A partnership destined to happen | Christian Owens

00;00;02;05 - 00;00;22;29

Patrick Campbell

Hey, everyone. It's been a bit. And some of you may know we were acquired by a company called Paddle. So Profit well is now part of the Paddle family. I have joined as Chief strategy officer, a member of the board. FOK has taken over all of product peace and sales crew and everyone came on board. And if you haven't seen the announcements, just go to my Twitter feed.

00;00;22;29 - 00;00;43;00

Patrick Campbell

I've talked about it a lot now, but one of the questions that we got a lot was like, Oh, so how did we meet? How did paddle and profit will come together? Well, it's actually this episode of the podcast. This was recorded a long time ago. It was before I was good at asking questions and podcast. It was also probably before Christian was so good at answering questions and podcasts.

00;00;43;00 - 00;01;13;09

Patrick Campbell

But it's a really cool kind of artifact because while the sale and everything happened in 2021 into 2022, this was the moment that I literally met Christian and it was a really good conversation. And after this particular interview and the conversations that were kind of before it and after the recording, I remember calling for Kundu and basically saying, Hey, if we want to get into billing, we have to do it now because these guys, a.k.a. Christian, are the ones who get it.

00;01;13;09 - 00;01;33;04

Patrick Campbell

They're the ones who think exactly like us. And in addition to that, it was one of those things where I thought, at the very least we've got to integrate with these guys because they get it. They're thinking of the world of subscriptions. The way that we think and that way is very much this do it for you mentality where we exist so that you can plug profitable in or now paddle and basically you don't have to do any work.

00;01;33;04 - 00;01;51;03

Patrick Campbell

You just get the thing you need. Taxes are taking care of retention is taking care of pricing, is taking care of chargebacks, are taking care of all of these different things. We do it for you. So today's episode features that first conversation we had that formed the foundation of the faith that we had and one another that eventually led us to joining forces.

00;01;51;09 - 00;02;17;15

Patrick Campbell

So sit back, relax, and hopefully we don't embarrass ourselves too much from paddle to protect the hustle, or we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Christian Owens dives deep on growth. We talk about early SaaS origins, solving customer problems, the roadmap to success, getting your customers to trust you, and what makes London a perfect for SaaS.

00;02;17;19 - 00;02;28;17

Patrick Campbell

After you finish the episode, make sure you check out the show notes for an in-depth field guide focused on what we went over for.

00;02;28;17 - 00;02;34;29

Patrick Campbell

Why SaaS like, maybe we go back like background. Like what was the origin story? When did you become a super hero?

00;02;36;05 - 00;02;59;10

Christian Owens

Is basically the only thing I've ever done. So I left school at 16, like dropped out, kind of discovered the thing called the internet. Like it was magical and it was like it was like building websites for clients. And I can't remember exactly how it came about, but sort of I started building some invoicing software. I think it's because I didn't want to pay the QuickBooks or something.

00;02;59;22 - 00;03;26;14

Christian Owens

Like it was like, I can build that. Like, why not? And I got this invoicing offering, like through that process realized I much preferred building a product to kind of doing like a restaurant website or something. So kind of transitioned into building this invoicing software of the Mac. Originally it was kind of pre subscriptions being sort of as prominent as they are and sort of through that process, I also learned that I suck at marketing.

00;03;26;20 - 00;03;45;11

Christian Owens

Like, I really, really was quite bad at it. My first idea was I knew a bunch of like software developers. I knew amongst people who are also building products, running companies. So it was a case of how do I like, utilize like complementary products? And audiences like to help me grow. Like, I didn't have any money like spent on ads.

00;03;45;11 - 00;04;19;06

Christian Owens

I couldn't go to conferences. I mean, I couldn't even open a bank account. I was like 17. So I sort of was one of like three or four companies to like, stumble across this idea of like bundling software. And it's like really popular now. It's kind of built into the App Store and things like that. But some of the company where I would approach other software businesses and this wasn't like the perpetually licensed software model, so they'd have like a real incentive to like six months before they're going to do a big upgrade to sort of get tons of customers really quickly so that they can hopefully upsell them over the next like 24 months.

00;04;19;23 - 00;04;27;23

Christian Owens

So it's like doing that. I organized the first one with like ten companies, ten products where we discounted it. This is like type of group.

00;04;27;25 - 00;04;29;24

Patrick Campbell

Where they related at all, or was it just it.

00;04;29;24 - 00;04;49;27

Christian Owens

Was like this vaguely. I think you could write and you could write copy to say they were related, but it was like some invoicing software and some design software and things like that were sort of a creative professional. Maybe that might appeal to you and sort of wants that. The first one did really well, you know, it did like half a million dollars in sales in like two weeks.

