Outseta Company Update - December 2019

It’s been several months since our last company update, so we have quite a bit to catch you up on!  This company update focuses on two major themes—deepening our partnership with Stripe and UI updates to some of Outseta’s most important screens.

Stripe Connect

When new users visit Stripe’s website, they’re presented with two options—work directly with Stripe’s API or implement Stripe in tandem with one of Stripe’s Verified Partners. Our partner listing on Stripe’s website has become one of our best lead generation channels, so we took the time to implement a Stripe Connect URL. 

This allows Stripe users who select the “implement Stripe in tandem with a Stripe Verified Partner” option to directly discover and connect Outseta to their Stripe account. Once connected users can setup subscription plans in Outseta and immediately begin processing payments using Stripe as their payment gateway.

Users can then embed Outseta’s registration (sign-up) widget into their website pages, adding a subscription checkout experience to their website without writing a single line of code.

A/B Test of Stripe, Speed-to-Market Messaging

In addition to building out the Stripe Connect workflow, we also launched a new version of our home page with Stripe specific messaging. We did this for two reasons—first, to speak directly to the audience that finds us via Stripe’s onboarding workflow and our partner listing on their website. 

Additionally, we wrote last month about how we’re working to identify the most compelling positioning for Outseta. Our existing all-in-one messaging often results in Outseta being compared head-to-head against other CRM, subscription billing, or customer messaging products.  These are extremely competitive categories and the head-to-head comparisons don’t effectively highlight how Outseta is unique or different.

While that’s the case, our ability to help SaaS founders get their products to market much faster in conjunction with Stripe is a position that we can claim and prove. There’s also far fewer companies competing on speed-to-market for new SaaS products. We think this could be effective positioning for Outseta that really appeals to bootstrapping founders or Indie Hackers who frequently launch new subscription products.

We heard from these groups that the process of working with Stripe’s API was very time consuming and required writing a lot of additional logic and code. Outseta’s registration (sign-up) widget saves founders considerable time here by allowing them to add a self-checkout experience for subscriptions directly to their website in seconds, without writing any code.

It’s early, but so far this messaging is dramatically outperforming our baseline conversion metrics on our home page. 

We’re Sponsoring Indie Hackers Meetups Around The Globe

Throughout 2019 I’ve been attending Indie Hackers meetups in San Diego. These events build strong connections amongst founders, most of whom are launching SaaS products and using Stripe. As they say in the marketing world, go where your target market hangs out.

With that in mind, we launched a program in October to sponsor Indie Hackers meetups around the globe by providing $100 to spend on food and drinks for the group. The only ask is that the meetup group snaps a photo and shares it on Twitter while @mentioning @outseta. This program has already proven to be successful for a number of reasons.

• We’re supporting the Indie Hackers community.
• We’re mobilizing the Indie Hackers community to create social media content on our behalf.
• We’re effectively building both brand awareness and brand affinity for Outseta. For every $100 spent, we’re typically introduced to somewhere between 5 and 50 founders. Sure, it would be more cost effective to just scrape emails off of the Indie Hackers website but this program gives us a warm intro when we then connect with founders in this community.

Photos from a whole bunch of the meetups that we’ve already sponsored—and more information on this program—can be found here: https://www.outseta.com/indie-hackers-meetup.

New UI Design: Dashboard, Sales Pipelines, Support Ticketing Inbox, Settings Pages

Over the last few months James has been busy refreshing the design of some of the most important screens within our product. Generally speaking these updates have focused on modernizing the design and improving the usability of the product. Here’s a look at some of the refreshed screens.

The new Outseta dashboard gives users a quick overview of what’s happening in their Outseta account.

We redesigned our support ticketing inbox to better accommodate conversations with more than two participants. The new UI also surfaces previously submitted support tickets for each recipient, making it easier to get up to speed on their past support interactions.

Outseta’s sales pipelines also got a refresh that includes better search functionality and notifications.

Finally, we redesigned our settings pages where we make the code required to use our registration (sign-up), authentication (login), and profile (user management) widgets available. 

This article provides an overview of how these widgets integrate with your SaaS product. This work was particularly important, as integrating these widgets has long been the most challenging aspect of onboarding new customers. Previously users were required to configure these widgets a bit themselves, but we now surface the required code for registration, authentication, and user management pre-configured. This allows us to offer no-code solutions for subscription and user management, which even non-technical users can integrate with their website or product with ease. 

Use your own authentication with Outseta

While we always try to catch SaaS founders as early as possible, the reality is many of the prospective customers that we talk to have already built a way to authenticate users into their product. 

Outseta users can now continue to use their own authentication solution, while still taking full advantage of our product. 

Language support for Outseta’s widgets

Last but not least, we now offer the ability to translate our widgets into any language of your choosing. This helps us better support international customers who want to use our user management, registration, or authentication widgets, but need those experiences to be translated into a different language to best support their customer base.

Thanks to our customer Vayoo for this suggestion and their continued feedback! If you’d like to translate your own widgets into a different language, email us at support(at)outseta.com.

That’s our update for this month—we’ll be back with a three year update in January!

-Dimitris, Geoff, Dave, & James