pccampbell

I wrote this book. Let me know if I can help or answer any questions.

Great. :)

We don't plan on stopping. Admittedly this gets us in some trouble being a growing company, because we need to make sure our free product is the best for our customers AND we offer up stellar paid products. A whole lot of surface area, especially for a bootstrapped company (although we're past the Ramen stage - $10M+ ARR and 45 folks :)).

There's a lot of work we did to make sure we're learning as quickly as possible that really helps advance the mission on all fronts.

Yup - a HN comment is definitely not legally binding. Given some of the flame wars on some of the threads over the years, that would definitely be a scary world.

Based on a number of lawyers (we've gone deep on this over the past several years), I'm confident this is resolved through the combination of our terms and privacy policy - the EU/Swiss privacy shield stipulations, which drove the privacy policy encompasses the specific data there that's shared (check out the section entitled "Collection", which is then what's referenced in the shared section). These are common information to engage in internet commerce like email, billing info, etc. This is actually specifically why we had language in our Terms to encompass the actual financial data. The ironic part of all this is we repeatedly told our legal folks we needed to simplify, simplify, simplify.

All that being said - you clearly came to the page and thought the worst based on the language, so I guess it doesn't really matter if we're legally doing the right thing, we need to make sure you (and other folks who reach us) are interpreting and seeing what we're doing as intended.

Give me/us a little bit of time to figure out how to make this instantly obvious. As I mentioned, we're in the midst of clearing up our house based on GDPR requirements, so it's a good time to revisit. Really appreciate the feedback - only way we get better. :)

Hey Joewee - wanted to answer this directly here in case the other longer, more in-depth comment gets a bit buried - short and long answer is no. We have never and will never sell user data. We monetize through a bunch of products that help optimize different pieces of your business - pricing through Price Intelligently, churn through ProfitWell Retain, revenue recognition through ProfitWell Recognized, etc.

I explained this in depth in response to one of the comments here, but the crux of this is that metrics are the gateway, which allow you to see the problems in your business. We then offer resources or products to help with those problems.

Re: privacy/terms - hope the other comment I just made clears some things up. Happy to answer any questions if not, of course.

Re: GDRP - you're absolutely right. We'll be required to align with GDPR in just over a month. We're all set from an engineering perspective and rolling through all the fun documentation, agreements, compliance records, and trainings from a legal perspective now.

Let's back up a second. The silence isn't because I/we don't want to talk about this, it's because it was 2am here in Boston and I was sleeping at that point (coincidentally after leaving the office around 1130pm pouring over our new GDPR paperwork).

The short answer is 100%, absolutely no - we do not, have not, and will not ever sell your data. We say this pretty clearly at the top in our terms and services, which you didn't link to (found here: https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security). For context, there's a difference between a privacy policy and a terms of service. I'm not a lawyer, but from my understanding the reason here we structured things this way (as a lot of BI/analytics providers do) is because one handles the actual handling of data, especially pursuant to EU/International/US law, and the other handles the actual service of that data. For instance, we will share your email address with our email service or with our payment processor. The terms are inclusive of the privacy policy.

From a terms perspective, we don't access someone's account unless given permission for QA, analysis, and the like. We do aggregate data for research purposes, but there needs to be a minimum of 30 companies in that data set and if you'd like to opt out of that we're more than happy to sign/put together custom Ts&Cs, which we do with almost every company that requests one.

Additionally, with GDPR the nature of our privacy policy is going one step further beyond EU/Swiss Privacy Shield compliance to offering up DPAs and a whole host of new functionality to make sure we go beyond the requirements.

Apologies if I'm coming off any bit passive aggressive/defensive. Just trying to explain and sometimes the legalease can be tough to sift through. I started my career working in network security/intelligence, so I personally take this really seriously and we put a lot of work into all of this fun stuff (pen tests, training, our policies, etc.), so I take it too personally when hearing someone misinterpret how we work. We can always make this clearer, as we tried to do with the pre-amble to our terms, but happy to do what some other companies have done and really refine the plain speak of our terms and privacy policy (especially since they're shifting a bit with GDPR). Assume you meant the best here with your comments though, so hope this clears this up at least a bit.

From a monetization perspective, we do offer a service to _someone_ - our customers. We sell Price Intelligently, ProfitWell Retain, ProfitWell Recognized, and ProfitWell Premium. All of these products are feature and performance based - and more than paying the bills for us to continue to invest in building the company without a drop of funding (which is intentional to keep us independent).

The reason we set up our monetization this way is that frankly we don't think there's a whole lot of value in taking your data and putting it into a bunch of graphs. I know that's trivializing BI/analytics, but that's the crux of the industry right now. Plus, doing willingness to pay and pricing analysis supports this - hence why most BI companies have to go upmarket to survive/grow. Instead, metrics are the gateway.

