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EP 13: The Unorthodox SaaS startup changing the way business is done
Transcript
Outseta: Unorthodox SaaS Startup Changing the Way Business is Done
Alex Ivanoff
Welcome to Mission Control, where we give you step-by-step instructions on how to take your eCommerce store to levels only a rocket can reach. Each episode, we'll be interviewing an expert in the eCommerce industry that is going to give you simple actionable advice on how to attract new customers, retain them, and build a brand that you are proud of. This show is brought to you by the makers of RocketCart, an eCommerce services and solutions company.
All right, welcome to the next episode of Mission Control. I am your host, Alex Ivanoff, from RocketCart and super excited to have our guest today, Geoff Roberts from Outseta. Thank you so much for hopping in Geoff and tell us a little bit about what you do. Tell us about Outseta and where you're from?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, thanks Alex. So my name is Geoff Roberts, I'm talking to you from San Diego, California, today. I'm one of the cofounders of Outseta and Outseta is an all-in-one software product that helps you build really any sort of subscription business. So our customers are online communities that charge for access to their community on a subscription basis. SaaS founders building SaaS products, membership websites that charge for access to content. But the common theme amongst them is there's a subscription billing component, and Outseta of brings together all of the tools that you need to run a subscription business. So subscription billing, CRM, email, marketing, helpdesk, all brought together in a single platform and designed for relatively early stage founders that are launching some kind of subscription business.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, super exciting tool. And I've seen a lot of traction being developed in the past couple of years. You guys have been around for around six years, I think. Correct? It's exciting.
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, we've been at it for six years. It's a huge product. And we're bootstrapping it. So it took us two years to even get an MVP out the door. Year three, to be honest with you, we struggled. And then the last three years, we've really been growing quite well. So we're excited about the future, the company in the product.
Alex Ivanoff
And I know you have a few co-founders, but diving into your background, you come from a marketing background. And then you also had a little bit of SaaS experience before you decided to start offset. Can you tell us a little bit more about your journey here?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, so I sort of found my way into the tech industry. Accidentally, I went to college to be a writing major, actually, I thought I was going to work for a newspaper or magazine or something like that. I got out of school in 2008. Right when the economy was absolutely tanking. So I kind of didn't know what to do. I went back to school and got an MBA. And long story short, the first job I got out of college was in a software startup. And I just kind of walked into a good situation without even realizing it. spent five years at that company, building out their marketing team and figuring out how to market technology. And along the way sort of realized the inefficiencies that come with building a subscription business, which is ultimately where the idea for Outseta was born. So I still think of myself as a marketer, that's sort of the skill set that I contribute to our founding team, or at least the primary skill set that I contribute. But I have my hands and a little bit of everything, as most founders do these days.
Alex Ivanoff
Of course, tell us a little bit about your co-founders, how you guys got connected. And you know, just coming to the idea of let's start Outseta and get started.
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, so we have two co-founders, their names are Dimitri and Dave. Demetri was my boss at that first company that I worked for out of college. So he was the CTO of the company, and I was hired as the first marketing leader. And long story short, I was kind of pulling on Dimitri's coat sleeves and saying, Hey, we need a real billing system, we need a CRM, we need email marketing tools, we need a help desk, I don't have the technical skill set as an English major to integrate these things. And we realized that he was spending a ton of time integrating software tools that were required to build our business rather than what he should have been doing, which was building our actual software product. So that's ultimately where the idea for Outseta was born. But in terms of our co-founding team, in general, the reasons we came together. One was a lot of philosophical alignment on how we wanted to build the company, and we can talk about that a little bit more as we go. But the second was just that we had very complementary skill sets. Dimitri is a back-end developer, my other co-founder Dave, is a front-end developer, and I'm a marketer. So between the three of us, we have the skill set, we needed to build the product and take it to market.
Alex Ivanoff
Perfect Storm. Yeah. So let's dive into that. You know, we're going to definitely get into just the brand and how you guys like to present yourselves and be honestly very transparent, very admirable. But when you talk about philosophical alignments, what does that mean?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, so in the context of this company we worked out previously. First of all, we had a successful outcome, we had a good run, we had a lot of fun, there's no negative reaction to what occurred. But we took sort of the traditional Silicon Valley tech startup path, we grew the business to a certain point, we were able to raise a bunch of money, we sort of grew as fast as we possibly could. And one of the things that we recognized looking back on the experience was we had a lot more fun as a company of 20 people than we did as a company of 200 people. So that sent us down this path of doing a little soul searching and saying, if we are to launch another business, what would we do differently? And one of the things we kept coming back to was this idea that we wanted to stay small and independent by design. And we wanted to sort of say, how far can we take a company? How much success can we have? Not to artificially cap the growth of the company, but to say, if you only had 20 employees, how far could you take a business. And that's something that was really appealing to us and continues to be really appealing to us. And then another part of it was, we just looked at how organizations scale, particularly when they do take on venture capital. And it's like, every time you have a problem, the answer is to throw more money at it or throw more bodies at it. And we saw a lot of inefficiency in that, and the example I'll give you is customer service. As your customer base skills and your rapidly growing, you start just hiring more and more customer service reps. And one of the things we saw was those people within the context of the company, in some ways became like a second class organization, they were working in customer service, so they weren't compensated as highly, we were kind of constantly rotating through people. And at the end of the day, a lot of the time people are reaching out for help. And they're reaching out to someone who can actually solve their problem. So we said in tandem with this idea of how far can we take a company with 20? People? What if we only hired experienced A-players? And what if we make everybody do support, so that if someone does reach out and has an issue, the person on the other end of the phone is someone who can actually solve their problem? So those are kind of some of the fundamental things that we've done a bit differently. And it's still very much a work in progress.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, you guys are definitely breaking false beliefs in terms of structure and management. I mean, everyone says you got to throw money at it, or to your point just keep getting bigger in headcount, how do you, I guess my question is, how do you envision let's say, you Outseta becomes 10 times bigger tomorrow? What happens to the headcount and how does everybody not become blindingly overwhelmed?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. And to be fair, not one that we've had to face yet, in terms of like, if this thing just exploded, growth wise, how would we handle it? I think if that happened, we'd have to pick one of two paths, one, we would have to sort of acknowledge and say this thing is growing at such a rate that we can't keep up with it, unless we do something differently. And maybe it's to raise money, maybe it's just to start hiring in bulk and grow beyond the headcount that I mentioned. Or we could say, we really want to stick to our principles, we don't want to adjust our strategy. And I could argue, we could even say we're going to sort of counteract what's naturally occurring in the business, we don't want to have 10,000 customers, maybe we'd rather have 1000, that is all paying us significantly more money. So I think that is something that entrepreneurs don't think about enough you can reduce how fast your company grows, or how much support volume you have, or any of those sorts of things by, for example, just raising prices, that's going to slow the growth of the business in terms of customer count, but it might actually allow you to grow revenue faster with a smaller customer base. So there's a lot of sort of knobs that you can twist to optimize for the type of business that you want to build.