00;04;50;01 - 00;05;15;23

Christian Owens

And then sort of like really just doubled down on that as a business. And it kind of went from zero to kind of 2 million. And sales in its first year. I still 17, so had no idea what I was doing. It was like dumb luck and then kind of saw the writing on the wall, a bit of like Groupon, sort of like going like this and sort of like starting to something to fall off in terms of this obviously isn't sustainable.

00;05;15;23 - 00;05;41;18

Christian Owens

Doing massive discounts and eventually you run out of software. That's good. So I tried to think of like, what's the next iteration of that and kind of settled on to things like one. I realize how difficult it was to just sell stuff through that, but like I'm kind of doing it at some kind of scale. I'm like taking payments, dealing with taxes, actually building people, doing it safely, but also it was partially that.

00;05;41;18 - 00;06;00;29

Christian Owens

And then partially the reason why customers liked it, I thought was was the curation aspect. Like, they knew that the things in this package were kind of trustworthy. They were good products. They like weren't stealing the data like they were going to go out of business more. And that's kind of how the first like the idea of apparel came about.

00;06;02;03 - 00;06;37;11

Christian Owens

Those are like 18. That business was kind of naturally sort of was coming to like conclusion. They went from being like three companies doing it to 610 months. It's like cleanse of this thing. So I raised like 150. Okay, to build the first version of panel. And the initial idea was a marketplace. So marketplace for downloadable software, SaaS subscription products where we focus around kind of yes, solve the commerce piece, make it really easy to buy, but also make it really easy to sell, but then also kind of focus on reviews, curation, sort of trust within this ecosystem.

00;06;37;11 - 00;06;56;27

Christian Owens

And so built the first version of that, launched it. And like the marketplace really did absolutely nothing. It was like you wouldn't know it. Like nobody wanted another marketplace. Like people had customers. They weren't going to direct them so that they can pay 30% or whatever it was. So like we literally could have sold the software like door to door than we could have on this marketplace.

00;06;57;03 - 00;07;30;17

Christian Owens

And then we had things started happening of like sales on the marketplace started going up and traffic on the marketplaces going down. And like we were like, What is happening? Like sort of. So we spoke to these like 50 companies that were using it, and like a group of them then got together and like hacked the way around this marketplace and it's like sort of taken the buying buttons on their website and started pointing them to like the checkout like flow of of the of the marketplace because we sold all these problems around payments, around taxes around and we built all this back end as well to help manage customers and subscriptions and relationships.

00;07;31;01 - 00;07;48;16

Christian Owens

And I think sort of whenever you have an idea and it doesn't quite manifest itself, you think like there was really no marketplace future and then sort of took us like two months or so to realize that. And then we shut down the B2C side of like the consumer facing that and then just focused all our efforts on like this problem.

00;07;48;26 - 00;08;06;06

Christian Owens

Like we got the reasoning behind like why we were building the marketplace, right? Like they wanted to like a better, easier, like more robust way to sell software and they wanted to inflate into the stuff and they just wanted the headache done. We got the execution wrong. Like they didn't they didn't want another marketplace. They had the App Store.

00;08;06;20 - 00;08;27;11

Christian Owens

And these businesses in a lot cases already had customers. Sure, they just needed a better way to handle the commerce space. And then the bit that comes after that, the okay, how do people get access to it? Like sort of what happens if they have a problem, like not having to log into six different tools to figure out sort of how do I refund or whatever it is that problems?

00;08;27;11 - 00;08;30;12

Christian Owens

That is what we've been focused on for the last five years now.

00;08;30;14 - 00;08;48;19

Patrick Campbell

Why do you think they cause similar to like another marketplace, like, you know, it's been five years and the space has changed dramatically. Right. But even back then, there were still, you know, basically a bunch of your competitors around. Right. And they weren't as definitely not as beautiful. Definitely not as like, you know, focused on the some of the things that you mentioned.

00;08;48;19 - 00;08;59;01

Patrick Campbell

But why do you think those early 50 companies or so that were breaking your marketplace to to use it this way, why do you think they use you versus spinning up one of those competitors?

00;08;59;19 - 00;09;20;26

Christian Owens

We focused on software. Yeah. Like when you looked at the competitive set that we had at the time. Sure. Like they weren't focused on software, they were focused on digital content. Yeah. So you had the products that were built for creators who people were selling e-books, people were selling themes and, and video courses and all that stuff is still really hard to sell.

00;09;21;10 - 00;10;00;12

Christian Owens

They were building platforms that were focused on that stuff, and then they were kind of like tacking on. You can also sell like a license key or download or sort of like we do subscriptions onto the side of that. But the core focus were on sort of non for the large part, like non-technical sort of non-product companies. It was focused on like how do I make it easier to deliver this thing that I have like created this content, this whatever to an audience of people and solve the same sort of similar problems, whereas we were focused on like the problems that but the contracted from sort of how do we need that for software businesses,

00;10;00;12 - 00;10;13;16

Christian Owens

SaaS companies, sort of this ecosystem of products where they probably do have engineering resource, they should just shouldn't be spending it on this? And that was kind of I think that's why it resonated with with this group.

