The Great Outseta Product Update of Summer 2021

Here we are at the beginning of summer 2021—a time when many parts of the world are beginning to re-open and many of you are likely planning to pack your bags for a much needed vacation.

If that's you, that's awesome—but we figured we'd drop the biggest product update we've ever made before you head out the door.

In all seriousness, we said in our last update that our product velocity would accelerate after we added Bernard Chen to our team—this update is certainly evidence of that. But beyond Bernard beginning to push new code, a lot of our biggest product priorities all came together at once.

Let's get into it.

Meet the new sign up, login, and profile embeds

Outseta's sign-up, login, and profile embeds are the core of our product—they represent the integration points between Outseta and your website, SaaS product, or community. They're what makes the magic happen and how Outseta transforms your product into a subscription or membership business.

We've completely redesigned and rebuilt the embeds based on what we've learned from launching thousands of subscription businesses over the last four years.

This is much more than a new feature—this is a new product that's deserving of its own post. Here's the full scoop including what this means for current Outseta customers.

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New Feature! One-Time / Lifetime and Quarterly Payment Terms

Far and away the most requested feature we've ever had, we're happy to report that Outseta now supports both one-time and quarterly payment terms. These features took us longer than expected to deliver—we had to finish off the V2 embeds first—but we're thrilled to get these payment options into your hands. We know many of you were waiting on this and we sincerely appreciate your patience.

It's worth mention that the one-time payment option can be used either to sell one-time products or can act as a lifetime subscription.

New Feature! Integration with Xano

We're pretty jazzed about this one, too. Our new integration with Xano gives no-code builders a powerful backend database that can be used alongside Outseta. Users can authenticate with Outseta, then all of their interactions with your product are synced with a user table in Xano.

This is important because it's a major step towards building full-fledged SaaS products without any code. A winning combination for no-coders:

• Webflow for the front-end
• Xano provides the business logic and database that powers your product
• Outseta handles payments, authentication, and gives you the tools to manage your business

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We want to give a shout out to one of our customers—Jac Evans—who pushed us to build this integration.

"Outseta replaces 10 other tools and gives me everything I need to run a SaaS product—regardless of whether it's a code or no-code project. Xano gives me access to backend superpowers—databases, APIs, scheduled functions, and more," says Jac. "I wanted to use both and ideally wanted them to work together—in a couple of weeks the Xano and Outseta teams got this set up and now with zero coding you can make a product with a complex and scalable backend plus get all of the fantastic tools Outseta provides like authentication, payments, account management, and help desk."

Here's documentation on the integration.

New Feature! Send Outseta notifications to your Slack channels

Outseta has always supported notifications that can be delivered to you or your team via email or webhooks. This is a great way to keep yourself updated when, say, a new paid subscriber signs up or a customer cancels their subscription. But with our new Slack integration you can send these same notifications directly to your company's Slack channels.

Go to SETTINGS > INTEGRATIONS > SLACK to connect Outseta to your Slack workspace.

New Feature! Change subscription renewal dates

This one is straight forward—you can now change the subscription renewal date for any of your customers directly from their CRM record.

New Feature! Build upgrade paths with the profile embed's new visual builder

As part of our V2 embeds update, we launched a page (AUTH > PROFILE) that gives you complete control over the information that can be updated by your subscribers in the profile embed. You can add required fields or even pre-populate each subscribers' profile with read only information— the profile embed is now a much more powerful tool for capturing profile information from your users. This now includes a profile photo as well.

While that's all great, perhaps the most useful change to the profile embed is that we launched a visual builder that makes it easy to open the profile embed preconfigured to a specific tab (for example, the "Change Plan" tab). This is really useful for building upgrade paths in particular—you can add an "Upgrade" button or page, then have that open the profile embed preconfigured to make it easy for the user to upgrade to a specific plan.

Here's how to build an upgrade path with the profile embed.

You can experiment with the visual builder for the profile embed by going to AUTH > EMBEDS > PROFILE and using the configuration tool.