Alex Ivanoff
I totally agree. And I think it's one of the metrics that I've been paying close attention to, and I think a lot of companies, especially in Silicon Valley have is revenue per team member, or just overall how much money you're making per headcount. And they're with technology, we're making our jobs more efficient. And with the macro economic cycles that we've gone through, there's this realization in the media that oh, a lot of companies are overstaffed, over compensated, not as productive as they can be. Not to say anything against individual people, but it's just kind of the way management has taken this trend for the past, I don't know 10 years of a bull run of a market right? And plus all this funding available you said, people just throw money at it and hire people. But from a philosophical perspective, you talk about how you guys are very transparent in Outseta how you want to stay, you want to manage yourself and stay lean. And you talk about how you want it to be the last company we ever built? Where does the thinking come from? And why? How do you get everyone to buy into that concept? And also, I want to ask, because you said you have more fun at 20 people than 200. Why do you think that is?
Geoff Roberts
I think when you grow beyond a certain amount, and 20 is certainly not like a magic number. It's just a number we've talked up. We've talked a lot about internally for whatever reason. But I think as soon as you get above a certain level, and I honestly think it's probably closer to 40 or 50 employees, there just becomes a need for more management, there becomes a need for a bit more bureaucracy, things start to slow down it's harder to move a 200-person ship than it is to move a 20-person ship. So I think that's it more than anything. And those sound like negative attributes of running a larger company. I don't like in some ways they are. But I think it's just a natural thing. It's not like these companies are doing anything wrong to make themselves slow down or become more sluggish or whatever. It's just a reality of trying to move that many people in unison at the same time. So in terms of how we kind of get people on board with this, I think like this is the most interesting part of this discussion to me. And it's we started talking about all this stuff from day-one at Outseta. And if you go back and read like our first blog post, we talk about all this and I had a lot of people reach out at that point in time saying you're a day-one startup, you're getting ahead of yourself here, when you're talking about all of this stuff why are you why are you doing this? Why aren't you just building your business. And the reason is, the more you put out anything about your your company structure, your brand, your values, all that type of stuff, people will self select in or out. And I think that's actually a huge opportunity that a lot of companies miss. So as as an example, we have a standardized salary that everybody had Outseta makes its $210,000 a year, if you choose to work five days a week, and we can talk more about that too. But without question, we have three engineers on our team who on the open market are going to command a lot more than that. That's just being perfectly frank. But they knew going into Outseta, this is how we want to build the company, this is what you're going to get paid. There's another upside that you can earn via profit sharing via how we issue equity. This either resonates with you or it doesn't. And we've already found that as we've looked to hire for other roles, there's people who come and look at this and say I can go to Facebook and make 500 grand a year as a senior software engineer. And there's other people that say, this is really cool. I've always wanted to work in a company like this. And like this is actually what's leading me to apply to Outseta in particular. So I think like, at the end of the day, having an opinion like that, and putting that opinion out into the world is one of the biggest recruiting tools that you have.
Alex Ivanoff
Would you classify that as one of the biggest factors behind this philosophy? Is making a place that people want to work at?
Geoff Roberts
100%? Absolutely unequivocally, that's probably number one. So this first software company that I worked for out of school, called Buildium, was doing a lot of similar things early on, and they just treated me amazingly, as an employee. I've been working remotely since 2013. I got to a point a couple years into that job where from a personal perspective, I wanted to move across the country to San Diego, and I had this job that I loved. And I asked my bosses like, can I work remotely full time with every intention of quitting If the answer was no? They said, yes, they gave me free rein to go work remotely and pursue the things that I wanted to do in my personal life. And I just looked at my reaction to how I was treated as an employee. And I was already working my butt off and super loyal because I love the company. But the more they just gave me free rein and actually cared about me as a person outside of just what I could do for the company, the more fiercely loyal I became, and the harder I worked. So I think that's ultimately what we're after at Outseta not to make everybody like to work back-breakingly hard but like my number one motivation more than the technology we're delivering more than anything, is to build a workplace where people love working so much. They're like I would never work somewhere else. This company is enabling me to live the life that I want to live outside of Just the work that I do with Outseta.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah. And going back to that decision that you, you say that they have to make, oh, I can go somewhere else to make this or this is really cool. And I can make this and really love life and work at the same time, I think you talked about how work life balance is kind of almost like a fallacy. But it's an element of reciprocity. If you ask me, it's like this company is doing so much to support me in my life, what I want to do, and they're investing in me, and I have to invest in them as well. It's a two-way trend. It's not a transaction, but it's a two-way street.
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, absolutely.
Alex Ivanoff
It's very admirable. Before we get into the product, because we're gonna get there, there's there's a lot here in terms of we talked about the brand and the transparency you guys are, it's abundantly clear on your stance on a lot of things you guys are, it's right there on your site, you publish it our producer Victoria, who pointed out a lot of these things to me, I was just, I never had seen anything like it where you guys are like, Hey, we don't do budgets or forecasts, or here's our stance or non stance on certain political social issues. You guys literally publish your operating agreement. I've never seen anything like that. What's the mindset behind all this? And have you guys gotten any backlash? Like, what's the thought behind that as a management team?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I would say, so part of the structure we haven't really jumped into yet is we operate using what's called self management. And it's sort of an organizational design. People generally aren't too familiar with it, those that are have largely heard about it through the company, Zappos, the shoe company, they embrace sort of a form of it previously. But the sort of key concept is, there are no bosses, and there's no hierarchy in the organization whatsoever. So we try to hire the absolute best people that we can. And then we let them sort of gravitate to the areas of the business where they can help the most. So I'm a marketer. I do most of the marketing, my co-founders who are developers, they focus on development, and they just kind of help out wherever they can. But if you don't have hierarchy, if you don't have traditional management, what you do need to do to be successful as a business is give everybody all of the information, there can't be like a leadership team that goes into a room and closes the door and talks about the finances of the company, if you're trying to build autonomy, and allow people to sort of operate without a whole lot of oversight. So that means from not just a recruiting perspective, but from an internal perspective, every employee has access to all the information about the business. And it's not just all the information, everybody's paid the same. Everybody earns equity that works the exact same way. There's no staff, there's no classes of stock or anything like that. And that's a prerequisite. Because we can't ask somebody to make a decision about whether to spend this budget or not, if they don't know the finances of the company. So it just comes back to this idea that in order to operate this way, there needs to be 100% transparency so that people can make sound decisions.
Alex Ivanoff
So this is so contrary to the typical way people run businesses, and there's nothing wrong with it. I guess my question is, most people don't do this, maybe for some reason or whatever. Have you guys seen any backlash or ramifications to this? Or does it just work super well out of the gate?
Geoff Roberts
I would say two things. It's worked super well out of the gate. But to be fair, we're still a small team. We're five people full time and some contractors. So I think the real challenge is, can we scale this? And can this work at 10 people or 20 people or if we go beyond that? cannot work beyond that. And to be fair we haven't demonstrated that yet. There are other companies that have used self management and grow into bigger organizations. So we believe it can be true, but it is certainly aspirational to an extent. I think the pushback, there's pushback in there. And there's also downsides to this. So I think if we get any form of pushback, it just typically comes from people to whom this means of operating is foreign. And to be fair, that's everybody, right? Like no one is used to working in a company with this structure. People are used to doing quarterly business reviews and the marketing team has a budget and all these practices that are just common in the business world. And I think the funny thing is how uncomfortable people are deviating from what the norm is. Something I like to advocate for is not so much you should look at Outseta and do the things that Outseta is doing, but you can build a business any damn way that you want to. And to be frank, there's a huge lack of innovation in terms particularly in tech, in terms of how people build companies. So like my number one message on all this is just like, open your eyes. Derek Severs is a pretty well known author in tech. But he has a similar take, which is building your own business is your opportunity to sort of like build your utopia, build things exactly the way that you want to. And I think that that's true and more people should sort of embrace that mindset. But in terms of just like, downsides of this, there are absolutely downsides of this model. First and foremost, I think around hiring, there's actually some things that are challenging. So the structure without question has been our biggest recruiting tool. And we have a crazy backlog of people that want to work with us. But we can't pull some of the strings that you normally would pull to hire somebody. So as an example, there was someone, a woman last year who I would want to hire, I wanted to hire, I still want to hire, to essentially act as Outseta's CEO. So first of all, we don't technically have a CEO, we just have all these people that come and work together. So we can't offer her the title of CEO. And beyond that she's an impressive person. Typically, if you're trying to recruit somebody like that, particularly for a CEO role, one of the things you would do is issue them a pretty large equity grant. That's not the way our equity works, we can't just hand you a percentage ownership of the company on a platter. Everybody starts earning equity in the business based on how many hours they elect to choose to work for equity. So for someone to get whatever it is three or 5% equity that a CEO might typically get in a more typical SaaS company, they'd have to work here until they earned that three or 5%, rather than us being able to use it as a recruiting tool. So there's definitely some things that are abnormal that we need to adjust for. But that's fine.