00;10;13;16 - 00;10;17;15

Patrick Campbell

So you're saying focus on a customer is a good idea? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00;10;17;19 - 00;10;46;12

Christian Owens

I think it's easy to get distracted like an easy to get distracted with, like two things. One, it's much easier to go after those creative people and the product looks quite similar. Yeah, and sort of the skepticism and trust and goodwill that you have to build with like product teams and engineering teams and software companies in order to do the other thing right of managing like the financial relationship that you have with somebody who's using your product in perpetuity.

00;10;46;24 - 00;10;54;20

Christian Owens

It's much harder thing to sort of to have to facilitate than, okay, I'm going to sell you this thing, going to let you download the PDF.

00;10;54;21 - 00;10;55;02

Patrick Campbell

Yeah.

00;10;55;17 - 00;11;00;20

Christian Owens

So it was, it was about like robustness of, of the relationships we have to the experience.

00;11;00;20 - 00;11;29;05

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is cool. We could call a pivot if we want, but like you kind of like sort of shifting the focus, right. And what I'm curious about too is because what makes you guys different, at least from an outsider's perspective, is we would call it focusing on the outcome. And I think you would describe it maybe a little bit differently, but maybe ask more generally, like what makes you different than your competitors besides just the like focus on SaaS software?

00;11;29;15 - 00;11;50;01

Christian Owens

There's a couple of things. So there's obviously like a huge landscape of tools, services, companies that are built around solving this problem in various contexts, whether it's the payment that whether it's the recurring recurring like billing management part, whether it's sort of the customer relationships afterwards, whether it's the data and visualization, that kind of all of these things.

00;11;50;02 - 00;12;08;23

Christian Owens

There's all of these different problems and sort of there tends to be like two kind of solutions to it currently. One is I build it from parts of myself. So if a company was going to take all of these components, I'm going to we're engineers, we're going to build it, and that gets you to a solution. Like you solve your problem by building it.

00;12;08;23 - 00;12;35;09

Christian Owens

You might have a really hard time doing it, but like you get to the solution and then it seems like kind of the other group of of companies that it's like trying to work on this or trying to provide not solutions, but tools to aid with building solutions. So they're building orchestration platforms, they're building the thing that plugs all of the other things together that makes it less of a headache.

00;12;35;17 - 00;12;49;24

Christian Owens

Sure. And I think what we're trying to do is just say the headache shouldn't exist. Yeah. Like, let's just get rid of it. Like, you shouldn't have to buy this thing, then buy these payment processes and plug them all together and then buy this other thing to deal with tax and then this other thing to deal with analytics.

00;12;49;24 - 00;12;54;17

Christian Owens

It's like we should just solve all of that stuff so you can focus on the bigger picture of building a good product.

00;12;54;17 - 00;12;55;12

Patrick Campbell

Customer and product.

00;12;55;15 - 00;13;26;02

Christian Owens

Exactly. And where you can augment that experience with tools that are specifically designed to utilize that like repository of information, customer service tools, analytics tools like data products that can plug into this amazing, like we're never going to be we're not trying to be the best in the world at building those things. We're trying to be the best in the world of building the running of the business so that you can focus on those other things.

00;13;26;02 - 00;13;53;28

Patrick Campbell

Because it's not a it's not a hard and fast line, right? Because sometimes, I mean, when you think about like a subscription sale, right? You have everything from like the acquisition, identifying the customer, you know, converting that customer, pricing that customer all the way through, retaining that customer and then all the like orchestration like you described in underneath ether, like, you know, on your maybe not your direct roadmap, but your larger roadmap, How do you figure out like this is something we would build, this is something we would never build, or definitely not for a long time.

00;13;54;10 - 00;14;15;16

Christian Owens

So you need to get back to like a more fundamental like point. Sure. Whereas you look at what exists and there's two camps, there's the camp of we're going to build the most flexible set of APIs that handle a bunch of this stuff for you that you implement with. Maybe that's different tools and you're responsible for how it all interacts, but it's hyper flexible.

00;14;15;16 - 00;14;31;11

Christian Owens

You can do anything you want if you have the will to do it. And then there's the other camp, which is we're going to prescribe to you like what we think this should be like, like how we think that recurring billing should be or how you should sell to your customers and you have to fit into these boxes.

