The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 15

Nick Francis, Help Scout

Competitive Differentiation in a Crowded Help Desk SaaS

Nick Francis is the co-founder and CEO of Help Scout, a customer communications platform designed for businesses that make excellent customer service a priority. Help Scout powers over 8,000 support teams in 140 countries, with customers including Basecamp, Trello, and Grubhub. Help Scout was founded in April 2011 and has raised just under $13 million in funding. The company has offices in Boston and Boulder, but most of its 60 employees work remotely across 40 cities worldwide. Nick and his two co-founders spent five years running a consulting company together before going all in on Help Scout. They pooled their money, spent six months building the first version, then applied to Techstars after Nick read "Do More Faster" by David Cohen. They were accepted - not because of the product, but because the co-founders had worked together for six years. The founding insight behind Help Scout was competitive differentiation through simplicity. Nick interviewed hundreds of support professionals before launching, learning that small businesses needed a help desk that was invisible to their customers - no ticket numbers, no support portals, just personal email at scale. He kept interviewing until he could finish their sentences. For the first four years, Help Scout operated on a seed round of about $800,000. Nick treated external funding as rocket fuel - only useful once you know exactly which direction to aim. The team focused on becoming self-funded and efficient before raising a Series A. Content marketing became Help Scout's primary competitive differentiation strategy. Nick reasoned that any tactic you can buy with a check is one a better-funded competitor can outspend you on. So the team invested in educational content, guest posting 25 times on a single topic to build SEO authority, and grew to 400,000 unique monthly visitors. Help Scout also made a costly mistake with freemium, learning that their best customers were 10-25 person teams ready to pay - not three-person startups hoping to grow into it.

Janna Bastow, ProdPad

From 30-Day to 7-Day SaaS Free Trial Conversion That Doubled

Janna Bastow is the co-founder and CEO of ProdPad, a product management tool that helps teams build product roadmaps, prioritize ideas, and organize customer feedback. ProdPad's customers include Disney, Automattic, and eBay. ProdPad was founded in 2012 and has been bootstrapped since day one. The company is based in Brighton in the United Kingdom. Janna is also the co-founder of Mind the Product, an international product community with over 50,000 members and events in 100 cities worldwide. This is a story about two product managers who could not find software to help them do their jobs. Janna showed her co-founder Simon Cast some ideas for a tool, and he offered to build the back end. She handled the front end - built with jQuery and Bootstrap in an era before complex SaaS stacks were standard. They used ProdPad internally for two years before realizing other product managers would pay for it. Janna quit her job first with zero customers. Six months later, they launched a version people could purchase, and their first paying customer signed up within weeks. Growth came organically through blogging about product management topics - how to build roadmaps, write personas, create specs. They ranked at the top of Google for "product management software" because almost nobody else was targeting that keyword yet. ProdPad grew steadily to around $30K MRR, but then hit what Amy Hoy from Freckle called "the plateau of doom." Janna calls 2015 "the year of faffing about" - the team tried AdWords, events, and other unfocused experiments instead of doubling down on what worked. Revenue flatlined for six months. Rather than raise funding, Janna focused the entire company on one metric for three months: free trial conversion rate. They cut trial time from 30 days to 14 (doubling conversions), then to 7 days with gamified extensions for completing key actions. A behavior-based email system recovered 25-30% of users who signed up but did not engage. ProdPad's free trial conversion rate climbed from below industry average to about 10%.