Alex Ivanoff
It's really fascinating. So when you talk about how other organizations do this at a bigger level, Is there really no limitations to this in your mind? Like, what do you think, can this democratic structure where you have unlimited earnings, or I guess unlimited on earning potential based on the company's profits and all that, and that democratic voting structure is that to you, in your opinion, just infinitely scale?
Geoff Roberts
I do not think it is infinitely scalable. So there are a lot of companies that are mostly in South America or Europe that have embraced self management and done this at a greater scale. I know several that have gotten into the 1000s of employees that have used this and use this well. Personally, I kind of believe that it is scalable to a certain point, I don't know exactly where that point is. I think without question like 100, or 200 employees could probably be managed using this structure. But I at least believe that if you get into the 1000s, this is probably going to break down. This probably doesn't make a lot of sense. And you almost need more structure and Management at that point. But that's kind of a hypothesis on land, I guess.
Alex Ivanoff
Okay. Are you a fully remote team?
Geoff Roberts
We're a fully remote team, yep.
Alex Ivanoff
Do you see one way or the other? Whether you're in person in office or remote having an impact on the Democratic structure? Um, that's a good question. to talk about it these days, right? In office versus remote.
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I would say we're fiercely remote and always will be. Honestly, I haven't thought too much about the mechanics and whether this would work better if we were in office or hybrid versus all remote. I typically think that you start to encounter more problems if you do have a hybrid environment. Particularly if there's like a swath of people that are in the office every day and then a swath of people that are never in the office, I think that almost naturally creates some level of divide and sort of some I don't want to say politics, but some, some separation within the organization that wouldn't otherwise be there. My hunch is it would be better to be all in person or all remote.
Alex Ivanoff
I agree. Yeah. So last thing on this philosophical conversation before we get into the product, sure. One concept that I was super fascinated with because as a young entrepreneur, and many others go through this it's it's constant conversation, you talk about life, profitability a lot and this stems from the the book, which I just put on my list, and I'm definitely gonna Read, but it you know, talk about how, essentially, life is more important than business. Everyone knows that happiness is more important than money, but optimizing your business and your work so that you're the entrepreneur of your life rather than of your business, and you're maximizing this like concept of life profits. Yeah. Why did that stick out to you so much? Because I know you said, you, when in your blog this was only the second book that you like, felt like you had to write about yeah, what was it that stuck out to you so much?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I think so. First of all, you hit the nail on the head with the concept of life profitability. It's a phrase that most people aren't familiar with. It basically just means like, as entrepreneurs, we look at our businesses and we know how much money they're making, how profitable Are they from a dollars and cents perspective. But we rarely, rarely look at our lives and ask the same question in terms of happiness. How rich are we from a happiness perspective? We don't have a way to quantify it in the same way. And the other point related to those two things is, these are not mutually exclusive. Right? You absolutely need to have some financial success, in order to enable the type of life success and life profitability that you want. It's not an either or. But why it's so important to me, all comes back to the idea of as a young entrepreneur, why do you start a company in the first place? What is the objective of starting a company? And I would argue the objective is to enrich your life. And in some ways, yes, part of that is probably financially enriching your life. But would you start a company, if it wasn't going to make your life better? Like, shouldn't that ultimately be what we're after? I think when you think about it that way, the answer is unequivocally yes. I'm launching this business to try to make my life better. Yet, if you look at the entrepreneurial landscape, I see a ton of entrepreneurs who are miserable. And even those that have successful businesses, they're just working crazy hours, they're stressed. You know, they're not giving their families the time that their families deserve. And I don't think that enough of them step back and say this business, even if it is putting money in my pocket, is not enriching my life. So when I think about life profitability, it's just always coming back to is this business actually making my life better or not? And I think it's equally important to recognize like we've had I told you in year three it out SATA, we struggled a lot we've had tough patches. And the objective is not to hit a rough patch and say, Oh, life is tough, I need to quit this business. But you need to constantly be doing the same level of accounting in terms of is this making my life better? Or is this just making me miserable for years on end?
Alex Ivanoff
Did you read the book before this week? Was this always something on your mind? Or was it kind of like you were thinking somewhat along those lines, and then you read the book, and it's just super clear to you? Yeah, I've
Geoff Roberts
I have always been thinking along these lines. So my intention, and launching the company was always to enrich my life, I hadn't thought about it in the language of life profitability reading the book, was just a perfect articulation of sort of what I felt in my heart, to be honest with you. But I think for me the reason I started the company was I said, I want to work for myself, I want to be able to work remotely, I want to be able to take time off when I need to, I want to be able to go to my kids sporting events, when I have kids I want to be able to travel, all those kinds of things. And I knew going in that I didn't care and I still don't care about building a billion-dollar company, if I could take 20 employees and build a $10 million company and everyone's compensated really well and loves working there. That would give me the freedom to do the things with my life that I want to do, and frankly in a way that a billion-dollar company probably wouldn't. So that was kind of the lens that I was looking at this through anyways. And then the book Life Profitability was just a perfect articulation of, of why I guess.
