Outseta Company Update - April 2023

Why hello there!

The first quarter is always the busiest time of year at Outseta—founders love launching companies at the dawn of a new calendar year! This year was no different—it's time to catch you up on what we've been working on over the past few months.

Our momentum has continued to build in really positive ways—we've set new records for revenue collected each month for six consecutive months now. While that's exciting itself, we're also excited about how we've grown.

• Our existing customers are growing! We see expansion revenue when our customers are successful.
• The quality of the projects launching on Outseta is improving dramatically.
• Migrations from other membership software and payment providers have scaled up significantly.

This growth has allowed us to grow our team—which in turn will allow us to increase our product velocity and invest more time in marketing.

Welcome Benedicte Raae to our team!

I'm thrilled to announce that Benedicte Raae has joined our team as a member of Outseta! She's going to be working with us two days per week, primarily as a Developer Advocate. Benedicte brings serious technical chops to our team, as well as a good mix of marketing experience. With our unique organizational structure, she'll be earning pay and equity in Outseta on the same terms as our founding team—and everybody else!

Benedicte was very proactive in forging a path that ultimately landed her the position—we saw a dizzying amount of excellent applicants for this role. I initially met Benedicte through Twitter and some online communities, eventually resulting in her taking on a small project as a contractor where she demonstrated how to integrate Outseta with React. Then late last year, she happened to be in San Francisco for a conference while I was in town for WebflowConf—she made a point of reaching out and came to meet me, a relative internet stranger, for lunch. After that lunch she continued to pop into my inbox with opportunities to be on podcasts as well as useful feedback.

While these circumstances are by no means required to land a job at Outseta, I think they are indicative of how we intend hire going forward. As we issue equity liberally and without a vesting period, it's critically important that we hire slowly and with a relatively high degree of confidence in everyone that we add to our team. Benedicte's talents are quite evident, but the personal connection and the work sample we captured via her consulting work went a long way in helping us feel like she was the right fit for the position.

We're going to be even more proactive going forward in offering up small paid projects as well as opportunities for affiliates to demonstrate what they can do—there's no better way to start building a relationship with us.

Welcome, Benedicte!

New Feature! Automatic Webflow Sync

This feature does what is says—it automatically syncs data in Outseta to Webflow CMS collections. It's a big deal for a couple of reasons.

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First, it helps us better deliver on our promise of operating your business with less software by alleviating the need to use tools like Zapier or Make to keep data in sync between Outseta and Webflow. One of the most common use cases amongst our Webflow customers is automatically creating and publishing account specific pages when someone signs up via Outseta. These pages are a type of protected content that can only be accessed by a particular user or group of users. Account specific pages are most commonly used to create user specific dashboards where users land upon login.

While that's the case, the act of actually creating—and then publishing live pages on your Webflow site—was previously dependent on using a tool like Zapier.

No more.

This delivers both cost savings for our customers and a tighter integration with Webflow.

Secondarily, his feature represents our initial submission to Webflow's Apps Marketplace. It's the first of many features that we hope to release to deepen the integration between Outseta and Webflow.

New Feature! Improved checkout for add-on products

One of the biggest opportunities that we've been thinking about is how we can make it easier for our customers to sell additional products and services to their existing members. We've always offered the ability to do this via add-on products.

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While that's the case, the process for doing so was initially designed for SaaS companies rather than creators more broadly. It required logging in to your account, and purchasing the add-on products via Outseta's profile embed (our version of Stripe's customer portal). This approach didn't leave much real estate to effectively market your product beyond a one line description, so we set out to deliver a better user experience that will help you sell more add-ons.

The goal here is simple—make it really easy to sell additional products or services to your existing customers!

Where we ended up is allowing you to create checkout buttons for add-on products that you can easily incorporate into your website pages, giving you full control over how your products are presented. Users do need to login to their account first so we know which account to associate their newly purchased products with, but after login users can now buy additional products or services with a single click.

This approach offers two major benefits:

• Because you already have your customers' payment information on file they don't need to enter it again—they just click "Checkout" and the purchase is made and tied to their account.
• This can be integrated with any web page, giving you full control over how you present your products. This isn't a "checkout page"—your website pages are now your own canvas in terms of how you market your products!

Give it a try—we're excited to see what you build now that you have complete control over how your products are presented.

New Feature! Set password strength requirements

As we've grown Outseta has come to be used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. Simply put, our customers have different requirements around security based on the industry that they operate in. To that end, we now offer the ability to set your own password strength requirements. Having a strong password policy makes it more difficult for unauthorized users to guess passwords by manual or automated means.

If you'd like to set stronger password requirements, you can do so by navigating to AUTH > SIGN UP AND LOGIN and clicking SHOW ADVANCED OPTIONS in the Login Settings area.

New Feature! Cancel upcoming subscription changes

This one sounds like a small thing—and it is—but it's already proven to be super helpful in making customers more self sufficient when it comes to unwinding subscription issues.

We've all been there—a customer is indecisive and signs up for one plan, then asks you to change them to another one. If the subscription change is a downgrade, the change doesn't actually occur until the end of the subscription period the user has already paid for. Next thing you know you've created a spiderweb of subscription changes well out into the future!

You can now go to the Subscription History section on any customers' CRM record and cancel any upcoming subscription change. And remember—you can always "Expire" any customers' subscription too, ending their current subscription immediately so that you can subscribe them to the right plan.

New Feature! One-time onboarding screen

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A relatively common request from our customers has been wanting to send users to a specific onboarding page upon login, but only the very first time someone logs in to their product or site. This is little more than a one-time redirect, giving new users the opportunity to access some onboarding materials when they initially login.

This is now possible by making a small edit to the Outseta script included in the header of your site.

New Feature! Import discount codes

As the number of existing SaaS and membership businesses migrating to Outseta has increased, we've just about seen it all—and nothing makes for a messier migration than a company that's used dozens of different discounts in the past! Previously we'd create a series of "Legacy" pricing plans to accommodate all of the different pricing scenarios, but maintaining a smaller number of plans and applying a discount so the customer maintains their current pricing is a better solution.

Our subscriber import process now accommodates applying discounts as part of the migration process.

New Segment Conditions!

We've also published three updates specific to segment conditions.

Account Has Payment Information

While Outseta's automated churn reduction process is so nice, the new Account Has Payment Information condition makes it easy to identify accounts that don't have payment information on file. This is useful if you want to send your own emails to these users or just get a sense of how many customers don't currently have payment information on file.

Account Subscription Plan Expiration Date

This new condition allows you to create segments based on the date that a subscription is set to expire. You can also use the Account Subscription Plan Expiration Date Days Until condition to segment users a certain number of days before their subscription expires.

Does Not Contain

Finally, segments can now be built around does not contain criteria.

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That's all for now! We'll be back in a month of two with our next round of product updates.