Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, it's Open Threads. It's my podcast. I'm Brian Casel. Welcome. Today I'm talking to my friend, Jane Portman. She is the founder of Userlist.. That's an email automation tool aimed at SaaS companies, especially SaaS that serve other companies. And we talked a bit about designing the product with a fundamental difference in architecture that could actually give you a competitive advantage against much larger competitors.

That might sound a little technical. We'll, we'll get into that, but you know, really, I think this conversation was just about the long, slow SaaS ramp that we all might know so well. And you know, all the learnings that come along with that from the pre launch phase and how that could sort of drag out. And into getting first customers, traction, pivoting the [00:01:00] product, understanding which features are most important and just keeping your mental state sound as you go through that.

And as Jane talked about, it's a lot easier with co founders. But yeah, we covered a lot of ground and really, uh, touched on different points in their journey. It's been over five years since Jane and her co founder Benedikt have started Userlist.. Luckily, I've had a front row seat to most of that. I've, I've known Jane for a long time, starting from when she was a well known freelance designer in this industry.

But in the last couple of years, Jane and I are in a mastermind group together with a couple of other friends. And we, uh, we talked, you know, behind the scenes, uh, and give each other advice. On our businesses. So we know that stuff really well, but it was kind of fun today to talk more publicly about what it's like to run a SaaS product like Userlist..

let's talk to Jane. Here we go.

Jane Portman, great to connect with you as always. Welcome to Open [00:02:00] Threads.

Jane Portman: Lovely to be here. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Casel: Yeah. So you and I actually talk quite often. We're in a mastermind group together. So that's been really cool. Has that been like over a year now in that group?

Jane Portman: I think we're approaching maybe two years, really not sure, but it's been definitely a while.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Wow. But I've known you much longer than that. I think I first met you when you were a freelance designer and one of the early folks doing like productized consulting and everything, but yeah, these days, of course, you're working on Userlist.S. It's been, it's been quite a journey.

Jane Portman: We met in person in Las Vegas at MicroConf in 2014, I believe.

Brian Casel: I remember meeting you in Barcelona, MicroConf. You were in Vegas too? I don't remember that one. They all sort of like blend together now.

Jane Portman: I just remember it was my first one actually going out there and seeing physical people, meeting people. And I recall meeting you, Brennan Dunn, Samuel Hulick. A few other folks was pretty magnificent.

Brian Casel: Yeah, [00:03:00] yeah, very cool. Well, what I would like to talk to you today about, obviously like we know each other's businesses, uh, pretty well, cause we're in the mastermind. But I think what would be really interesting to folks is the sheer number of years to make progress, like moving from being a freelance designer into working on a SaaS product.

I know you've had a few different products in there over the years between books and another SaaS. But with Userlist., you guys have really hit your stride here and I'm seeing it much more in the wild now with other people, or I just happened to notice a Userlist. Product is implemented. So I think you were just telling me like offline here, like how many years has it been since you actually started Userlist. With Benedikt?

We

Jane Portman: started in the fall of 2017. Can you believe it's approaching five years? It's amazing. It's incredible. Yes.

Brian Casel: Yeah, in that time, I guess thinking back to like the first year, when did you feel like this product [00:04:00] had legs? I don't mean like your very first customers, but like getting to the point where it's like, Oh, this could turn out into a multi year business.

Jane Portman: This was a second SaaS venture of mine. And Benedikt was my developer for hire that first one for people who are not familiar with the story. So. We had a chance to work together and I made so many mistakes in this first one that with Usalist, it was obvious that we're building something useful. It was obvious that it's going to be a complex product.

So it's a journey. Albeit we did have a very optimistic schedule when we got together. So it was like October, I think it was me, Benedikt and Claire on board back then, the three of us. And we're like, Oh, we're gonna. Get the MVP out and we're gonna get to like 5k MRR in six months and we're just gonna validate and after that we can incorporate and stuff like that, but Would you believe that it took us two years to get to public launch?

Maybe a year [00:05:00] and a half.

Brian Casel: Oh, really? Like even just your very first customers, it took two years to get there.