Alex Ivanoff
So what is it about you? Because I guess where this question is coming from is that most people don't. Most people see entrepreneurship and they go, Alright, great opportunity to make money. I can find whatever business model I can be good at. And then I'm hitting my goal of making a lot of money. Sure, if they don't stop and have that conversation with themselves, especially young and growing up, they need to maximize their happiness and do something that they love and create a business that they're proud of. They're just, and there's extreme examples of this too. And this is like a serious issue, especially as entrepreneurship becomes more popular. You see the extremes of like Elizabeth Holmes Moments where it just gets so overwhelming and they get caught up in this like fraud and sanctions. See in the news now with Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX. there's always these stories, right? Was this something that you wanted me to say about you when you were younger that you just avoided that mentality? And you went this healthy work route?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, well, I think the other thing I want to make clear is I want to make a ton of money., I have no problem, I have no, I have no problem with making a ton of money whatsoever. I am not like an independently wealthy person growing up, I'm not an independently wealthy person, as we sit here today, I would certainly like a couple years from now to have that not be the case. And I have no problem with making money whatsoever. But people tend to look at someone like me who is saying the things that I'm saying and say, Oh, he's building a lifecycle or lifestyle business. And I think that has taken on this negative connotation that is like, this person isn't aggressive, this person doesn't want to have runaway success. And that's not true at all. As I said, I want to have a lot of financial success, I think it comes down to just a realization that like, if I make $20 million, versus if I make $200 million, am I going to be dramatically happier? I don't think so. I think there's a point where if you make enough money, and you sort of have your financial freedom, everything above that is you just chasing your ego, essentially. And people like something that drives me crazy. I see. Entrepreneurs go on and have these runaway successes. And then they come back and do it again, and do it again, and do it again and spend their whole life working these 80 hour weeks, I'll tell you point blank, I want to make a ton of money. But that would never be me. People ask me like if outsrt is a runaway success, and you have this massive exit what would you do? Would you start angel investing? Would you start another tech company? My answer is unequivocally No. And it's not that I don't like tech, I love working in tech. And it's not that I don't want to support other startups, I would love to support other startups. But I'm a human being. I've already worked in tech for 12, 13 years. I envision I'm going to work in it for 10 more years. There's a lot of other stuff that I'd like to do with my life that's completely unrelated to startups that's completely unrelated to tech. And if I had the financial freedom to go and pursue those things, I almost think it was LAME if you didn't pursue something else. And you just continued to do the same thing over and over and over. So I guess that's kind of how I think about it.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, at least in place of doing work, right? If people like if you're picking one or the other, some people are doing both after you know, hitting that accomplishment, then respectable? What did you have? How old are you? By the way?
Geoff Roberts
36.
Alex Ivanoff
So relatively very young. Do people have mentors? Did you have parents like conditioning you to think this way when you were younger? What makes you so like, why is that most people just don't get?
Geoff Roberts
I think I've had a lot of good mentors in general, too, that are two in particular that come to mind. My dad is an entrepreneur himself. He is a structural engineer. And I think aspects of my interest in entrepreneurship certainly came from him. He is incredibly smart, 100 times smarter than I ever dreamt of being. And he's sort of the typical example of an entrepreneur who is incredibly talented at what they do, but never took the business part, maybe as seriously as they should have. My dad is this like a world class engineer, and is not world class rich, is one way of putting it and I think I saw that growing up. And I developed an interest in entrepreneurship. And I have a strong work ethic as a result of that. But I also sort of recognized that wealth does not necessarily correlate to how talented you are, or how much value you're putting out into the world. making money is very different from how good you are at what you do. And making money really as a result of how much you prioritize making money to be frank. And then the other two would be at the first software company I worked at building them. One of the two co-founders, Dimitri is now my co-founder at outset. The other one His name is Michael, were huge influences on me early on. They did build you know, a tech company that we grew quite aggressively and made tons of money and all those sorts of things, but they did it and In an extremely people-unfriendly way, to the extent where, when they had a big payday they took money that they did not owe to anybody, it was contractually theirs, and they distributed it to other employees when they didn't need to just because they thought it was the right thing to do. And I saw all of that. And again, it goes back to just like reflecting on how I was treated. And I said, that's the way to run a company. That's the way to get people to work hard for you and to be motivated and to keep them engaged over the long term. So I think those are kind of the major influences that have led to me thinking this way to the extent that I do.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, so you're pretty fortunate from a young age, having your dad and seeing and learning by example. And then getting into the workforce, having other people within you within your company to be that influence for you. It sounds like you're pretty important in that respect,
Geoff Roberts
Totally. And I think an interesting thing about my career path is, my first job out of college, I had no idea what I was getting into, and I walked into this amazing situation. And to be fair, I did a good job. I didn't screw things up. And I recognized it was a good opportunity and stuck with it for a while and all of that. But I think starting your career in a company that was so well operated, and that had so much success, was just massively beneficial in terms of the network, I was able to build in terms of what I learned on the job, and all those kinds of things. And what I see happen a lot more often with people is they get out of school, and their first job, their first two jobs, their first five jobs, they're kind of lost, and then kind of finding themselves and trying to figure out what their interests are. And then maybe in their later 20s or early 30s, they find themselves in that great company. And they sort of realized that at that point, I had almost the inverse experience, I started out with that great company. And after that I went to a few other jobs, I did some consulting, and I sort of saw things not done as well. And I said, Oh man , if I'm gonna go off and build my own business, I know what I want, because I had that experience so early in my career, whereas a lot of people kind of find it later.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, yeah. Hopefully sooner or later people do have that experience. Okay, let's, let's talk about the product, cuz there's a lot of cool, exciting stuff that you guys are building and have built. So the way I imagined or I, my perspective of us that it is it's a keyword, no-code tool for early. SaaS founders are info product builders that are just looking to integrate some of the biggest tools Webflow replaced something like a CRM and Pipedrive, or HubSpot, and, essentially billing your customers on subscription, getting data from your CRM around those customers, email automations, automating the helpdesk and the user authentication. So you have a good core of products here. I guess my first question around the product lineup is what did you start with? Or did you envision from the beginning of this that it's all going to be roundabout?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah. So that's probably the most interesting part of our product story is we said, from the get go, we need to build all this the value prop of Outseta is that all of these tools being tied together is really what delivers the value. It's what allows you to launch faster. It's what allows you to manage your business from within a single platform. So if you look at HubSpot, for example, versus our set up, we can talk about how they're the same in different later, but they had completely different origin stories, and they've kind of ended up in the same place. With regards to the feature set. HubSpot said we're going to focus solely on inbound marketing. And then over time, they built the CRM and a service desk, and now they offer some payments, tools and that kind of stuff. We said, No, we need to have a basic version of all of this in order for a startup to launch quickly. So what that meant practically, as I said, it took us two years to even deliver an MVP, which is a long time to work on something before you've got a product out in the market. But having lived the alternative, we knew that if we can build these tools to the point where they're competitive with other more specialized software products on the market, this is a better solution. We had a very high degree of conviction on that, which is why we were able to say we're going to devote two years to building this. But to answer your question more directly, you do need to start somewhere, right? So the very first tool that we built was sort of the first version of our email marketing functionality. And I would not have thought that we would start there. But literally we built the tools in the order that we needed them. So we wanted to send an email to announce that we were building Outseta. So we built the email too with Outseta, okay, and then we kind of just added on like, Okay, now we've got some people on this email list, we need a CRM to be able to sort of manage those people and store their information somewhere. So we started on the CRM. And then when we got to the point where we were ready to actually charge customers, we built the billing system. So it was a natural evolution. But it wasn't until we had built all sorts of four or five key categories of software that we covered that we said, okay we have an MVP, we're ready to go to market with this thing.