The world we're building is one where ProfitWell can show you the one graph (or few) that you need to look at - not the 60 you need to sift through to truly understand if there's a problem or not. Then we're going to help you see exactly the metric you should worry about (and the ones you shouldn't worry about) before offering up resources to help you fix it or a product that takes care of that metric for you with 0 work on your part through what we call an anti-active usage product (like ProfitWell Retain). This just feels like the right move to best serve our customers and the greater community.

Hey Tiffany - Patrick from ProfitWell here.

I know you wrote this to Josh, but just jumping in here to address the ProfitWell side. :)

1. You're 100% right. We don't have a live demo. We're working on a solution for you here, but it's been delayed for some other cool features. Happy to share when we launch something for you. I know a call can be annoying, but it wouldn't be a sales person. Most metrics demos are from our product/engineering team. :)

2. As for pricing - we don't typically hear it's confusing, but it's 100% free forever. We make money through our add-ons. There's definitely something here to get better at though, so I'll take this back to the team to make it rock.

Thanks so much for the love here. :)

Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following:

PHILOSOPHICAL 1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products).

2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis.

ANALYTICAL 1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free product.

Here's the thing though - back to that lack of appreciation - when measuring the willingness to pay for analytics/metrics, people just aren't willing to pay that much. We measured this well ahead of going all in on free and found that our unit economics, especially in a market that's weak in number of logos (subscription market is much smaller than people think). As a result, most BI/analytics companies go up market. We're upmarket and do have an enterprise plan for all the fun enterprise fixings people need, but we don't want to waste massive amounts of CAC fighting for $50/month or even $150/month. Creating a phenomenal user experience (we're not there yet) is so much valuable. Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for.

Long story short, this business and space requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer for growth. Hope that's helpful. Always up for answering questions.

Here's the blog post we wrote up with some of the data, too: https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-pro...

Yea - found you actually and can share meta details privately if you liked. Fortunately wasn't the DB port.

On that front we automatically just don't touch any of the unsubs for the new system, so was worried that was messed up. Doesn't look like it though. Not a lawyer either, but from my understanding it's the same list even if you change marketing automation/email products. GDPR is making this fun, too. :)

Hey there - this doesn't sound good (and definitely not our intention). We ported over some contacts here and there from different marketing migrations, but always made sure to hide out any unsubs or things like that. I just looked in our DB for the email address in your HN profile and I'm not seeing it anywhere, so I'm assuming it's a different email address.

Ironically, could you email me the email address to patrick[at]priceintelligently[dot]com and I'll investigate. If it slipped in or you ended up actually opting in, definitely will take it out. If it's a larger issue, definitely will solve it. Obviously, apologies either way.

Ha! I do it respectfully and only backed by data though. :)

patrick[at]priceintelligently[dot]com

Always happy to help where I can when it comes to pricing.

PC

+1 to this.

Sure. If you examine the freemium model, you're either the product or you're going to be sold too. Personally, if I'm getting value out of a product and it's free, I'd rather be sold to than have my data sold in some manner.

I think I agree with you, but I'm not sure no one would use them. A lot of folks use Mint/Personal Capital and I believe they disclose a lot more about the data being the product for offers.

I'd be interested in slicing the outrage responses by age or tech sophistication. After all, my parents are still uncomfortable putting their CC in online. Just a different world now.

On one hand this is similar to all kinds of financial institutions who sell your data (which is why you'll get a bunch of credit card offers). It's a bit better than those, because it at least appears like the emails/receipts are anonymized.

On the other hand, this was hidden deep in the TOS and Privacy Policies, whereas some extra disclosure probably would have helped the backlash they're getting today.

I hate the phrase "if you're not paying, then you're the product", because plenty of freemium models don't follow that narrative, but in this case it seems crystal clear. I supposed we're just seeing how naive people can be with their personal data (email inboxes).

If you can get enough solid survey responses, conjoint is ideal, but won't give you a lot in terms of a price elasticity curve. That's not necessarily a problem, but I'd recommend a combination of MaxDiff (baby conjoint) and Van Westendorp. Used in tandem you'll get some solid footing on packaging preferences, value props for positioning, and ultimately price elasticity.

Hey Everyone - Patrick Campbell here, CEO/Founder of Price Intelligently. We've been in the pricing trenches for the better part of five years now working on the pricing for anyone from Atlassian and Autodesk to Lyft and Blue Bottle Coffee.

