Episode Details

Most SaaS founders pick a price, put it on their website, and never touch it again. Patrick Campbell built an entire company around fixing that mistake. His SaaS pricing methodology has been used by Wistia, BigCommerce, Optimizely, Zapier, and hundreds of other companies to optimize their pricing strategy and packaging.

Patrick cashed in his 401k to bootstrap Price Intelligently, spent nine months as a solo founder grinding out deep content on SaaS pricing, and grew to 30 employees charging a minimum of $30,000 per engagement - all without raising a dollar. His four-step framework covers buyer personas, willingness-to-pay surveys, feature preference analysis, and pricing model alignment. Companies that never update their SaaS pricing lose years of revenue because customer value perceptions shift constantly.

Patrick Campbell is the co-founder and CEO of Price Intelligently, a Boston-based startup that helps SaaS businesses figure out the right subscription pricing using data instead of gut feeling. The company also launched ProfitWell, a free SaaS metrics tool. Patrick's background is in economics and math, with experience at the US Intelligence community and Google.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 💰 Use willingness-to-pay surveys instead of guessing your SaaS pricing: Patrick's four-question survey asks at what price a product is too expensive, getting expensive, a good deal, and too cheap to trust - revealing price elasticity for each buyer persona.
• 🎯 Align SaaS pricing tiers to quantified buyer personas: Instead of guessing which features belong in each tier, survey your personas on feature preference using forced-choice questions, then build packages that match what each segment values.
• 🔄 Revisit pricing every quarter to capture lost revenue: Companies leaving prices unchanged for years miss enormous growth because product improvements and market changes constantly shift what customers will pay.
• 📉 Deep content marketing compounds into a growth engine: Price Intelligently's deep blog posts on pricing strategy drove 80-90% of all revenue, even though early posts got just 30 views - proving that content compounds over time.

Chapters

• Introduction
• What drives Patrick - blue collar work ethic and Teddy Roosevelt's speech
• Patrick's nonprofit work and data consulting for grants
• How Price Intelligently started - economics background, Google, and a hunch
• First steps - building models and pounding the pavement
• Customer development using the same pricing methodology
• Is Price Intelligently a software product or consulting service?
• How the pricing data collection works
• Company size - from 14 to 30 employees in nine months
• Growth trajectory and the first nine months as a solo founder
• Inbound marketing - the HubSpot Playbook and deep content
• Blogging as the primary growth engine - 80-90% of revenue
• Health challenges - burnout and beating cancer as a founder
• Step-by-step SaaS pricing framework overview
• Defining and quantifying buyer personas
• Survey design - current customers, prospects, and strangers
• Feature preference surveys - forced-choice methodology
• Pricing surveys - four open-ended willingness-to-pay questions
• Analyzing pricing data and setting tiers

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/134
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email