Outseta Company Update - September 2018

With some vacation time now in our rearview we’re heading towards the home stretch of 2018, making it the perfect time to fill you in on what we’ve been up to at Outseta since our July company update. Here’s the latest and what’s to come.

We now support Stripe as a payment gateway

When we launched our subscription billing and management functionality, we initially partnered with Forte Payment Systems as our payment gateway. We did this because it allowed us to offer the best possible pricing to our customers, but Forte can only support processing payments in the United States and Canada.

We’ve received quite a bit of interest in Outseta from international customers and companies domestically that sell internationally. As a result, adding Stripe as a payment gateway very quickly became the most requested feature from our users.

We’re happy to say that we now offer Stripe as a payment gateway. While many early stage SaaS companies just think “I’ll use Stripe!” when considering their billing needs, they very quickly realize that they need to build quite a bit of other “scaffolding” around Stripe - subscription management functionality and logic to handle upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations being a few examples. We’ve built this functionality already so our customers don’t need to and we’re eating the $.30 per transaction fee that Stripe charges as well.
 
You can learn more about our subscription management and billing tools here. 

API support for partial CRM record updates

When we rolled out the first version of our REST API, if you wanted to update one of your CRM records the API would resubmit all data on that record. This wasn’t ideal for companies using multi-step onboarding processes or forms, because if a user abandoned the form or onboarding sequence prior to completing it the data that they had entered would not be captured and they would essentially lose out on a (partial) lead. We’ve updated our API to now support partial updates to CRM records to better support these workflows.

Shout out to Callum at TapTapGo for this feedback! 

Paid advertising experiments

Our go-to-market strategy to date has consisted primarily of launching on Product Hunt, email prospecting, and content marketing - essentially free tactics focused on building our our audience and stirring up some initial customers. As our product matured, we got to the point where we decided it was worth experimenting with some paid advertising moving into Q3.

The goal of these efforts is to test the waters and see where opportunities to acquire customers with paid advertising may lie, while being very judicious about limiting expenditures. Here’s what we’ve done so far.

Google Adwords

Because our product competes in a number of hyper competitive categories, we need to stay away from keywords like CRM, subscription billing, and email marketing. While these keywords are accurate descriptors of what we offer, there’s simply too much competition on these keywords; we’re priced out. 

As a result, we’re looking for creative ways to cost effectively tap into search intent from people who would likely be interested in our product. That means we’re primarily targeting keywords that have low search volume and low competition, but still represent highly relevant traffic. A few examples of keywords we’re bidding on…

1. MicroConf - MicroConf is a conference for self-funded software entrepreneurs; there couldn’t be a group of people that’s a better fit for Outseta. While this audience is not searching for software when they search for MicroConf, we’re using some interesting ad copy to lure them in to a landing page we built specifically to address this audience.
2. Indie.VC - Indie.VC is a venture capital firm that invests in companies that focus on selling their product at a profit from day one. Again, our approach at Outseta likely resonates with this audience and companies that are truly focused on profitability from an early stage are attracted to our pricing model.
3. Best platform for startups - A long-tail keyword that’s relevant and has low competition.

Because these keywords all have low search volume it’s going to take several months to get a good sense of how effective these campaigns will be; we don’t have any results worth sharing just yet. But we’re getting clicks, quite cost effectively.

Linkedin Direct Sponsored Content

A more aggressive experiment that we ran was throwing $500 at Linkedin advertising. We did this because we know founders of SaaS companies tend to be active on Linkedin and we can easily target the right buyer persona using targeting criteria like…

Location: USA
Industry: Computer Software
Skills: SaaS
Title: CEO, Founder, Co-Founder
Company Size: 1-10

You get the idea. For the $500 budget, these ads generated:

1. 3,018 impressions (the number of times the ad was shown)
2. 80 clicks (landing visitors on our website - $6.25 per click)
3. 3 Outseta accounts created ($166.66 per account)

Ultimately the success of these campaigns will be assessed by revenue created and there’s lots of room for landing page optimization - we sent people who clicked on the ads to our home page this time around. But this experiment gave us some useful benchmarks in terms of how our ads would be responded to, which messages resonated, and how cost effectively we can drive visitors to our website (and create account sign-ups) using Linkedin.  

Sales Pitch, Take Two

You may remember from previous updates that we decided to put a page called "Sales Pitch" in the primary navigation on our website. We don't want to come off to prospects as "salesy," and instead want to readily surface any materials that will help them decide if Outseta is right for their business.

Our original sales pitch hit hard on the importance of start-ups saving time evaluating, integrating, and maintaining software tools. But we started hearing from our users that that was only part of the story; they were realizing other benefits as well. As a result, we updated our sales pitch page pretty dramatically to give a more complete picture of the benefits of working with Outseta. The retooled page better represents our pie-in-the-sky vision of the benefits all Outseta customers will realize.

You can check it out here: https://www.outseta.com/sales-pitch/.

What’s next?

We’re hard at work on what the next major feature that will be added to the Outseta platform - it’s one we’re particularly excited about, and the next time you hear from us it should be ready for action. At that stage we’ll transition from building new, primary pieces of functionality to going deeper on each of the core features of our product.

Thanks for following along!

-Dimitris, Dave, Geoff, & James