Jane Portman: Yeah, we did do pre orders and we did have a very long period of private beta with a handful of customers, but it was not maybe a year at least to get to the working beta. It was definitely more complex product.

And up to date, I'm still amazed why we haven't gotten to this because it's. Immense. This aspect of behavior based ML that we tackled, it's It's incredibly technologically complex. Like you've got to process, uh, you've got to store customer data. You've got to process it. I am honestly admiring how Benedikt can sleep knowing that this thing is running.

Like he's definitely doing a great job. If you weren't such an experienced consultant and engineer, I don't know where we would have been by now. It's definitely, uh, all accolades should go to him in that regard.

Brian Casel: For sure. I mean, I don't want to get into everything about what the product is, of [00:06:00] course, but just to give listeners a brief sense.

So my understanding of it is that I think of it as an email marketing tool aimed at SaaS. But it seems like it was born out of like the user's lifetime with a SaaS product, starting from onboarding into their using the product and growing in the product. And then this Userlist. Is kind of all about the messaging, like the logic that goes into sending the right messages at the right time.

How is that description?

Jane Portman: Yeah, love that. We call it an email marketing or an email automation platform, uh, for SaaS companies. And, uh, we have, like you described before, being very stubborn about only focusing on the life cycle part of it. So everything after sign up, not mixing in marketing email, but we did give up eventually.

Brian Casel: So I want to get into that. Yeah. So like the shift into like also offering the email. Messaging before signups, kind of like email marketing to SaaS, which makes a ton of sense to me, but I'm curious, like still going back to that first [00:07:00] two years, you said it took a while to get to those first ready to use first users.

What did it look like then? Like when you thought about the MVP, what was like the core product that you felt like needed to be shipped in order to actually start to onboard first users?

Jane Portman: We had everything we have today, just in a very minimal way. We had a very minimal message editor. We had user profiles as per design.

It was accepting data. It was processing data, maybe not all trigger types that those were grown organically, but it's such in this industry, you can't really. Go out with a half baked MVP. People are going to be sending emails to their customers on our behalf. It's got to be polished in some way. So it was small, but it was definitely well shaped, like rather polished, rather nice looking.

And rather reliable, for example, one of our early customers was Urban Gamers with his DocSketch, which is now SignWell product. So he was always the first one to break things [00:08:00] with his massive email list. But really, I hope we didn't give too much headache to Kim in this, even in the early days.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And it's in that space where you're selling to technical SaaS founders, even if they themselves aren't technical, like the product and the business that they're in.

It's technical. And so there's all these like table stakes of features that for it to even be considered, like it can't just be like a MailChimp alternative. It's got its higher level of sophistication with these type of customers.

Jane Portman: We had some foundations done really well, thanks to Benedikt. For example, we process customer data in form of properties, custom fields, and also events and our events are implemented very nicely.

They can have properties of their own. And this is. Sounds like just some data problem, but it is really an important thing for some of the people who want properties in their events and other things, which are completely technical and boring, but we're done, right? And [00:09:00] also a couple of years in Benedikt added company accounts, which is right now our unique.

Selling proposition, which no other tool does.

Brian Casel: Well, this is really interesting. Yeah. That's another piece. What I think is really interesting about this is like you and Benedikt took Userlist.S into a very competitive market with like email marketing SaaS. And I mean, I'm thinking about like what I'm doing with zip message and space, like where like loom is.

And so like, I think from a design and the product standpoint and the fundamental data model of how the product is built, that's where. Folks like us can have an advantage from the early days when you're going into these big markets, right? Like you guys have the advantage of designing the core of your product around like storing properties and the ability to recognize people within a company.

Within the product, whereas these larger companies, like the MailChimps, who are trying to get more automation focused or whatever it is like drip and active campaign and all these other [00:10:00] things, like for them to add on that ability. Now it's so much more difficult or slow or even impossible for them. I think like with loom and, and zip message, asynchronous threads on a single page that can be shared.

Whereas, uh, products like loom is. One video, one URL, different architecture of how the product works. And that's actually why in a New York case, like people come to use it with us because they're company focused in how they think about their users.

