemium SaaS: How a Free Product Led to a $200M Exit
Patrick Campbell cashed out his 401k and gave himself nine months to build a company. Ten years later, Paddle acquired ProfitWell for $200 million - one of the largest bootstrapped SaaS exits in recent history. The foundation was a freemium SaaS model that competitors could not match.
In this episode, Patrick reveals why he made his analytics product free while competitors raised millions, how accuracy beat flashy features, and the co-founder mistake that created four years of conflict. You will learn why freemium SaaS only works when the free product is better than paid alternatives, how product-led growth through zero-config "automatic" products drove the SaaS exit, and what it takes to build a bootstrapped SaaS company to eight figures in ARR.
What You Will Learn
Why Patrick made ProfitWell's analytics free while competitors charged for less accurate tools
How a freemium SaaS strategy captured 30,000 companies through word-of-mouth
Why "automatic" zero-config products outperform traditional marketing automation
The part-time co-founder mistake that created four years of founder conflict
🔑 Key Lessons
💰 A freemium SaaS product can drive a massive exit: ProfitWell captured 30,000 companies by making analytics free and better than paid competitors, building distribution for its paid Retain product.
🎯 Freemium SaaS only works if free beats paid competition: Patrick's rule was that customers should say "I feel bad for not paying" - ProfitWell achieved feature parity and better accuracy before the model started compounding.
📉 Part-time co-founders create years of conflict: Patrick spent four years managing co-founders who never fully committed, wasting emotional energy and creating distrust.
🛠️ Zero-config products require no user setup: ProfitWell's Retain handled payment failures automatically - copy, timing, offers, and translations - without users configuring anything.
🚀 Video content transforms brand recognition: Adding video to blog posts changed ProfitWell from "a company that writes good content" to a brand entire rooms recognized immediately.
Chapters
Introduction and ProfitWell overview
Company size and Paddle acquisition details
How the acquisition came about
The origin story and cashing out his 401k
Price Intelligently vs ProfitWell naming
Building the first version of the product
The 9-month personal runway challenge
Competing against venture-backed competitors
How the free product generated revenue
The part-time co-founder mistake
Did co-founders ever come on full-time?
Learning to let go of resentment
Being diagnosed with cancer twice
The founder's way of handling adversity
Key growth drivers over the last 5 years
Why people are the biggest challenge
What's next at Paddle
Lightning round
Resources
Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/327
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email
Dissecting ProfitWell's Acquisition (with Patrick Campbell)
What does a $200 million+ acquisition look like up close? How much time, focus, and communication happens between the first conversation and closing the deal? And when do the CEOs of each company just need to use the "red phone" and have a direct conversation without the 86(!) lawyers in the room?
We sit down with ProfitWell founder and CEO Patrick Campbell to answer it all, centering on ProfitWell's recent acquisition by Paddle. And incredibly, Patrick built and scaled the SaaS company without taking a single dollar of investment! If you're running a company that may one day need to navigate an acquisition (or just curious), tune in!
Links:
- Our Previous Episode with Patrick, a Masterclass on Pricing - The Documentary: "We Sign Tomorrow?"
Sponsors:
Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
Episode 611 | Bootstrapping ProfitWell to a $200M Exit (with Patrick Campbell)
In episode 611, join Rob Walling as he chats with Patrick Campbell, the cofounder of ProfitWell, on how he and his co-founders bootstrapped ProfitWell to a $200 million exit.
Profitwell was acquired by Paddle earlier this year. We dive into a bunch of topics you have not heard elsewhere, including details about the actual transaction, what was the stock vs. cash split, the revenue breakdown of consulting versus SaaS when they sold as well as talking through his thought process as they were deciding whether to sell.
Topics we cover:
[3:53] Using their consulting business to fund and grow Profitwell in the early days
[8:23] The split between cash and stock in Profitwell’s acquisition
[9:49] The percentage of Profitwell’s revenue from consulting vs. SaaS
[13:39] The conversations that Patrick and his cofounders had from the get-go about their end goals and how much to reinvest in the business
[15:02] The ownership split between all of the cofounders
[17:08] How he made sure his employees were taken care of in the acquisition
[19:05] Did Patrick ever consider taking funding?
[26:14] How long it took to sell the business from the first contact with Paddle
[31:55] Why should SaaS founders take money off the table once they hit certain milestones?
[36:01] Patrick’s feelings about competing with Stripe
[42:15] Why Patrick moved to Puerto Rico
Links from the Show:
Patrick Campbell (@Patticus) I Twitter
Profitwell
Paddle
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.
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Patrick Campbell: The Billion $ Quilting Industry And Using Spy Secrets To Gain A Competitive Edge
Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk to Founder & CEO at ProfitWell, Patrick Campbell (@Patticus), about the billion dollar quilting industry, using spy secrets in business, buying cheap debt and a hostile takeover of a person.
Also, want $5,000? Check out the My First Million Clips contest.
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Links:
* ProfitWell
* Missouri Star Quilt Co.
* Hallmark
* KMikeyM
* Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.
* Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter.
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Show Notes:
(01:35) - Patrick Campbell background
(07:55) - Surprising businesses: Quilting and craft industry
(20:55) - Chili's and Applebees
(25:25) - Why you should invest in unsexy businesses
(26:50) - Rolling up trades & things for old people
(30:05) - Using spy secrets to get competitive intel
(46:30) - Buying debt to forgive it
(49:40) - How it feels to get very rich very young
(55:00) - Hostile takeover of a person
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Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
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Additional episodes you might enjoy:
• #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits
• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future
• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto
* #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett
• #218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates
• Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More
• How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More
#257 – From Indie Hacker to $200M+ with Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell
We're talking to Patrick Campbell, an indie founder who just sold his company for $200,000,000. That's an insane nine figure exit for a bootstrapped founder. In this episode, we talk with Patrick about his champagne problems and what indie hackers need to know today to get to where he is more quickly.
