Outseta Company Update September 2020

The no-code community chose us

When we set out to build Outseta almost 4 years ago now, we were laser focused on building a product to help bootstrapped SaaS founders launch new products more efficiently. We’ve never wavered from that mission—today the majority of our customer base is other SaaS companies. But around the beginning of 2020, something started to change—without any deliberate effort, we started to get a lot of “no-code” founders signing up for Outseta. 

In the vain of putting a toe in the no-code waters, we became a partner of Webflow. That changed our business almost overnight as our partner listing on Webflow’s website quickly became our top performing marketing channel.

As I reflected on this, it became clear that this was a path that we needed to give a serious look as a business. If I’m honest, selling to SaaS founders had often felt a lot like pushing a boulder up a hill. Software developers have the technical skills to integrate their own tech stack—many even revel in the opportunity to build the perfect tech stack while acknowledging it’s probably not the best use of their time at an early stage.

The no-code community has proven to be the polar opposite—all of a sudden sign-ups are coming to us easily, and I started hearing, “This is exactly what I need, how did I not know this existed?” feedback from no-code users almost immediately.

If you think about it, that makes sense—no-code founders typically don’t have the technical chops of their developer counterparts, so building that perfect tech stack is that much more of a slog. Simply put, Outseta provides even more value to less technical founders.

These happenings led to some healthy introspection about our business and our target market. What we’ve concluded is that whether it’s no-coders, SaaS products, membership sites, or consultants that sell their services on a retainer basis what Outseta does best is:

• Help founders launch subscription billing in minutes without writing code
• Provide a full suite of integrated tools to help founders grow recurring revenue

Much of this update is focused on changes we’ve made to better serve these objectives and the no-code community at large. We didn’t choose the no-code community, the no-code community chose us. We’re excited to serve them!

We became a Makerpad partner

As part of our quest to better serve the no-code community, we’re excited to share that we’re now a Makerpad Gold Partner. If you’re not familiar with Makerpad, they are without a doubt the home of the no-code community. It’s an educational site that focuses on how to actually build stuff without code. Over the coming months you’ll see us publishing all sorts of tutorials and projects over on Makerpad. We’re excited to share how we can help small, non-technical subscription businesses dramatically improve their operational efficiency.

New feature! Protected content

Furthering our inroads into the no-code space, we launched the ability to setup “Protected Content” within Outseta—pages or folders of content on your website that are only accessible to subscribers based on their subscription level. This is one of the most commonly used features for membership sites, who publish content that only members can access based on their membership level. Here’s an overview of how Outseta is different from other membership software providers.

You can sign-up for the free Starter plan on our Webflow demo site if you’d like to gain access to some protected content…

New feature! Account specific pages

We also launched support for “Account Specific Pages”—pages of content that are only accessible to a specific member or group of members. Most often these pages are used as a landing dashboard where new members are sent when they login to a membership site. You can manually create these pages, or use our Zapier integration to automatically create account specific pages when new members sign up. A key differentiator is we allow our customers to publish as many account specific pages as they like, whereas most other membership software products only allow one.

New feature! Google Auth

One of our top requested features for a long time has been the ability to authenticate users using Google—this is now live and works alongside Outseta’s other authentication tools. Here’s how to add this option to your sign-up and login workflows. 

New feature! Revenue Reporting

Finally, we started adding some reporting features to Outseta’s primary dashboard so that you can easily get a glimpse of how your business is performing each time you login to Outseta. Specifically, we added reporting for monthly recurring revenue, subscribers, and total invoiced/collected revenue.

I scaled up to 4 days per week focused solely on Outseta

With all of these happenings, it’s been hard to deny that we’ve stumbled across a market opportunity worth attacking and one where our product is really uniquely positioned and defensible. There isn’t another product out there with a comparable set of features that I’m aware of. 

As such, I’m really excited to share that as of September 1 I’ve scaled up my involvement in building Outseta to four days per week. This will help us better serve our customers and will increase our velocity across the board as we continue to work towards the point where our whole team can focus on Outseta full-time.

Thank you as always for following along!

—Geoff, Dave, Dimitris, and James