Jane Portman: What's worth mentioning is that as founders, we understand the architectural difference.

What matters for people is. The brand and the word of mouth, nobody honestly understands what's inside until they have had a chance to deeply explore the product, which in good, could be a demo, but ideally like actually using it for one of their projects. That's the only way to really closely know it and understand the benefits.

So they know they have been burned. They had bad experience with [00:11:00] some other generic enterprising tool. Let's say it was too complex. But they know what's inside, but now they need to overcome that chasm and adopt an unfamiliar tool to learn like what's inside that and that chasm is bigger than we had expected, like building the brand and awareness in the space.

It's tough. That's why it's taken us so long to grow slowly and steadily versus what we hope. Like, we hope that it's going to be a quick win because it's an accomplished market. Every SaaSs is potentially our client. Of course, they're going to love us, but well, they don't know what's inside. It is all, it's going to make their life easier and make their process of sending emails more enjoyable or pleasant.

Another strong side of ours, it's kind of intangible, but it's really. Lightweight to use compared to any enterprise tool, but you won't know that until you try and to try, you need to trust and to trust. You need to market and to market you need years. So it's a very long [00:12:00] team.

Brian Casel: That's a really good way of putting it.

We keep coming back to this theme of like, it just takes so long to get traction and then to get to a sustainable business. I mean, what were you guys? Thinking about talking about in like that two year stress just to get to first customers, but then even after that, to get up to like 5k, I know you're well beyond that now, but how did you like mentally handle it?

Right? Like so many of us are in this long SaaS ramp of death, right? How do you handle, like, is this taking too long? Are we working on the right product in the right market? Like, how did you get through those barriers?

Jane Portman: Well, having a co founder definitely helps. And we were positive that the market exists.

People definitely need automation tools. SaaS definitely need good automation tools. So we never had doubts whether the product is useful. That's helping because if you're inventing a new niche or something, if you're trying to educate and build awareness, that's a double challenge. In our case, we knew this is a needed [00:13:00] product and we had a customer base of raving folks who really liked it.

That wasn't encouraging. And overall, we've got them on board. We've got these businesses with their data and everything on boarded and using it. It's definitely not our strategy to just like dabble and quit after a couple of years, we're in to help them long term and then the same way the customers we're on boarding now.

Going to be with us with many years. I know custom IO, which is our very close and respected competitor. They published once a revenue chart showing cohort revenue from very old customers and This chart is magnificent. It shows that good customers stay with you for many, many years if you're serving them right.

Brian Casel: Especially when you have like such a essential, like sticky product that can be like the core of their business. So

Jane Portman: I guess all these factors combined, they just, sure, we were maybe not so excited about the pace of growth at some point and was [00:14:00] slow, but it was never an option. To quit really, like we never seriously considered it was obvious that going forward is more important for everybody.

And also eventually it's got to work and there were signs of it working. So it was not like we were flatline for four years in a row. It was progress. Just sometimes this progress was more in the mental slash brand awareness space versus numbers. So we could obviously tell that the brand awareness was working.

And like, we went to. Microcontent, uh, Croatia before COVID the last time and everybody knew Useless before they knew us. And we're like, that's amazing. We made it.

Brian Casel: Yeah. What were the first big wins or turning points in the brand awareness or just marketing or maybe like acquiring customers? I know like in the very beginning, it's sort of about like, Useless is a brand new thing.

That's why it's interesting for you to come check it out. But then once you get past. [00:15:00] The initial, Hey, Userlist. Is new. How did you start to acquire customers? What were like some of the key things that you started to like figure out?

Jane Portman: Just gradually building the customer base. There was no like break point.

We did have a public launch on Product Hunt in August of 2019, I believe. So two years after we started, and it was an amazing launch. I felt like we leveraged all our possible social capital and the waiting list and everything. So it made number one of the day. It was great. But by that time we had already known that it will not bring us like 60 new trials.

