Paddle Billing
ProfitWell MetricsThe company
Founded in 2016 by programmers Michel Bardelmeijer and Ron Kesting, Enflow started as a digital agency specializing in custom web application development.
But this is just one side of the business. Michel and Ron have also built a SaaS solution called redirect.pizza which automates the domain redirecting process. When a business changes its name and moves to a new domain, redirect.pizza handles the entire redirecting process with full HTTPS support and API compatibility.
"We began by offering it to other companies fully free of charge. It proved really popular. In fact, over two-and-a-half years, we racked up several thousand users.” Michel Bardelmeijer, Founder, redirect.pizza
The challenge
Many of redirect.pizza’s users were actually enterprise-size customers looking for more than the free, self-serve model, so Michel and his team saw an opportunity to monetize their offering.
“They were willing to pay for a service level agreement (SLA) that was more secure, as well as invoice billing and sales-assisted functionality. Realizing there was a big demand for a paid model, we decided to offer a subscription billing model.”
The team recognized that to move forward successfully, it needed a tool to manage the monetization of its new subscription service. But they also didn’t want to build a whole subscription and payments stack to sell globally.
“We knew from the off that we didn’t want to be our own merchant of record (MoR) – we wanted to offload the complexities of running an international business. We also wanted a tool that had good technical integrations. It was important that it could manage card payments and PayPal, for example.”
Michel Bardelmeijer, Founder, redirect.pizza
The solution
While searching for a tool to help redirect.pizza set up and monetize the subscription service quickly, Michel found Paddle. The technical integrations were immediately appealing, backed by positive user feedback.
“We heard many great things on Twitter. We saw a lot of good integrations, and we decided to start there.”
redirect.pizza began by seamlessly integrating their cashier tool with Paddle’s subscription billing platform. There was no need to migrate data because redirect.pizza used Paddle to start its subscription service from scratch.
“We found it fit our needs perfectly. It was more like a technical decision than a company decision because the integration was very easy for us. We were set up and ready to monetize our service in around a week.”
The results
redirect.pizza has grown by 12-15% month on month since using Paddle to facilitate its subscription process.
Further results include:
Offloading the complexities of an international operation
Paddle acts as a MoR, handling all payments and taking on the liability related to each transaction. It effectively acts as a middleman in the transaction between a company and its customer.
As a result, redirect.pizza doesn’t have to get involved in the complexities of operating in different markets – all of which have different tax laws and requirements.
“Much of our client base is in the US, which can be very complicated. Luckily, with Paddle, we can operate in multiple jurisdictions with multiple tax laws and compliance requirements without any hassle whatsoever. It manages all of that complication, so we don’t have to.”
Reducing the manual burden from the outset
“Thanks to Paddle, we don’t have the same huge manual accounting burden that many SaaS companies face. This is a real advantage. Both our local and international invoicing has been managed via Paddle right from the start, so we’ve had a clear view of our revenue from day one.”
Retaining control of the customer experience
While Paddle takes away many of redirect.pizza’s headaches, it also gives them greater control where they need it.
"We particularly like the inline checkout function, which is fully customizable. It has allowed us to add a link that users can share with their finance team to set up a subscription without having to enter their own payment details.”
It's also straightforward for Michel to tailor subscriptions to suit different business requirements and allow users to switch between subscription types easily.
“Our customers can easily upgrade and downgrade, without needing direct help from us.”
The future
We aren’t stopping here. We aim to get to 20% month-on-month growth in the near future. Because Paddle has taken over the whole back-end billing and monetization process away from us, we can focus on our marketing.”
ProfitWell Metrics by Paddle is the largest database in SaaS, providing useful actionable intelligence for SaaS businesses like redirect.pizza.
“Now we are making decisions based on actual revenue data, rather than on gut feeling. In the past, we have had to manually pull together reports – which not only takes time but can be prone to error. Now we can get real-time insight into what’s going on in our business – and we can be sure it is accurate.”
This will help redirect.pizza better understand what its customers are looking for and provide an even better service.
“Paddle will undoubtedly be instrumental to our future success.”
Would you like to know more about how you can get started with Paddle like redirect.pizza? Create your free account now or speak to sales to learn more about migrating to Paddle. Get in touch.