We sell speed to market

A hard truth—the software you choose to use is going to have very little impact on your start-up’s chances of success. A strange statement coming from a software company, yes. But there’s one factor that does have an outsized impact on your chances of success—the quality of your core product.

• How much value is your SaaS product delivering? 
• How awesome is the content on your membership site?
•  How engaged is your community?

Every aspect of Outseta is designed so that you can spend as much time as possible focused on what really matters—building your core product. When your product is ready to go, your business is ready for you.

From authentication to payments to transactional emails, there’s so many little workflows that Outseta gives you out-of-the-box in minutes. We routinely hear:

“You gave me in 15 minutes what I spent three months building at my last company."

Speed to market matters. How soon will your start-up be relevant?

In fact, here's 28 specific examples of workflows that Outseta gives you out of the box—the vast majority of which would require writing custom code to support otherwise.

Gone are the days of unnecessary "look what I didn't build" trade-offs.

Less software = better alignment

When you choose to stitch together a series of software solutions, you and your team are consistently logging into a series of different tools. You login to your help desk software to answer support tickets, your email marketing software to send an email campaign, your CRM to manage your sales process. Even if these systems are well integrated, some context on your customers and their journey is inevitably lost along the way. You’ll definitely have a “Doh!” moment or two when you deliver a lousy user experience to one of your customers because of the context you were missing. We’ve all been there.

Particularly in an early stage start-up, it’s a major advantage to have your whole team living in the same tool day in and day out. When everyone’s in the same tool, everyone’s looking at the same data. Your team has a single, shared understanding of your business' performance and a more complete understanding of each customers’ unique experience with your company. When alignment improves, business results follow.

Imagine managing your business from behind a single login… when you have less technical overhead, your business feels a lot more calm.

Improved operational efficiency

Once you’ve launched and realized the benefits Outseta offers around speed to market, you’ll start to realize the benefits of a fully integrated platform, too. Your Outseta account is littered with examples of workflows that can be built in minutes that would otherwise take hours to set up with separate software tools.

Say you want to proactively fight churn by reaching out to users who show signs of becoming disengaged—users who haven't logged into your product in say 14 days. Typically this would require that you:

• Create an "event" that recognizes that this is happening within your authentication tool
• Send that information to your CRM
• Use that event to trigger an email from your marketing automation tool
  

This is a common workflow, but one that's both technical and time consuming to setup. In Outseta, a completely non-technical user can configure this workflow in its entirety in less than 30 seconds. 

Or say you wanted to track the actual lifetime value of each customer. This would likely require integrating your billing system, CRM, and reporting tools. With Outseta this calculation occurs automatically and updates in real time as new payments are accepted, directly on each customers’ CRM record.

Your Outseta account is filled with examples of common workflows like this that can collectively save you a ton of time.

You'll save you a bunch of money & scale with low, predictable overhead

While we hate to peg our value to cost savings, we sell primarily to bootstrapped start-ups (which we are ourselves). We know how much low and predictable overhead matters! 

If you look at our subscription fees compared to the costs of the software products we replace, our fees are extremely low—that’s by design. And with no per user fees you can invite your whole team as you grow without incurring additional costs—also by design! We make money by taking a 1% fee on successfully processed payments, so we only grow when you grow and our interests are aligned.

If you compare our fees to other membership software providers, we’re significantly less expensive. And Stripe's own billing tools are great but they'll cost you extra, too. Most founders don't realize that you'll pay at least 3.4%-3.7% per transaction if you use Stripe’s own billing tools—it’s worth educating yourself before making a decision. You'll need to spend a bunch of time integrating Stripe with the rest of your tech stack, too.

Your tech stack doesn't need to feel duct taped together

The allure of using the absolute best software for every aspect of your business can be intoxicating—we get it! But in working with thousands of founders, we've found that those best in class software tools are almost always fractionally used—and the more integrations you have in place, the more your tech stack feels like it's duct taped together. Code based integrations aside, tools like Zapier are great but they only introduce another potential point of failure.

Outseta brings order to SaaS chaos. Does it feel like you're managing your tech stack, or your tech stack is managing you?

Ask any CTO or VP of Engineering that you know who has had a successful start-up run a few questions…

• How often did you change the tools in your stack as you scaled?
• How much time was spent evaluating and integrating new tools?
• How often were you asked to pull data from one tool, to support a campaign deployed in another tool?
• How often did you encounter issues with data consistency?
• How often did your integrations break?

The point is, as your start-up scales time spent evaluating, integrating, and maintaining the tools on which your business relies scales up—not just a little bit, but dramatically. That’s why you see entire IT departments, and full-time salaries devoted to business, sales, and marketing operations teams.

Perhaps most unfortunate is that in an early stage start-up it’s typically an experienced engineer that’s tasked with doing a lot of this work. Let’s say that a technical founder’s time is valued at $150,000 per year. If that person spends, conservatively, 3 hours per week managing their tech stack guess what that will cost a start-up in its first year of existence?

$11,249.16—roughly one month of working time. For further reading, please see: opportunity cost.

How far would that time go if it was spent building your core product? How far could that budget go if it was spent on marketing?

One vendor to deal with

Remember the last time you called customer support to deal with an issue related to your cell phone plan? Or your cable TV provider? Would you rather deal with five cell phone providers? Seven cable TV providers? Or one?

With Outseta if you have a problem with your software, you have one vendor to deal with. You can reach us via email, live chat, or our knowledge base—you can even jump on a 1-on-1 call with us any time you like. 

You'll come to know our team members by name, and we'll come to know your business. Plus, one point of contact is easy to remember… an inbox filled with messages from a handful of Account Managers? Not so much.

Accelerate investor diligence and increase the odds that your company is funded

One of the most common misconceptions with start-ups is that to raise funding from investors you need a perfectly polished pitch. One that accentuates the positive aspects of your business and truly puts your best foot forward.

Bullshit.

Investors don’t want the dog-and-pony show—they’re too smart for that and if they’re going to fork over a large sum of money, they want to understand your business inside and out; the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Outseta helps accelerate the diligence process dramatically, giving potential investors a single source of truth so they can get up to speed on your business quickly. Everything from your financial reports to your marketing campaigns and support tickets are easily accessible, so you won't waste countless hours explaining data discrepancies that are common when disparate billing, CRM, and business intelligence tools are stitched together.

Providing that level of insight into your business doesn't cost you a penny and the credibility you build by providing that level of transparency... priceless.

If you want to see what Outseta is all about, the best way to do so is to create an account. If you’re a subscription start-up with minimum viable product (MVP), we can help you stand up and operationalize your business in less than a day. You made it this far—let’s do this, eh?

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