Pricing is ultimately a process, similar to product or marketing development. We've written extensively on it at priceintelligently.com, but here's a bunch of topics you should look through that will ultimately give you a solid foundation. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that there aren't any tips or tricks that are going to help you win - you need to quantify your buyer personas and price based on them accordingly. If you ever have any questions, always up for getting on the phone - patrick[at]priceintelligently[dot]com.

Value based pricing 101 - overview of how you should be thinking of your pricing (not based on costs or competitors): http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/162160/Value-Base...

Pricing Process: Here's a 130 page ebook we wrote on how to collect the data you'll need, how to structure things, and a bunch of other pieces. This isn't the final cut of the ebook, but given the conversation I thought I'd share early (no lead form): https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/120299/Price-Intelligently-Sa...

Here's also a webinar recording that walks through the above process if you prefer to watch: https://pi.wistia.com/medias/79lpgnqd2f

Survey design is absolutely crucial. We've sent around 20M using our pricing software at this point, but here are some lessons we wrote through at the 5M mark: http://blog.profitwell.com/lessons-from-sending-5m-saas-cust...

Absolutely. That pesky fold gets me, too (even though our design team tells me the fold doesn't exist ;)).

Hola! Patrick here - Founder of PriceIntel/ProfitWell. Why ProfitWell is free is actually a longer story, but the short answer is we discovered we could monetize more effectively (and efficiently) by giving away the metrics for free (while still being the only one on the market that's 100% accurate) and then selling add-ons like Retain (kills your delinquent churn), Recognized (Revenue Recognition), etc.

Here's our pricing page (with paid tiers - you have to scroll down): https://www.profitwell.com/pricing

If you're curious around the science/data that went into this (the longer story), you can check out a talk I gave at our SaaSFest conference: https://pi.wistia.com/medias/jdywlrpowl. We used our Price Intelligently software to determine market willingness to pay/feature value before writing too much code.

As always, let me know if you have any questions. Happy to help.

Kind of bummed on the two weeks notice, but I'm sure there's some pressure and tradeoff the team had to make, which I guess softens the blow a bit (for me at least).

Thanks for posting, Ryan. Patrick Campbell here, CEO of Price Intelligently - the makers of ProfitWell. Happy to any additional questions around our journey. I hope you find it helpful, and ultimately timely in your journey.

Plenty of examples to think about, but I suppose it depends on your definitions of really big:

1. Atlassian became very large before raising money, Github too 2. Litmus is a pretty large company, but not Billion dollar club (which is the typical "really big" moniker 3. Dyn was pretty huge $50M/year+ before they raised money

I think this is awesome in terms of a product. Could be interesting to expand to other types of recalls (just go through the Ralph Nader list). Most of this information is publicly available, but in such shitty databases that it's not even worth pursuing. If I was a parent, I'd definitely sign up and probably pay a low amount.

Also, if you want some free help tracking your subscription metrics for Stripe, feel free to check out profitwell.com (completely free). Would love your feedback on that as well, if you don't mind. :)

Cool post. (Author here).

Let me know if you have any questions on this. We ended up finding that most users would potentially pay more (at least in the US).

The only issue is: Is this "price discrimination" from a legal perspective or not since they're clearly pricing differently based on age?

I'd push back on that first part. I think there are plenty of appropriate marketing tactics you could put under the growth hack umbrella.

To me, things are inappropriate when:

1. They're blatantly illegal 2. They cause damage or mental anguish to another (revenge, gossip, etc.)

Even with both of those though we're looking at some grayness, especially with measuring #2.

I do like the measuring stick of: would individuals be annoyed/disgusted/pissed enough to stop using.

I've definitely felt that pain, too, especially for getting API access, which is required for essentially any integration. We started out on the Group plan, then quickly had to move to the next one, and then with only 3 people we needed to jump to $125/user + API fees at a ridiculous price per month just to integrate with our marketing platform.

That being said, we were willing to pay the price.

Salesforce could make this a bit easier to swallow by a bit better onboarding. They're going to need to as folks like HubSpot and the plethora of other CRMs continue to jump into the market.

Not the author of the post, but good question - Typically, the amount is prorated as you inferred or you just kick out to another 12 months, meaning you'd be signed up for 15 months total. I've seen both, but the former is more popular.

The issue comes in how you calculate your SaaS metrics, because the MRR/revenue upgrade is easy enough (prorated over the next 9 or 12 months in your example), but it's tricky when trying to calculate where you attribute the customer upgrade.

That's a fascinating take on things I didn't really internalize. In the Boston community (which I'm a part of) it's being treated more like a "we couldn't raise the B, so we needed to shut things down and admit defeat."

That being said, a core team poach would definitely have killed the team, as well.

Consumer plays are hard in general, but particularly difficult in Beantown.