For sure. The fact that we're there, uh, doesn't mean that people will sign up and that remains a reality. Our sales cycle is extremely long and convoluted, like we're there in people's minds, but it might be another year until it's some specific time in their business when they're ready to switch tools.

Brian Casel: Did you start to do anything differently in like sales? Or like how you talk to new leads and that sort of [00:16:00] stuff.

Jane Portman: We have become more deliberate about managing our sales pipeline. And we've recently brought a dedicated customer success person, Michael, who is amazing. So he's taking closer a look at the sales pipeline, following up more consistently and everything like that.

But we've never been a sales led organization to this point. And. Might change, but it's not in our DNA list. Like if we do that, it's going to be big transformation so far. It's been inbound. I

Brian Casel: agree. I've never quite understood how I know that that companies are very successful with this, but like, I've always operated sort of in the same way where it's like, you have to get it to a point where there's inbound interest and then optimize every step from there.

And they need to reach some point in their business where it's like, this is a priority this month and we're in the market.

Jane Portman: We just got into probably like a leads sales pipeline for one of the payment platforms out there. I'm not going to name [00:17:00] the name, but essentially somebody's initiated a semi personal conversation, like genuinely exploring our profiles and striking informal conversation, but then they like sent us three.

Very detailed sales emails about like what exactly we should be doing and how and why we're wrong. And I'm pretty sure they have great results, but ultimately, is it what we want for our company DNA to be perceived like that? I don't know because definitely it is working like sales work, except that maybe there is some strange aftertaste for those who don't buy.

But then, well, they don't bring you money anyways. Does it matter? For example, ConvertKit by Nathan Berry is a wonderful like role model for us because they do a similar thing. They do an email platform for a niche, just for bloggers. They have probably their own aspects of, and their own problems, but.

Nathan was extremely sales oriented in the first years. Like he would double down on people he [00:18:00] knew and it would like really go into adoption. And unfortunately, neither me nor Benedikt are like that. Maybe if we were, we would have been farther along in our journey. Another thing is doing that you don't enjoy for five years.

Well, that will make you miserable for sure. So another secret to success is to just do things that align with who you are and with your ethical standards. I'm not saying sales is unethical, but aligned with your nature, what feels right, and later you can improve by hiring people who compliment your skills, not expand their skills.

Brian Casel: Yeah. I mean, I think it really does speak to the sophistication of the type of customer that a Userlist. Is for. They need to be sophisticated enough to know, like, okay, this is a priority for us right now. It's not going to be some outbound salesperson that's going to convince me that it's priority for my business right now to move to a Userlist..

Right?

Jane Portman: It's a blurry line. There [00:19:00] probably are people out there who can be convinced. And in fact, that's how sales work, except that, well, it's not in our plans to hire a gang of sales, salespeople who can do that.

Brian Casel: Yeah. To me, like the more important challenge there is onboarding and activating the people who are actively in the market and they came across Userlist..

And then like, are you guys doing anything on that front too? Or have you learned over the last couple of years, like changes that you've made in your onboarding? Workflows, customer experience, anything like that to help them get value and stick with the product longer.

Jane Portman: We've done a great job neglecting our in app onboarding experience for a while.

Like we've always had a very solid email sequence that supports everything. We dog food, we, we run it in useless for useless in the in app side. We are just rolling out an improved onboarding signup flow, and we are taking the sort of a questionnaire approach. And I borrowed, [00:20:00] like, we totally borrowed this from, uh, since Sama's founder, Ashutosh Priyadarshi, we had him for one of them better than the perfect podcast episodes, basically the questionnaire, it helps the user.

Self qualify and get in the right mood. So in addition to technical things we need to start an account, like email and company name, we also sprinkle in strategic questions. Like, do you have your copy ready? Like what are you planning to achieve with this tool and other things? And this is in development at the moment.

We're planning to roll it out maybe next month. So that's going to be a great improvement. I think, but yeah, we haven't been really focusing on that for ourselves. And unfortunately, there's so many external factors. You shouldn't be so self centered to think that you can influence it, like, by 50 percent with just something you can change.

