How Outseta Uses Outseta to Run Outseta

Peter Suhm, Founder of Reform, recently kicked off a series of posts where founders are sharing how they use their own products in the context of running their own businesses.

I had to jump in—we built Outseta because we saw a better way to run a SaaS business and now practically our entire business runs on our own product. Here's how we do it!

Users sign up, login, and manage their own subscription with Outseta's embeds

Our own website is built on Webflow where we've integrated Outseta's sign up, login, and profile embeds.

• Customers pick a plan and pay for their subscription via our sign up embed.
• After they sign up, the receive a confirmation email and set a password. They then enter their login credentials into our login embed, which redirects the user into our software and shows them all the appropriate features based on their subscription plan.
• Customers can then login to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel their subscription via our profile embed. This acts as a customer portal and can also be used to invite team members, view invoices, or edit billing information.

Get started with the sign up, login, and profile embeds.

Customer relationships are managed via Outseta CRM

Once a customer signs up, Outseta automatically creates an "Account" record for the new customer in Outseta CRM.

• The account record is populated with any information captured during sign up.
• Because our billing system and CRM are the same product, I can manage each customer's subscription directly from their CRM record. This makes it easy to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel a subscription. I can also issue refunds or change the date the subscription renews directly from a customer's CRM record.
• The CRM record also includes an activity history that automatically pulls in all login activity, payments, email messages, support tickets, chat conversations, and other notes. This gives me a very complete picture of what's happening with each customer.
• I can track exactly how each user is interacting with our software directly on their CRM record. Here's how to setup user engagement tracking.
• Finally, I also track "Customer Lifetime Revenue" directly on each customer's CRM record. This is the actual amount of money we've collected from each customer over their lifetime of using our product—it updates in real time as new payments are collected, no integration required.

Users are added to segments that are used to send emails and trigger automations

All of the data that makes its way into Outseta can be used to build segments—groups of users with some sort of shared characteristic.

• All new paid subscribers start receiving our onboarding email sequence.
• We have a segment specifically for users that haven't logged into Outseta in 14 days. As soon as this condition becomes true, the disengaged user receives an email offering help and asking for feedback. This has been super useful in keeping users engaged by proactively reaching out and offering help in an automated fashion. When your CRM, authentication, and email tools are part of the same platform this takes about 30 seconds to setup.
• We also send email broadcasts using our own email tools—primarily to share blog content and product updates with our customers.
• Finally, all of our transactional emails are sent via Outseta—this includes emails for things like failed payments and lost password workflows.

We track user engagement for both prospects and customers

We use our own user engagement tracking features for tracking user engagement for both prospects and customers.

• Tracking how prospects engage with our product is super helpful from a sales perspective—this allows me to invest my time with the most engaged prospects who are more likely to convert to paying customers.
• Tracking user engagement for our paying subscribers is really useful from a customer success perspective. This allows me to recommend features to customers to help them get more value out of our product, while also making them less likely to churn.

We provide customer support by publishing knowledge base content and responding to chat messages and support tickets

We use our own tools to support of customers, too!

• All of our product documentation and how to content is published using Outseta's knowledge base.
• Prospects can start a live chat conversation with us on our website, and logged in users can ask for help from directly within our software as they're actively engaging with our product.
• We respond to most incoming customer service requests via Outseta's support ticketing system.

We create new pricing plans and run pricing experiments 100% without code

As a non-technical user, I use our own billing system to create new pricing plans and run pricing experiments.

• I can create subscription plans, one-time plans, or per user pricing models
• I can also offer free trials, sell add-on products, or configure coupon codes
• I issue refunds as needed directly from within Outseta
• I routinely use Outseta's "Plan Families" feature to run pricing experiments—this allows me to completely change the pricing on our website and in our product with a simple toggle.

Outseta's notification system and reports keep our team informed

We also use our product's own notification system to keep our team informed. This allows us to send notification of important happenings—like new paid subscriptions that are created—and send them via webhooks, email, or directly to Slack.

Finally, we use our reporting tools to report on our own metrics. This includes subscribers, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn, and conversion rates.

That's a wrap! That's an awful lot of dogfooding, eh Peter?