New Feature! Integromat Integration

If you're not yet familiar with Integromat, the product is an alternative to Zapier that's quite popular in the no-code world. We're happy to report Outseta's Integromat integration is now live—thank you to all of our customers who advocated on our behalf to make this happen.

New Feature! Allow members to sign up and manage their membership from within your Circle community

Outseta is increasingly used to monetize and manage Circle.so communities. To that end, we built a way for members to both sign up and manage (upgrade, downgrade, or cancel) their membership directly from within your Circle community—even if you don't have a separate marketing website.

Here's how to allow new members to sign up for a paid membership within your Circle community.

Here's how members can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel from within Circle.

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New Feature! Create segments based on lead capture form submissions

File this one under "shoulda done this long ago"—but you can now create segments based on lead capture form submissions. This makes it really easy to send email campaigns to everyone who has submitted a particular lead capture form.

New Feature! We decoupled "add-on" products from subscription "plans"

This is the feature in the entirety of this update that's going to fly under the radar, but it's really important for so many of our customers.

Every customer in Outseta has a single primary subscription that gets setup as a "Plan." This is the subscription information that gets pulled into the top of your "Account" records.

While that's the case, we've always allowed customers to purchase additional products—including additional subscriptions— as "add-ons." This combination of "plans" and "add-ons" allows Outseta customers to have multiple subscriptions concurrently.

This functionality has always served our customers who sell multiple products well—especially if those products were all purchased at the same time. But if a customer wanted to come back and purchase an additional product at a later point in time, Outseta didn't handle  that scenario so gracefully.

When the customer purchased the new product, Outseta would restart (and prorate) their primary subscription plan at the same time. The idea was that the customer would have a single renewal date for all the subscription products they purchased (rather than being billed on different dates for different subscriptions), but in reality this just caused a lot of confusion.

Subscribers were often left wondering why their existing subscription was getting restarted and prorated, when all they really wanted was the new product. We've now fixed that by decoupling subscription plans from add-on products so each operates independently.

Customers can now buy additional products at any time without any change to their primary subscription. This is particularly useful for membership sites or communities that offer some sort of base membership, but who also want to sell their members additional products and services.

New Feature! Bulk send confirmation emails and improved subscriber import

As Outseta has grown in popularity, the number of SaaS companies and membership sites looking to migrate away from their current software providers has scaled up dramatically—a great problem to have, but the process of moving subscribers to Outseta wasn't as easy as it could have been. For companies that are already processing payments with any product that uses Stripe, we can migrate all of your subscription details and credit card information over to Outseta in a single import file. This makes the migration process really seamless and the only ask of the customer is that they set a new password.

To better support this scenario, we've started making a series of improvements.

1. First, we updated our documentation that outlines the migration process. Here's how to import your existing subscribers into Outseta if you want to make the switch.
2. We added the ability to select a group of accounts, then trigger a confirmation email which prompts the subscriber to establish their password with Outseta.

This second change makes the migration process a lot smoother—you can simply import all of your subscribers, then trigger an email that walks them through setting their password for the first time.

To take advantage of this feature, go to CRM > ACCOUNTS and select the accounts that need to establish a password, then click SEND CONFIRMATION EMAIL.

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There's an awful lot here, but I hope these updates help you squeeze that much more value out of your Outseta subscription. And let's give a golf clap to Dave, Dimitris, James, and Bernard—this is the group behind the scenes making all of this happen. These updates represents some serious software development coming out of a small team... I just work here.

Now go jump in the ocean or something, would ya?

-The Outseta Team

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WHAT'S NEXT: We're working on closing the loop on per user pricing. Outseta already supports per using pricing models—customers can input the number of "users" or "seats" they want to purchase and be charged accordingly at checkout. While we handle the payment correctly, Outseta doesn't *technically* limit the number of users that can be added to a subscription based on the number of user seats purchased.

We're working to tighten this up—customers on user based pricing models won't be able to add additional team members without first purchasing additional users. Email me at geoff(at)outseta.com if you want this.