Follow Patrick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Patticus
Check out ProfitWell: https://www.profitwell.com/
SaaStr 429: The Current State of SaaS Companies, Subscriptions, and Retention in 2021 with Patrick Campbell, Founder & CEO @ ProfitWell
In this episode, ProfitWell Founder & CEO Patrick Campbell shares benchmarks from over 23,000 companies and offers a helpful framework to re-evaluate your retention strategy and increase your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) between 10 and 60%.
This episode is an excerpt of Patrick's session from SaaStr University: Spring Semester conference. Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/-hybaFIV964
Transcript: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-429-with-profitwell-founder-ceo-patrick-campbell-the-current-state-of-saas-companies-subscriptions-and-retention-in-2021/
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Pricing: everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask, with ProfitWell CEO Patrick Campbell
We're joined by Patrick Campbell, founder & CEO of the world's leading SaaS profit-optimization service ProfitWell, to dive deep on all things pricing and monetization. Patrick began bootstrapping ProfitWell 8 years ago, and has since grown the business into a massive success with customers like Notion, Lyft, Masterclass, Atlassian, Help Scout, HubSpot, Cisco, Autodesk and many more. Patrick gives us a masterclass in how to think with a profit-maximization lens about pricing, feature development, growth and retention. And, as a special bonus at the end of the episode, he talks about his own entrepreneurial journey, bootstrapping the company without any venture funding, along with challenges overcome along the way. This episode has something for everyone to learn about company building — and is not one to miss!
Sponsors:
Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
Links:
Patrick's 2x2 matrix of product features: https://i.imgur.com/J3AAilr.png
Max Diff analysis: https://learn.profitwell.com/article/tFfVQbtRnT-quantified-buyer-personas
Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter: https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/190607/unlock-price-sensitivity-s-profitable-surprise
Transitioning Customers to your Current Pricing: https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/grandfathering-discounting-prices-terrible-subscription-business
#120 – Seeking Truth as a Founder with Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell
Patrick Campbell (@Patticus) grew up as farm boy from Wisconsin. But after getting tired of working in bureaucratic environments, he cashed out his 401k to bootstrap his own business in 2012. Patrick joined the show to discuss the importance of finding the root cause of problems in your startup, to talk about why pricing and churn are major levers of growth that shouldn't be ignored, and to share how he grew ProfitWell to over $10M/year in revenue.
Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/120-patrick-campbell-of-profitwell
SaaS Pricing: A Step-by-Step Framework That Works
Most SaaS founders pick a price, put it on their website, and never touch it again. Patrick Campbell built an entire company around fixing that mistake. His SaaS pricing methodology has been used by Wistia, BigCommerce, Optimizely, Zapier, and hundreds of other companies to optimize their pricing strategy and packaging.
Patrick cashed in his 401k to bootstrap Price Intelligently, spent nine months as a solo founder grinding out deep content on SaaS pricing, and grew to 30 employees charging a minimum of $30,000 per engagement - all without raising a dollar. His four-step framework covers buyer personas, willingness-to-pay surveys, feature preference analysis, and pricing model alignment. Companies that never update their SaaS pricing lose years of revenue because customer value perceptions shift constantly.
Patrick Campbell is the co-founder and CEO of Price Intelligently, a Boston-based startup that helps SaaS businesses figure out the right subscription pricing using data instead of gut feeling. The company also launched ProfitWell, a free SaaS metrics tool. Patrick's background is in economics and math, with experience at the US Intelligence community and Google.
🔑 Key Lessons
💰 Use willingness-to-pay surveys instead of guessing your SaaS pricing: Patrick's four-question survey asks at what price a product is too expensive, getting expensive, a good deal, and too cheap to trust - revealing price elasticity for each buyer persona.
🎯 Align SaaS pricing tiers to quantified buyer personas: Instead of guessing which features belong in each tier, survey your personas on feature preference using forced-choice questions, then build packages that match what each segment values.
🔄 Revisit pricing every quarter to capture lost revenue: Companies leaving prices unchanged for years miss enormous growth because product improvements and market changes constantly shift what customers will pay.
📉 Deep content marketing compounds into a growth engine: Price Intelligently's deep blog posts on pricing strategy drove 80-90% of all revenue, even though early posts got just 30 views - proving that content compounds over time.
Chapters
Introduction
What drives Patrick - blue collar work ethic and Teddy Roosevelt's speech
Patrick's nonprofit work and data consulting for grants
How Price Intelligently started - economics background, Google, and a hunch
First steps - building models and pounding the pavement
Customer development using the same pricing methodology
Is Price Intelligently a software product or consulting service?
How the pricing data collection works
Company size - from 14 to 30 employees in nine months
Growth trajectory and the first nine months as a solo founder
Inbound marketing - the HubSpot Playbook and deep content
Blogging as the primary growth engine - 80-90% of revenue
Health challenges - burnout and beating cancer as a founder
Step-by-step SaaS pricing framework overview
Defining and quantifying buyer personas
Survey design - current customers, prospects, and strangers
Feature preference surveys - forced-choice methodology
Pricing surveys - four open-ended willingness-to-pay questions
Analyzing pricing data and setting tiers
Resources
Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/134
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email