It's mostly serendipity. It's mostly serendipity and other things.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And I still believe it's [00:21:00] like, there has to be a natural drive from the customer that they really want to solve this problem. So they are incentivized to get it working.

Jane Portman: That trumps everything. That trumps everything.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure.

It's funny to hear you say like you guys. Focus much more on your email onboarding experience and not so much the in app. I feel like I've been like the opposite. I keep like redesigning and reworking the in app experience. And then every time I go back and look at my onboarding emails for customers, it's like, Oh my God, there's like so much inaccurate information in these emails that I didn't change like eight months ago, it's like a to do that I have to do right now, but it's like.

It's one of those things where I feel like if I'm not seeing it every day, that I'll just like, forget that my customers are seeing these like random emails that make no sense.

Jane Portman: Do you know over this year is how many times I have received that one of the best practices you can do is to sign up for your own product every month?

Yeah. Do you think we do that? Of course we don't. It's like exercising every morning. It's like [00:22:00] exercising every morning.

Brian Casel: I know. Well, that's why I do focus a lot more on the in app experience. Cause I do go through that flow like almost every day when I'm working on the product, like even just like creating like test accounts to test something out in the product, like I see it.

Jane Portman: It's a very big emotional thing. For example, imagine your kitchen is dirty and you never washed it in five years and now you need to go cook something. Well, of course you'll be resistant. In the same way, imagine you have an onboarding sequence that you haven't reviewed in Three years and you feel it's dusty and you just don't want to know, but if you take it into shape, if you enjoy the process and you know, it's okay, then let's say we just added a new help article on how to migrate email providers and, Oh, another step to promote it.

It would be to add this link to our onboarding sequence. So new users can make use of the article takes one minute, literally, if you had your onboarding out of shape or in the wrong [00:23:00] tool, that would be. You would procrastinate for ages to do that, but it's really just a simple step. So like mental effort versus physical effort is really incomparable.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure.

I'm in this like phase right now where I'm starting to do a lot of SEO content and stuff, but then as I was getting into that, obviously there's going to be a lot of work for gathering traffic on the public website, but I was getting into it. I was like, well, there are all these articles that I want to send to our existing customers.

To help them get activated and to help overcome the objections that would cause them to have trouble with the product. And it's like, these are blog article ideas, but not necessarily for search engines. I just want to have them to send to existing customers beyond like the typical onboarding sequence of emails and messages.

What else are you seeing in terms of campaigns or automations or messaging that can really help improve the customer lifetime value, help [00:24:00] customers get more value from the product?

Jane Portman: It's a very meta question because it relates both to useless and any of our customers, we do feel that there are so many opportunities on the table for successful customers that you can leverage, but nobody does.

Because everybody's like, okay, when boarded activated, whatever. But literally you can absolutely have. A single customer loyalty campaign, you should probably start it a couple months in after they've been successfully onboarded. So they have already been successfully receiving value and then, I don't know, every month or so you can drip them different things to improve.

You can ask, and you can also give things. You can ask for referrals. You can give away promo codes or promote annual upgrades. You can send them swag. You can ask them to book a customer success call with your agent using a Calendly link or SavvyCal link combined with email automation, a really powerful thing to initiate personal [00:25:00] touch.

Uh, like ask, invite them for a customer success call, invite a friend. Tons of opportunities. What I just named can really like, you're just not doing it, but you could be. And each of these touch points, not necessarily, but they have like a 30 percent chance of sparking a nice thing, a nice thought in your customer's brain.

And so that they can be more loyal to your brand and recommend it more often. And this is just like a gold mine of opportunities, which. Very few companies do, even though it's dead simple, it's really very simple. Yeah, for sure.

Brian Casel: Again, going back to the journey of the past five years with Userlist., I wanted to talk about these two features that we touched on earlier, in my view, as like an outsider looking in, they seem to be like big turning point product features.

I'm curious to know what they looked like. From your perspective on the business, like, I guess the first one that I'd like to ask about is the switch to [00:26:00] marketing emails, right? So. Since the beginning, like you said, like it was starting with a customer's lifetime from when they sign up for your app going forward, but you did not offer email messaging to pre sign up customers.