Alex Ivanoff
Sure. Okay. And knowing that you guys have a ton of new integrations with different tools to be able to bring it all into one place in Outseta a, do you there's a lot of flexibility do you see in your customer base, one dominant type of customer or in terms of business model, or what they're running, not to exclude anybody? I said, there are a lot of different possibilities. But
Geoff Roberts
yeah, so there's a couple of different ways that we look at this, there are three use cases that I would say are very common, or I wouldn't say they are very common within our customer base. The first one is technical founders building SaaS products. That's what we are ourselves: we're a traditional software company that's built on top of outsert. A second would be what I would call no-code membership sites. So these are less technical builders that have written content, video tutorials, etc, that they want to charge for access to. Without question, most of those are built on Webflow. Not all of them, you can really deliver your content, or product or community or whatever it is, however you want. But Webflow is extremely common. And then the third is online communities. So you're just charging for access to your online community, essentially, those are the use cases, in terms of the technologies that we're most commonly integrated with. These ASP products are kind of off on their own, because everyone picks their own tech stack and uses whatever coding and development frameworks they want. So that's certainly one one bucket. But other than that, I would say it's Webflow. First and foremost, a lot of communities are built on top of a circle. And then the third one that that's really coming on really strong right now is notion as well, all products that we integrate with a lot
Alex Ivanoff
imagined for info products. Yep. Yeah, it makes sense. And on the topic of no-code, this is something I'm, I'm so fascinated by, I've said this before on the show, but I'm on Twitter a lot. And one of the biggest trends I've seen, especially in the past six to 12 months is there's just founders building things that would never be able to be built with no-code recently, you have like 17 year old high school kids building like you said, an info product or even a software that is not as a unique value proposition to the market, doing like 40k a month it's completely built in like three days, they don't do any hard coding, it's almost like you you press a button, you ask artificial intelligence, build a business for me. And it's done. It's just fascinating. So beyond the simple concept of just let's make things quicker and easier. Why is this no-code movement so important for what's happening in tech? And you know, the market?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, no-code is huge. And I'm not just saying this, because like, we have a product in the no-code space, I think people are at large sleeping on no-code to a huge extent you hear so much buzz about web three, and we can talk about web three, and whether you think it's legit or not. Now we're seeing so much. There's so much buzz around AI and I'm pretty bullish on AI. I think AI is...
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, did you see open AI yesterday?
Geoff Roberts
I did, yeah.
Alex Ivanoff
Incredible.
Geoff Roberts
Absolutely incredible stuff. But I think people almost tend to downplay no-code. And that comes largely, or at least historically, has come largely from the real technologists in the tech industry. The coders, the designers, sort of looking at no-code and saying like this isn't as powerful as what we can do without code. And of course, it's not. But that's not the point. The thing that is so impressive about no-code is it can take someone like me, I am pretty non technical. I'm really pretty non technical. I could never have built half of the type of businesses that I can build today with no-code. And if you talk about tech and like what tech is supposed to do, it's supposed to enable people to do something that they couldn't do before. And you can talk about how exciting AI is, how exciting web three is, no-code every bit as exciting and as impactful because it's allowing people like myself to build companies that they never could have built before. And I see it every single day in our customer base, it's really, really cool.
Alex Ivanoff
I think that's a good way of framing what's supposed to be happening. I mean, 150 years ago, you could not go coast to coast without a horse. And it would still take you a lot of weeks, maybe months. And Henry Ford, and the Wright Brothers changed that. And now technology advances at an exponential rate. Now, we're seeing products being built, I said, by 17 year old kids that just have not been built before and even 20 years ago, would require hundreds of 1000s of dollars of developer talent. It's just incredible. Well, now, my question is, was this anticipated six years ago, when you started out, set up? Because it's really taken off since then.
Geoff Roberts
No, it was not. And this is probably one of the things that I screwed up, and I'm most responsible for it, to be honest with you. So when we started out. We were focused 100% on selling to other founders of SaaS companies, we built this company, point blank, because as founders of a SaaS company, we said, we see an efficiency, we think we can solve this problem for other technical founders. And one of the pieces of startup advice that everyone gives that I think is generally good startup advice is particularly when you're getting started niche down on a target audience. And don't take your eye off the ball to serve that customer really, really well. And that's what we did with technical founders of SaaS companies for the first three or four years that we were in business. Even in year three, where I said we were struggling, I was like, this is our target audience. We need to continue to serve them the products just not good enough yet. We just need to work harder. And around that time. So this is 2019-ish. Some people started mentioning no-code, they were like, there's this thing called no-code, it's kind of starting to emerge, we think Outseta might actually be a really good fit for no-code builders. Because no-code builders don't have the technical skill set to integrate all these tools and sort of build the perfect tech stack you're going to be that much more valuable to them. And I was kind of like, I've got my blinders on in a good way. We're focusing on SaaS developers no-code isn't our thing. And frankly, I was wrong.
So we started to get some inbound interest, mostly from people building on Webflow, being like, wait, I can hook this up to my Webflow site and have a fully functioning subscription business in a day or two. And it got to the point where we basically just got pulled into the no-code community because so many people started signing up. And I eventually scratched my head and said, okay this is an opportunity that we need to take a look at. And we went through a whole process of sort of no codifying outset, the early versions of Outseta were words designed to be integrated with code. And it wasn't as easy to integrate with a Website Builder like Webflow, as it could have been. So we basically made everything so anybody can implement it. That's completely not technical. And that's really what caused our first major uptick in growth. And what we kind of realized thereafter was even, even in no-codifying the product and making it easier for a non technical builder to implement. All those sorts of changes still benefited developers, like if you can implement a technology easier, faster, quicker, it's good for everybody. So we have this customer base today that's very much split between kind of developers and no-coders. And one of the challenges for us as a company is like, whenever we're receiving support tickets, or talking to a customer, we need to very quickly sort out who they are. Is this a really technical person? Or someone that's very non technical? And how do we sort of tailor our advice and guidance to the persona that we're serving.
Alex Ivanoff
I, that stands out to me a lot. Because as a Stripe user in the past and non technical person, you go to their knowledge base, and it's very code heavy. And you're like, I don't know how to do this simple setting without coding. And maybe they have improved since I last checked, but I think that's super important from a support perspective. And talking about your customer base. I think it's very interesting to think about, their, their incentive to and their motivation to do what they do. you said, half of them maybe could be just non technical people, and they're just looking to build something. We had Matteo Grassi on the show a couple weeks ago, who was building a no-code funnel builder for e-commerce and Shopify stores. And we talked about the no-code Feldman, he talks, he got really philosophical, he's talking about how what separates humans from animals is that we have this ability to ask for reason and ask why something is and, and use imagination to create ideas. And from a biological perspective, everybody can create an idea. And now, no-code is allowed, for the first time ever you talked about this motion, have the ability to create whatever you want without needing certain skill sets and just kind of sit down on the computer and build something. Now, do you? Do you ever see what your customer feedback is? Like did they ever say like, Hey, all I had was this idea, and now I use this tool, I use this tool and Outseta brings all together and boom have you seen that as well?
