Outseta Company Update - March 2019

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3 min read

Hi-dee-ho! Two months of 2019 are already behind us—here’s an update on what we’ve been cooking up at Outseta so far this year.

New Feature! Lead Capture Form Builder

We’ve long offered forms to help you build your email list as well as product registration and authentication forms that allow users to sign-up or login to your SaaS product. But we recently released a new lead capture form builder to all Outseta customers. Our form builder allows you to generate form code that can easily be dropped into your website pages, or we provide hosted web pages where your form lives as well.

Forms can be customized to capture whatever information you see fit, with form submission data automatically syncing with Outseta CRM records. You can also easily specifiy a post-submission display message or redirect users to a new URL, allowing for easy conversion tracking in Google Analytics or similar tools.

You can learn more about Outseta forms here.

Outseta SaaS Consulting

Throughout the final quarter of 2018 we saw a significant uptick in user engagement with our product. More companies have been signing up for Outseta each month and we’re seeing broader feature usage and more complete implementations of the product than we’ve seen before. We expected that we’d see these signs as the product continued to mature; it’s a pretty good indication that we can prudently start to make more significant investments in growth.

With this is mind, we’re exploring a number of ways to raise some growth capital for the business. A couple of options we’re considering include:

  1. Raising some funding from Tinyseed or Earnest Capital. We shared a post discussing these alternative funding options last month.
  2. Funding the business through revenue from CompareRentalBookings.com. This is a second SaaS project we launched earlier this year, and we’ll be reinvesting the profits into Outseta.

We’ve also taken on some consulting work in the past to provide seed funding for the business. This is something that we’re excited to formalize—we’re committing to helping one company bring a new SaaS product to market each year. If you know a entrepreneur looking for a technical co-founder, a team in need of more development firepower, or any start-up that needs help building their MVP we have a very attractive consulting package to offer.

New Feature! Product Engagement Tracking

While we’ve seen a significant uptick in user engagement with our own product, it was initially a pretty manually process for us to get a sense of which features were being used and how often. Our login forms have always provided some stats on login activity on Outseta’s primary dashboard, but we found ourselves needing to build dashboards in Amazon Quicksight to get better insights into feature adoption and usage.

There are a number of other product engagement tracking tools on the market like Heap Analytics, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics, but they’re all fairly expensive and overkill for a start-up company. Pretty much every company that’s using Outseta would benefit from better understanding user engagement with their own products, so we built the engagement reports that are the most valuable to early stage start-ups into the platform where they’re nicely tied into the CRM. Outseta customers can now set up and track their own custom events, and can track product engagement based on billing stage, cohort, or month.

For our own use we created custom events that correlate with Outseta’s primary features to help us track events like imported contacts, email campaigns sent, support tickets received, companies that have activated e-payments, and knowledge base articles authored.

Documentation on setting up engagement tracking for your own product is available here.

New Outseta Explainer Video

We recently filmed a new Outseta explainer video that we’re leveraging on our home page. We’re not sharing because this is scintillating creative work—far from it—but as a bootstrapped company we had this video created for $32… Yes, $32. If you’re a start-up in need of an explainer video on the (very) cheap, feel free to reach out and we’ll point you in the right direction.  

That’s a wrap!

So who do you know that needs help building a SaaS product?

-Dimitris, Dave, James, & Geoff

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