So people who might come to your website, but then you change that and offered like the full email marketing message suite, which really makes a lot of sense to me. If I'm going to use a tool, I would want to go from pre sign up through the sign up and after. So like when you launched that ability, I think it was what, like a year or two ago.

Jane Portman: Last fall, last fall we did. Okay. End of 2021. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, we'll have to go back in time. This is actually the latest addition to the suite. Yeah.

Brian Casel: So tell me a little bit more about that. Like, first of all, the decision to actually start offering it. How did that come about?

Jane Portman: In December of 2020, we understood that we needed to do something that might get us closer to the product market fit.

And yeah, we did have some sort of product market fit, but something that could speed up our growth, make us more attractive. And we did a round of non [00:27:00] customer interviews with people who could be our customers. But aren't, and I talked to like 25 people over the course of a month.

Brian Casel: I sort of remember that.

So how did you find people who are not your customers and to get them to talk to you?

Jane Portman: Well, I have a big Rolodex and we're also part of, uh, communities like tiny seed and also microconf and a few other, like what are cooler places for founders. So I was looking for people who were, let's say beyond couple KMR, like serious about their SaaS, but still not doing it.

So we wanted to know, we didn't ask like, why are you aren't using Useless, but I read the mom test and was happily, very heavily inspired by this vague questions of like, what's going on in your business? Where's your mind? Like, what do you do for your email marketing and stuff like that? And we were blown away by the variety of.

different setups that people have and how creative they get with their email. Some people have no [00:28:00] marketing list. Some people have no customer email list. Some people like, have a source of truth in their internal dashboard or in HubSpot. And it's just amazing. The spectrum, it's huge. You wouldn't even think, and there are even products who operate in different marketplaces where you wouldn't have an email of your customer, all you have is in app messages.

Because you're not entitled to have an email, isn't it fascinating by nature that such products still exist. And by the way, WordPress ecosystem is one of them because until they convert, yes, you don't have their email. You can just mark it inside.

Brian Casel: Yeah, it just seems like a minefield of building a product for that.

I mean, but many successful businesses do it. But you mentioned like the source of truth for looking at your customer list, your Userlist., if you will, like, I mean, yeah, you're right. Like it's so different from one business to the next, even mine. I feel like I have like four different sources of truth for where my customers are being managed.[00:29:00]

Yeah. I mean, that's gotta be tough. So like coming out of those interviews, it was pretty clear, like. Okay, yes, there's a lot of variety. We do need to cover the ground before the sign up and after the sign up.

Jane Portman: Yeah, we observe the same phrase. Many times, a lot. And the phrase was, I want all my SaaS email in one tool.

And it was obvious that we were stubborn, but of course we should be that stubborn. And it's a can of worms to allow both marketing leads and customers in the same tool, but it's necessary. And that's what people want. By that time, when we launched it and almost a year later, because it's a fairly big feature set to add also was mentally scary, but by that time we had already known that It might change our growth trajectory, but most likely it won't.

A general marketing ROI and, and speed is just so inert. It's so dependent on just your name more than on any feature. By that time, like we knew it wouldn't [00:30:00] probably move the needle as much, even though we had hoped, of course, there were a couple more features that you mentioned were. Milestone ish. One of them was introducing company accounts.

Yeah. The company ones. Yeah. That was great in terms of it really gave us a sales argument and solidified our unique stance in the market, but also it didn't bring people next day. It's not the type of thing that can bring people next day.

Brian Casel: Well, the company one is really interesting because it literally changed like your homepage messaging and everything.

I want to get into that in just a second, but before we leave the switch to email marketing. What did it look like when you actually started to roll it out? Did it make any short term impact on the growth? And were there any like new types of customers who you started to see come through the pipeline as a result of expanding into that?

Like, did customers look different to you post that than before?

Jane Portman: I don't think it made any dramatic change. We have gained, so among our [00:31:00] existing customer base. We have opened it up for several customers who were delighted and that definitely helped with the word of mouth. The launch day was great. We had great support of the community because there is a number of people who really delighted by this and they were vocal.

