50 Cents a Pool: The Pricing Model Behind a SaaS Exit
Ron Hash bootstrapped Skimmer, software for pool service companies, to over $1 million in ARR and 1,500 customers with zero paid marketing, then sold it. His SaaS pricing was the engine: 50 cents per serviced pool with a $29 minimum, when every competitor charged per seat. Ron shares how he validated the idea with one cold call, why his SaaS pricing aligned revenue with each customer's growth, how he cut churn from 6% to 2% by fixing onboarding, and why he never regretted the exit. His SaaS pricing chose a value metric close to the money instead of per-seat pricing, which made adding customers feel good and kept churn low. Ron Hash built Skimmer with no prior SaaS experience and got it to 1,500 customers on SEO and word of mouth alone. That SaaS pricing model kept churn low and made the business acquirable; he sold to Unbundled Capital in 2020, after which the company raised $79 million and grew past 100 employees. He is now building QuickFax. This episode is brought to you by: 🍎 Product Fruits → Book a demo tailored to your product 🔑 Key Lessons 💰 Usage-based SaaS pricing aligns revenue with customer success: Skimmer charged 50 cents per serviced pool, so a customer's bill rose only as their business grew, making them happy to pay more. 📉 Per-seat SaaS pricing punishes growth and drives churn: Ron priced on serviced pools instead of seats, so customers never hesitated to add users and the product became stickier across the whole team. 🎯 Validate with one real conversation, not a survey: Ron cold-called a single pool pro who said "the paper game is killing me," and that one honest answer was enough proof the problem was real. 🚀 SEO plus word of mouth can replace an ad budget: Ranking for "pool service software" and delighting customers got Skimmer to 1,500 users with zero paid marketing. 🔄 Churn is usually an onboarding problem: Ron cut churn from 6% to 2% with a simple onboarding flow that pulled new users to their first win, not by adding features. 🛠️ Build for the user doing the work: A fast, low-tap, offline-capable mobile app for field techs beat the web-based tools competitors built for office staff. Chapters 00:00 50 cents a pool 00:30 Introduction 01:46 What Skimmer is and who it's for 03:46 Where the idea came from 07:05 Going all in on nights and weekends 08:16 Deciding what to build first 08:53 Welcome calls and learning from customers 11:36 The first customer and teaching himself SEO 13:32 Inbound vs the people he cold-called 15:00 The long slow ramp to 76 customers 16:39 Pricing at 50 cents a pool, not per seat 20:32 Explaining usage-based pricing to customers 22:41 Pen and paper vs software 25:19 Why Skimmer got so much traction 31:00 Cutting churn from 6% to 2% 36:25 The hard days of bootstrapping 39:17 Selling Skimmer 43:26 No regrets on the exit 44:53 QuickFax, his new project 47:56 The biggest lesson: solve small problems 49:35 Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/488 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email