Geoff Roberts
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, a huge portion of our customer base is people that could not have been entrepreneurs in the same way, or at least built the same ideas even five years ago, that they're building on Outseta today. And a lot of our most successful customers. And I think this is true of entrepreneurship in general, not just our customer base. A lot of our most successful customers are people that are absolutely not technologists in any way, they have some sort of domain expertise in a particular industry. And that's really their skill set. they don't know they love selling handbags online. And like building the perfect handbag is what they're good at, and what they're passionate about, and ultimately why their company is successful. We just enable them to create the storefront and run the business in a way that they never could have previously without spending 1000s of dollars on designers and developers and all that kind of stuff. So I think it is just an enablement play. And it is creating a whole new sort of category of entrepreneurs that didn't exist previously. And I think at first, frankly, developers, to some extent, were a little critical of no-code tools, because they realized that all of a sudden, there were a lot more entrepreneurs who are sort of dangerous enough to actually launch businesses. And now that no-code has become more popularized. I think we're actually finally starting to win over developers. And I see a lot of developers using no-code now. Because they're saying there are these speed-to-market advantages, why would I code this just because I can, if I can launch my business faster, just like a no-code founder can. I'm going to do that. And I'm going to reserve my time to write code for when I need to write code. And I think that's the right mindset.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, and you mentioned the speed-to-market and you guys have published content around this where it's, Hey, here's like, I think it's 28 time saving tools for developers or non developers to use that set up and build something that might take weeks otherwise to do or just flip a switch and it's on did how early Did you realize that you needed to do something like that? And you have that motivation to do something like that?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I think that was me getting better at marketing to developers a challenge. Yeah, challenging aspects of marketing to any audience that you're not a part of is learning to think like them. And I'm the first one to tell you, I do not think like a developer. I'm a writing major again. That was like one of the things I would say, just to give you like, a more concrete example of that is out of the gates are marketing to developers was like, here's a complete tech stack, you've got your helpdesk your billing, your CRM, and your email marketing, and they're integrated. And to be frank, the response was, who cares? Like there's better email tools, there's a better CRM, there's a better billing system, and I can integrate them because I'm a developer that really liked that message. Still, today doesn't resonate that hard with most developers. But if you look at even just integrating like a subscription billing system with your website with your authentication tools, there are all of these tiny little workflows, which is what the article you reference is about, that no product handles out of the box. And developers always have to write custom code. An example would be if one of your customers has a payment failure. Can they log into their account and continue to use your software? Or do you stop them when they try to log in and ask them for payment? This is something every developer in the history of the world has eventually custom coded and if you're using separate authentication tools and payment tools, you need to get those tools to interact to build out that workflow. Next thing you know you've lost the day building that. Outseta of gives you those sorts of workflows out of the box because all the tools are interconnected. So Instead of focusing on, here's this perfectly integrated tech stack, we started pointing out like, here are all these little examples of things that you're going to have to build. And you probably know that because you probably built them in your last company. And if you look at this stuff collectively Outseta just paid for itself 100 times over. And it's resonated a lot more than sort of what we did previously.
Alex Ivanoff
And I think it's smart, because it goes back to flip we have a nimble team, we're trying to stay small, you're doing this one too many things that everybody suffers from, at some point you said the payment failing thing, everybody goes through that at some point. So it's very wise to take that strategy not just from a marketing perspective, but from a product perspective. On the topic of all the features that Outseta of has a you know, it is unique, but what makes it so unique from the other options on the market or competitors? And How do you frame your unique selling point and your differentiation?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, honestly, it's hard to communicate. And it's something I've always struggled with, I'm still struggling with, I think we're getting better at it. And I have a tendency, I know, to almost like to talk down to our product and make it sound unexciting. And I say this, I say this, because I mean it but like you look at our feature set. And there's nothing about it that is terribly unique. We are an email marketing system where a CRM or a subscription billing tool, were quite comparable to the other tools on the market that you're probably familiar with across those categories of software. And I don't say that to be uninspiring. I say that because it's the truth. And like, if you're looking for this one beautiful, shiny feature that is completely differentiated, frankly, you're not going to find it. What is unique is what you can do, first of all, two things. I guess there's two things, how fast you can launch a business, the speed-to-market thing is absolutely the initial selling point. But beyond that, it's what you can build, because all of these tools are interconnected. And the example of sort of stopping someone from logging in and prompting them for payment is one example. But another one that's really, really common is, let's say you want to try to reduce churn within the context of your subscription business.
One way that you can do that is identifying accounts that sort of become disengaged. So we have a workflow within our software, where if we see that someone hasn't logged into the software in 14 days, we make note of it, we send them an automated email saying, hey you haven't logged in in 14 days, blah, blah, blah, do you need some help? Do you have feedback for us, that kind of thing. Every subscription business sets up that workflow. But if you set it up with a separate CRM, a separate email marketing tool and a separate authentication tool, the authentication tool needs to recognize someone hasn't logged in, in 14 days, it typically is going to send that information to your CRM, that's going to be used to trigger your email, you can build out that workflow. I've built out that workflow and other companies, but it takes a day or two of work. And you've got to integrate these three systems just to get that simple workflow out out the door. In Outseta of you can build that in literally 30 seconds. So it's been more about how can we show people how much efficiency they gained by all of these tools talking to each other, immediately and really efficiently?
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, I think I'm the same, I'm with you. And I think you gotta give yourself credit for explaining it the way you do. Because like you said, it is hard, because from the front, people just see the feature list, and they see what it does. And they're saying, you've seen this a million times, why do I don't even need this, but when you really stop and think about, and it's something I did when I looked it out set up first, and I was like, there's nothing else that brings all together this way, right? Like this is if you really think about oh, what what, what's the process of connecting point A to point B? And how long does that take? And if you know, in the instance of the examples you gave, if that came up, what would I do? You know yep, these are real practical problems. If you sit and think about it, and then you look at Outseta, you're like, Oh, this is the solution. And it's tough from a marketing perspective. I can imagine what your job is
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, people honestly the number one thing that we hear all the time is people, people look at our data, and they say, it sounds too good to be true. And if you're doing all these things, you're not doing any of these things well, and that is totally valid. It's a totally valid thought process. That's what I would be thinking. That's what I would be saying. Those are the questions I would be asking. And I think the truth is kind of twofold now. One is at this point, the products are pretty damn good because we've been working on it for six years. So it took us a while. I helped to build those feature sets just to get to the point where we're at and we are competitive. But I think beyond that we sell to relatively early stage startups. And when I look at the more powerful, more specialized software tools that most companies still use, they're used very fractionally, they're using only a percentage of MailChimp or a percentage of HubSpot, or a percentage of Zendesk. And the features that they're not using are oftentimes features that are built for larger companies to sort of grow into over time, we don't have to have perfect parity with those tools, we don't have perfect parity with those tools. Because at an early stage, you don't need all the bells and whistles, you need sort of the core email functionality, the core CRM functionality. And our argument is actually like the fact that the tool is a little bit more simple, and fully integrated far outweighs the benefits of a few features here or there that we might be missing. And that again, it comes back to that thought process that really resonates with some people. And then there's other people that are just going to say I want the absolute most powerful technology across each of these categories. And that's fine. They kind of self select out about data. Sure,
Alex Ivanoff
That's my next question. And it's probably a difficult one is, do you have customers that outgrow you? Do you encourage them to grow with them? What's the thinking around that?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, that's honestly like the worst part of Outseta. And the way that I communicate this to other people is if you're a venture capitalist looking at outset, objectively, you would be like, this is a horrible idea. Seriously, you would, it's like, we're bootstrapping this massive product that's taken years to come to market. We sell it to bootstrapped founders who have a budget of zero, typically, you're gonna see high degrees of churn because we're selling to startups. There's just so much about this business that is unattractive, to be honest with you. And that goes back to why we've made decisions like keeping the team small everybody does support like, we have no sales team, we need to make sacrifices in order to make this business work from a financial perspective. So I don't know, I think that's, that's interesting. And at the end of the day, yes, our biggest customers do outgrow us. That's something we're aware of. That's something we have to plan for. But our mindset for what it's worth is we want to take companies from day one and $0 in revenue to about $10 million in revenue. We want to be the best tech stack to serve that customer journey. And I think frankly, even the fastest growing companies in the world going from zero to 10 is going to take them years. And that's plenty of time for us to capture enough lifetime value to run a great business and bring it back to HubSpot. The way that we kind of look at this and I don't bring up HubSpot Like honestly, we very rarely sort of compete with them. In some cases we do but we have bigger competitors in HubSpot. But I think the reality is like a company like HubSpot, they say they're a tech stack for sort of scaling or growing companies being publicly traded being a billion dollar company, they really want to serve customers from like $10 million a year in revenue upwards. We want to play in that lower end of the market that, frankly, is pretty underserved today.