Like we had raving reviews and product hunt and such. It is seriously a big problem. So. We planted a flag on that day, but in terms of the lead flow, maybe a little influx, but not a like life changing trajectory. And in the same way, a year earlier, we added in app notifications as another channel. It was, that was our first feature that was really expanding our capabilities.

And it also only brought in like an influx, but not a big one. And this makes us different from another email provider because you can send your own messages via email or in app notification. You can orchestrate those within campaigns to achieve the result you want. And that's on, not on the table for MailChimp, for example, and [00:32:00] the others too.

So it can be a great argument for a certain type of buyer.

Brian Casel: So moving to the company's feature, how do you explain this feature? Like, what is it about Userlist.? That's fundamentally different from other tools around companies.

Jane Portman: We help you mirror your internal data in our tool, meaning we can combine user accounts into company accounts and show you a company profile, and you can also store data on the company level instead of.

Having to duplicate it on each individual user. And the reason why it's life changing is because if you deal with a team account, individual user activity doesn't make any sense. Like one user writes two articles, another handles the billing. The third one does something else. They're all three. Each one is failing.

If you put them together, it finally makes sense. Like, so the workaround that other founders have to deal with is to duplicate the success metrics for the account per each [00:33:00] user. And also when you log into your tool, You see just the bulk of users. You have no idea how many customers that is even on that level.

So this structure of users combining users into company counts, it's pretty magical for a good deal of B2B SaaS because many SaaS serve teams, like almost all SaaS serve teams.

Brian Casel: I could imagine like also with the messaging, right. That every individual team member might receive at any time in the, when I think about like what I'm currently doing with zip message.

We have teams, all of my marketing focused and messaging focus is on the account owner, right? Like the one person who initially created the account and like the one person who controls the billing, that's basically the person that I'm sending all of our onboarding emails to and other outreach and stuff like that.

And then if they invite team members, I don't even know if those team members are even receiving any meaningful messaging.

Jane Portman: And there is [00:34:00] no, no way you can extrapolate this person's behavior onto another team member, send them something if something happens. Right. So it's in terms of automation in Userlist., you can send, you can see when something happens on the company level, and then you decide who's receiving information based on that.

It's very simple in the UI, but it's very empowering.

Brian Casel: Yeah, again, it's like one of those fundamental infrastructure and architecture changes or things that you guys were able to implement that these other much more established competitors, it would be a complete rebuild of their whole platform to go. In this sort of direction, right?

Like, I think it's 1 of those, like, technical product competitive advantages that smaller startups can have against these bigger players is to fundamentally architect the product in a certain way to then enable a major feature like this.

Jane Portman: I need to mention that e commerce is booming, so every email automation tool out there that [00:35:00] is just generalist, their majority of the user base, people who truly see the ROI on email marketing, it's a lot of e commerce and for e commerce.

These company counts do not matter as much at all. And, uh, SaaS, it seems like a large market, but in fact, can you compare the number of consumers in the U S versus the number of SaaS companies in the U S? I'm pretty sure it's not even close.

Brian Casel: And so you were able to get to not only launch that feature, but it, from what I saw again, from the outside, looking in it, it really sort of fundamentally changed.

You're positioning, right? Like you actually went forward with a homepage, copy change and everything around this company feature. Can you speak about that a little bit?

Jane Portman: Actually, we have been promoting on the homepage, but we've changed the entire phrasing just lately. And it was also not obvious how to do that because when you say company accounts or account level marketing or anything like that, It's just too generic and without context, it can [00:36:00] actually

Brian Casel: Yeah, it might give you like the wrong impression of what the tool is.

Jane Portman: Yeah, it might drive off the good users because they would be like, Oh, we don't have any accounts. Like this is not for us. And we did, uh, like a Twitter test of our sales page copy. And everybody on Twitter was like, what is it? I'm your customer. Is it for me even? We're, that is not the impression we want to make.

And thanks to Derek Reimer, he suggested this angle. This is a SaaS email platform that actually understands my customer data. That was a great phrasing because customer data can or may or may not include companies, but in any case, we do really very, very well reflect your customer data and it doesn't drive off and repel good leads for us.

