Jackie Vullinghs (Principal, Airtree) chats with Patrick Campbell (Founder & CEO, ProfitWell)

Join Jackie and Patrick in our latest Open Source VC Meetup! Key topics:
0:07 How should startups think about pricing decisions in the early days when they don’t have a tonne of data?

2:06 - I’d love to hear a story of where it’s gone right surprisingly and where it’s gone horribly wrong.

9:33 - You mentioned you discovered customers weren’t willing to pay for the metrics product so I’m curious how you tested this pricing and established it? What was your framework for customer development?

17:31 - One of the things that I’d love to go into is that you were mentioning unit economics and one of the things we often see early founders make a mistake on is customer acquisition and go-to-market strategy you should have based on the actual unit economics over time and whether that’s initial ACG or whether you “get in, land and expand”. Can you just talk a bit more about how you think about go-to-market channels in the context of unit economics, what different companies should do and how they should think about it early on?

21:11 - Let’s chat a bit more about your go-to-market strategy and how you have evolved those channels over time. One of the questions that came up before was free trial vs freemium and you talked about how the metrics product feeds in and gives you data that enables you to upsell to new customers. Could you chat about freemium vs free trial and who should do which?

28:08 - How do you build a broad service offering for your existing enterprise product?

32:00 - I know you’ve talked about expansion and churn a tonne and so I’d love to hear your thoughts on what companies should be thinking about.

36:06 - I think it might be good to talk through that concept of understanding your value metric in terms of your company and maybe Retain could be a good product for talking about how you think about pricing in that way.

41:29 - We’re super interested in your content strategy, how you figured out what buyers you were targeting and any learnings on content schedule timing frequency. It might be really interesting to talk through this in the context of your evolving media strategy and how you thought through targeting users through that.

About Patrick Campbell
Patrick Campbell is the Founder and CEO of ProfitWell, the suite of tools that plug right into your subscription management system and provide turnkey solutions to reducing your churn, optimizing your pricing, and ensuring your revenue recognition is audit proof. ProfitWell's flagship metrics product also powers the subscription financial metrics for over twenty thousand subscription companies (it's free and takes less than five minutes to set up - seriously). Prior to ProfitWell Patrick led Strategic Initiatives for Boston based Gemvara and was an Economist at Google and the US Intelligence community.

About Jackie Vullinghs
Jackie is a Principal at AirTree Ventures, an early and growth stage venture firm backing world-class entrepreneurs at startups like Canva, A Cloud Guru and Linktree. Prior to AirTree, Jackie invested in Fintech at NAB Ventures, and was Chief of Staff at B2B SaaS startup Kalo, a Series A stage startup based in San Francisco & London. Jackie started her career on the trading floor at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch as a VP in Equity Derivatives, and graduated from Cambridge University.