Alex Ivanoff
And it's bigger, your service to one another. There's a lot more people at the bar. Yep. And yep, it's a good problem to have. Because if you're selling one to many again, and you have that bigger market, you can run a very profitable business and grow. You know, you've done so much in six years, in the next six years, or whenever you guys are having a plan for it, you could plan for that future of art, let's serve even bigger and better. It's fascinating. I want to talk about Webflow and Stripe, because it seems as if those two are some of the biggest partnerships or integrations that you have. I don't know if you have dedicated partnerships with them, but I saw you were at the Webflow conference a couple weeks ago, you guys are very invested in, you know, working with them. One, how is it that you're able to offer Stripe integration with cheaper rates and to what? We talked about Webflow and kind of it's taking over, what fascinates you so much about Workflow so we'll talk about a little bit about those two ones as your meat potatoes.
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I'll start with Stripe. So with Stripe first and foremost where Outseta it came from initially was we built subscription billing for Stripe because it didn't exist. Stripe had not built a great billing system. For SaaS founders. They had great API's and you could integrate their API's with your SaaS product, but I don't know how familiar you are with Stripe, but Stripe billing today is Stripe's sort of no-code billing system. And they have built a product that's extremely similar to Outseta from a billing perspective. We started about two to three years before they did and sort of solved the problem because Stripe hadn't solved it. Stripe launched a competitive product. And now our value prop is really sure Stripe offers very similar billing tools, but we wrap it in the CRM and the email marketing and the helpdesk. So we're all in one tech stack that Stripe is not and that's kind of the competitive differentiator, or why people choose Outseta versus Stripe billing.
From the perspective of processing payments and how much it costs. This is just a topic that nobody understands, to be honest with you. Everybody that I talked to assumes that if they're using Stripe, they're paying 2.9% per transaction. If you're in the US, that is almost unequivocally not true, you are almost definitely paying a lot more than that. The bare minimum payment processing fee that Stripe will charge on a transaction is 2.9% And Outseta charges that to every single outset, a customer is connected to Stripe on the back end, that transaction fee is going to be the same no matter what. If you use Stripe billing, they charge you additional fees to create subscription products in Stripe, to charge taxes to do all these other things that Stripe does, those are incremental fees. And I'm not ragging on I don't mean it to rag on Stripe, but they don't ever show those to you in a single invoice, you never get an invoice that's like here's all the fees that you're paying to stripe, it's all taken out at the transaction level. So it's actually hard for people to know what the effective rate that they're paying is if they're using Stripe or most other Billing products. With Outseta, the thing that's different is we built all of our own subscription management, we built the UI to set up your products. We built all that stuff. So we don't rely on Stripe for that. And what that means is we don't incur those extra charges. So if you look at Outseta, it's almost always actually cheaper to process payments without Seto versus Stripe or any other alternative.
Plus you get the rest of the tech stack. So that's just not well understood. But at the end of the day we live and die by Stripe, you can't use Seto without a Stripe account. Stripe is like we're a Stripe verified partner and all of that. And I think the world of Stripe in general, they enable us to build what we've built and are a huge customer acquisition channel for us. Webflow is different. So our journey with Webflow started because Webflow did not have a way of charging subscription payments, and also did not have a way of having people log in and out of a Webflow site. Similar to Stripe, which has since changed, they offer both now. So again our value prop more and more is this all in one nature. And that's why you would use Outseta or with Webflow rather than just the tools that Webflow offers. But I could not be more bullish on Webflow in general. And it's for a very similar reason to our conversation around no-code, what Webflow is, at the end of the day, they've sort of latched on to this term no-code, I actually don't think that's a great descriptor, because I think the term no-code sort of implies to people that you don't need to be technical in order to use a tool. And that's not really the case with Webflow. If you put someone non technical in Webflow, it is very overwhelming. And I don't say that as a criticism of their product. I say it as if it were just me the first time I went into Webflow. I was like, I don't know how to do anything here. Agreed, Yeah. So there's a big learning curve. What Webflow is, at the end of the day, is a website builder built for designers. If you're a designer and you get into Webflow, you're almost immediately at least somewhat comfortable with it. It works the same way that your brain does. It uses concepts that you're familiar with. So the power of Webflow is it allows a designer to build stuff without needing a developer. And that is huge from an enablement perspective.
As a marketer that grew up on WordPress, every time I needed to build a website, we had to go hire a designer and pay them $20,000 To do the designs for this website. And then we got to go by our then we have to go hire a developer and pay them 50 grand to actually build out and write all the code to launch this website. Webflow has cut the developer completely out of the equation. So not only does it allow you to build products more inexpensively, but It turns designers essentially into developers in a pretty significant way. So I think it's just got, from that perspective, a huge opportunity to disrupt the entire website-building market. And that aside, I mean, I think there's a lot of good website building products out there today. I love cards. I love Squarespace. I love Webflow, but WordPress is still the 800 pound gorilla in the room. And it's, it's painful for me to log into WordPress at this point, to be honest with you, once you see how some of these other tools work and how good the UI is and what you can build with them. WordPress is on its way out. I
Alex Ivanoff
i know I couldn't agree with Webflow . I mean, WordPress is the bicycle, and Webflow is the car really. So yeah, it's very interesting to see. And Webflow really, I just really first heard about in the past couple years from a non designer, non developer perspective. And now knowing that someone like myself, you need someone like yourself from a marketing perspective can use it.. Again, we're democratizing access to tools and skill sets that we didn't have before. percent. It's, yeah, it's fascinating. So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask, we've talked a lot about different instances in which you kind of came to a realization or you something changed along the way from six years ago. Do you have one that stands out to you where you're like, this is the number one thing I wish I knew when I first started, or this is the number one thing that I just did not anticipate and was a head-scratcher moment?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, I think the biggest learning for me personally, having jumped into building Outseta having spent the last six years doing it is is twofold. One is I've learned so much about what makes a good startup idea. And that comes through my own experience of building the idea that we chose to build as well as just seeing millions of companies launch on Outseta and talking to founders every day about what their ideas are. So I think going forward from when we started with Outseta to where I am today, my ability to think critically about what a good startup ideas is. lightyears different. And to be perfectly frank, when I signed on to build Outseta, I had plenty of valid reasons. But most of them were related to my two co-founders that I had the opportunity to work with, they're both a little bit older than me, a little bit more senior than me. And I saw that they were just an incredibly talented tech team. And I said, I want to work with these guys, it almost doesn't matter to me what we build. And realistically, I think I could have thought more critically about the actual idea that we latched on to.
One of the things that they said to me at the time was, we want to build Outseta because it is this this massive product. And we think it's going to hold our attention for 15,20 years and be technically difficult and challenging, and all those sorts of things. And they weren't wrong in saying that. But boy, boy, did we bite off a lot, and particularly bite off a lot from a bootstrapping perspective. So I think I would have been a little bit more critical of some of those aspects. And that dovetails into probably the biggest learning for me, which is the extent to which what you're you're building kind of jives with how you're building the business. So the way I would say it point blank is Outseta is in every single way a venture scale product, we chose a venture scale idea and product and bootstrapped it. And that has been enormously challenging. And that's why it's taken us six years to get to this point. Because I don't think those two things were in harmony. To be frank, I think we just built an idea and said, We're going to bootstrap it. That's an idea that's not conducive to bootstrapping. So for me I took massive pay cuts over the last six years, it took us five years, two or 44 years to get to the point where I was even able to work on Outseta full time. And there's just a ton of life stress and realities that come with that. Now, I can also tell you, I'm sitting pretty today as a result of that as a result of sort of enduring that pain and delay delaying my own gratification, if you will we've gotten to the point where the business is doing well where we have retained complete ownership in the company and whatnot. But there wasn't a lot of sacrifice to get here today. And I'm not sure that I would do that, again, in the, if I if I had to do it all over again, I think I would be much more critical of if we want to be bootstrapped and independent, fine, but let's look for something that we can build up substantial revenue.