So right now, and for the next few months or maybe a couple of quarters, our marketing angle is very strongly hammering, uh, Onboarding companies versus important users and customer data and such. And we've partnered up with [00:37:00] ARPIT of Data Lead Academy to do more content on this, more expert content. And he's also quite excited about this company feature.

When you know this customer data field, it's so huge and we're not even remotely experts in it, which is another challenge. Like we know our little corner of it, but there's so much more to learn.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure. You're so right that like email marketing, all the action does seem to be with the e commerce folks.

And like, as a user, I'm a SaaS user. Right. So it's like, that always frustrates me. It's like, I don't care about the stuff that an e commerce retailer would care about when it comes to email marketing. I just want to offer a good user experience for my customers on my SaaS.

Jane Portman: Right. You would think that just simply differentiating like the Weir's email platform for SaaS, we would provide ourselves with sales, easy sales, but no, it's not enough.

Uh, just this drive, this motivation to migrate tools, it's got to be so [00:38:00] big to overcome this friction. We've been struggling with that.

Brian Casel: When it comes to SaaS tools. This is going to be a complete overgeneralization, right? But I feel like there's like two sides of the equation. One is big complex. So that means harder to onboard, harder to get new leads to decide.

It's time to switch, but stickier, more essential, longer lifetime, probably more expansion revenue built into that. And then there's the other one, which might be higher volume on the signups and conversions, but it's a tool that they could take it or leave it. And I've seen the challenge on both ends with like, when I was working on process kit, I had the harder time of like onboarding and getting people to switch.

And with zip message, it's the opposite. It's like some people are using it a lot and then others use it just sparingly.

Jane Portman: I think to mention Derek Reimer again, I think he struck the balance really well with, with SaviCal because it's simple enough to get started. It's no rocket science for sure, but you incorporate your links in your [00:39:00] email automation and everywhere.

So it's not a super trivial task to turn it off. So I think he, like, he got it right.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And also what I'm seeing, getting back to how you guys sort of decided to get into the Userlist. And how you were saying it is an established market. It's not like an open question of like. Is this a problem that nobody has?

Like, no, of course it's a problem that lots of people have, right? Like there's no question in terms of validation. It's really just a question of, can we grow this thing? Right. And you guys have been growing. I feel like that's also the case with our community of SaaS companies. Like the folks who are going to micro comp and in this community now, it's not so much about identifying completely new ideas or untapped.

Products. It's more about like entering established, like, because every category has competitors. Now it's a question of like coming in with something a little bit different for some segment of the market.

Jane Portman: And with my first productivity tool product, I made this mistake. I thought, Oh, there is no, [00:40:00] there's no tool like that.

I should make one. Well, congratulations, Jane. It didn't go anywhere. It was a completely. Hard to market like entirely.

Brian Casel: Yeah, for sure. Well, Jean, it's always great to catch up with you. Of course, Userlist. Is the link and we're going to get it all linked up in the show notes. So yeah, thank you for sharing this journey and we'll have to do this again and get an update in the next few months.

Jane Portman: I appreciate that. Thank you, Brian. And I'd love to mention, we do have a podcast of our own called Better Done Than Perfect. And you can see I have a tattoo, which says BDTP right there.

Brian Casel: Oh, is that what that says? Oh, cool.

Jane Portman: Yep. It's a reminder. Better than us.

Brian Casel: When did you get that? The tattoo?

Jane Portman: A couple years ago.

Brian Casel: Oh, wow.

Jane Portman: Same time the podcast started. Because, like, literally, both me and Benedikt are perfectionists. And we want to ship more than we hold off to it. So,

Brian Casel: well, I'm going to have to go get like an Open Threads tattoo now.

Jane Portman: Oh, we should get you a shirt. Oh, we should get you a shirt. Yeah. Head over to Userlist.. com slash podcast. We have great show notes and great [00:41:00] folks out there.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, thank you, Jane.

Jane Portman: Thanks so much, Brian.