And very, very quickly, let's look for something that's going to lend itself to having relatively low support volume, as opposed to this bigger platform type solution, where we know we're always going to have a lot of support. So just making sure like, what you're building and how you're building it are in harmony is a topic that I think like no one talks about. We hear all this like really polarizing. Do you like bootstrapping? Or do you like going for broke and raising venture capital dialog, but it's never, which one makes sense based on what you're actually trying to build?
Alex Ivanoff
Sure. So to be clear, if you could go back, you still would have bootstrapped? Like, you wouldn't have looked to raise money?
Geoff Roberts
No, I think if I think I think at the end of the day, why our team worked together was this philosophical alignment on wanting to remain small and independent. wanting to know, embrace self management, do all these things that we've talked about, I think going back, I would have said, Yes, let's do that. But let's choose an idea that's more conducive to doing. I probably wouldn't sign up to build Outseta again, in that way. Or if we had said building outset, and this particular product idea is the most important thing, I would have said, Fine, let's go do that. But let's go raise venture capital to build it. That's probably the single biggest learning I would say.
Alex Ivanoff
Yeah, and I think either way knowing where you're at now, if nothing changed in terms of the destination, then the journey just would have been easier. You know, for sure, maybe the destination would have changed? Who knows? Yeah, so one question, we always like to ask everyone as we round it out here. And this is gonna be interesting, cuz we already touched on it. If you could sit in a room every morning with a bunch of mentors, once a morning to sit at a table, and they're you're checking in for the day, and they're sitting there and you have questions you want to ask, they're there to help guide you every morning. Who would be in that room? Would you still have your dad? Would you still have your co-founders? They could be alive or dead.
Geoff Roberts
Interesting. This is a weird question for me. And I don't want to, in any way, discount the idea of, of mentors, and advisors, and all all those sorts of things. But something that I see a lot in the world that I live in, is founders, whether they're first time founders or not, are getting backed by venture companies, or accelerators or whatnot, not just because they need the money, but because there's a network of mentors that comes with it. And they almost like to join those communities, or those accelerators for the mentorship as much as they do the cash. And that, hugely beneficial, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Something that was, I guess, maybe a little unique to my situation, going back to this point of I started my career in this company that did so well, is if you're in a company like that, that does so well, all of a sudden, all of these doors open to you. And like my very first hired mentor was the CMO of Constant Contact, which was like one of the first SaaS companies to be a runaway success. And I've just been privy to so many super talented people within the SaaS world, that as we sit here today, and I really don't mean this, the way it might sound like the mentorship that I'm looking for is much less focused on like, this is what you need to do to build a successful SaaS company. And it would be much more focused on sort of like the life profitability type stuff and like here, here's how to think about your life in general. And I think I would want to pull in influences from completely different industries other than SaaS, and I've said this before, and I really think it's true.
Once you've worked in the SaaS industry for a while, something that's different now than 10 years ago, the SaaS playbook understands that there is a way of doing this: you need to reduce churn, you need to figure out how to make your customer successful. You need to charge enough to make sure the company is profitable and can afford to hire the types of people you need to hire like. It's really not that hard. The mechanics of the business model are really well understood. And now if you're a first time founder and you've never worked in SaaS, then maybe you do need mentors to teach you some of that stuff. But to get back to your question, mine would be people from all different walks of life. I kind of feel like I've got the SaaS mentors or the tech mentors, under good reps, one person before I get to the other people, I love Mark Roberge. He was the initial Chief Revenue Officer and VP of sales at HubSpot. We don't have a sales team. So we don't have an immediate need for him. But he's someone I've gotten to know a little bit. And I just love the way that that guy thinks about everything related to sales and everything about scaling SaaS companies. There's a reason HubSpot was as successful as they were. And I think he was a big part of it. He is someone that I would maybe want to pull in at some point. But beyond that. I'm like a goofy Tom Brady fan.
I'm from New England, I would love to be able to talk to Tom more just about team building and leadership and that kind of stuff. I think having someone with that perspective would be really interesting. I actually posted something about this the other day on Twitter. The single happiest person I know in my life is my dentist, as ridiculous as that sounds. He's just like the 60 year old guy that I literally pay out of pocket to go and have a dentist appointment with this guy every six months. Because he's just like, he's just he just has this like vigor about him and this passion for life. And like, he's figured out what he wants out of life, and he has it. And people like that, I would love to just kind of build a circle of people like that, because they all come from different walks of life. And I think the more you surround yourself with people that have that sort of life profitability, they can be a great sounding board. I need to execute what I need to execute from the Outseta of perspective to make the company successful. I kind of know that piece, but I like to have these other people chirping in my ear about how to be a better leader, how to be a happier person, here's how to be a better father and husband and all those kinds of things. I think those are the type of people I would want to bring into my circle.
Alex Ivanoff
So a very interesting answer and I like it. No, I know, this, this room is not only supposed to be business-focused. So I like that you have Tom Brady, and there's not a lot of business to him. But you know, he's more so an athlete first and a good person. And then there's so how long have you been going to your dentist?
Geoff Roberts
I've been going to my desk for like five years now. I discovered the guy and I was just like, I gotta go here every time.
Alex Ivanoff
You know what's interesting is, I've always heard that, I don't know if this is actually true, but most people say that dentists are the least happy people in the world because they have to go through the pain of inflicting pain on others all the time, so to hear that someone is that enjoyable is good. someone stands up, back?
Well, Geoff, it's been a pleasure having you. And I've learned so much about Outseta before. And now during meeting you and you guys are destined for great things, just based on the original talk that we had about the philosophy in which you guys approach business and life. And I think those two are equally maybe maybe not, life is more important, obviously. And, and seeing the way that you guys conduct yourselves and the way you conduct yourself is extremely admirable.
And I'm sure people listening are gonna really, really love hearing this. And I hope that they apply this to whatever it is they're building or working on, whether it's an eComm store or a SaaS company or an info products, and hopefully they use Outseta, but yeah, it's, it's really awesome. So thank you so much, I appreciate it.
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, this was a lot of fun.
Alex Ivanoff
Absolutely. Well, for everyone listening, go check out this episode on GoRocketCart.com. You can click on the podcast page to see our list of episodes and go follow Geoff on Twitter. Do you want to drop your handle here? We'll put it in the link as well. But what's the best place for people to follow you?
Geoff Roberts
Yeah, you can check Outseta, it's just Outseta.com. It's the word outset with an A on the end, where you can find me on either Twitter or LinkedIn on Twitter. I'm @GeoffTRoberts.
Alex Ivanoff
It's a good way to remember how to spell it. All right, well, we'll put the links in there and you know, hopefully you'll go follow Geoff and go follow our show, and again, thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.
Geoff Roberts
Take care.