00;14;31;26 - 00;15;03;00

Christian Owens

And what we're trying to say is neither of those are wrong, but neither of them are right. We're trying to build something in the middle where it's like we have a bunch of experience and like we know best practice. Yeah, if you want to deviate from best practice or the subscription landscape changes or you want to experiment with a new billing model, like it shouldn't be restrictive because we're trying to solve a problem, but then it shouldn't be laborious because it's customizable.

00;15;03;03 - 00;15;33;22

Christian Owens

Yeah, so that balance is a tricky one. Yeah. Like balancing those two things. And we take it of approach of let's build kind of the most open platform that we can on top of really robust API. So if the person wants to come in and do something wildly crazy, go do it. But for 99% of these companies, especially when they're just getting started, yeah, like there's probably a right way for them to start that process and then it's up to them to experiment top of that.

00;15;34;14 - 00;15;57;04

Christian Owens

But we can't be prescriptive about how they grow that business longer term. But I think the thing that we feel really, really passionately about is that if you and me were creating, we're each creating a product, we're both going to go and we have the same amount of resource in terms of like mental capacity ideation, like product development.

00;15;57;24 - 00;16;21;02

Christian Owens

And we both go away and we create a project management tool. Sure. Your project management tool is better than mine. Like it's just a better product and it's better because I've decided to spend 30% of my resource on billing, check out flow conversion optimization, and then I'm more successful than you. Even though my product was like, We don't think that's right.

00;16;21;09 - 00;16;51;19

Christian Owens

Yeah, fundamentally, it's about like, how do you and I, with the same levels of resource, dedicate the same amount of focus to the products. So the best product wins. Yeah. Not the person who can spend like the most amount of resource on billing or conversion optimization or pricing. It's sort of like let's take the low hanging fruit kind of out of the equation, focus on building good products like maintaining great customer relationships, like executing on really great growth strategies.

00;16;51;19 - 00;17;10;14

Christian Owens

Yeah, like those are the things that should be the differentiators between like you winning versus me, not the I spent a bunch more time on like integrating Alipay. So like we can now sell to China, like and that shouldn't be the determining factor. It's, it's a.

00;17;10;14 - 00;17;30;20

Patrick Campbell

It's weird though because like I think there's a little bit of a chicken or the egg problem with this because we were just talking before your recording like there are situations where you're suggesting to your customers and you're literally having to almost not trick them, but just basically like, listen, do this for a week. I know it's going to work like and if it doesn't work well, you know, whatever, right?

00;17;31;01 - 00;17;40;10

Patrick Campbell

Like you think that like, I guess the lowest common denominator question here is like, do you think people are ready for that even? Or is it just because they can't even think about it because they're so bogged down?

00;17;40;17 - 00;17;59;20

Christian Owens

I think there is that point of if they're spending all of that time fighting fires, they can't even think about these things. So they can't even take a suggestion that you might give them an evaluated rationally. They can't say, oh, that sounds like a good idea. It doesn't sound like a good idea. If the answer is always, I don't have time to think about that right now, but I think it's about playing small.

00;18;00;06 - 00;18;26;14

Christian Owens

I don't think tricking. Not tricking. I know you didn't mean that, but I don't think that's like I don't think it's I don't think we give people enough credit, like in terms of I think if you go and speak to and you are speaking to like our founders, if you go and speak to 50 of them and say like, what stuff should you be doing, repricing or whatever that you're not doing, they would probably all have a list and they'll probably all be pretty.

00;18;26;19 - 00;18;41;21

Christian Owens

Like all of those things will be correct in some to some degree. So it's about one, how do we free up the resource so that they can actually focus on that list? But then also how do we halve the list by just having some of it taken care of? And I think our approach to that is start really small.

00;18;41;21 - 00;19;08;25

Christian Owens

Start with the really simple stuff like that. What's out of the box and how do we get them when we make a suggestion or a given site, how do we get them to act on that is just by perseverance. I think like if we can demonstrate that the really small thing that we ask them to do or suggested that they do at a 1% list where we think this other thing that may be risky, it's maybe half your price in this market or triple your trial period.

00;19;08;26 - 00;19;28;02

Christian Owens

Yeah, that they were like, Oh crap, I don't really know if I haven't thought about it enough. Like if we can do that enough times sort of and build trust, we're at that point with customers. We get to a point where and if they understand the suggestion that we're making for them is to benefit them as a business like.

00;19;28;08 - 00;19;56;01

Christian Owens

And because of the way that we price like, we don't charge a sort of monthly minimums, we don't have like long contract terms, we don't have a lot of things that we can upsell when they when we win. Yeah, so that is pretty obvious. But if we say half your price in this market because X, Y and Z, we're not doing that because like we have this kind of arbitrary or if they have more customers, sort of like with their they're charging, we're charging them like $1 a customer a month.

00;19;56;12 - 00;20;19;17

Christian Owens

So like if they get more customers, even if they make less money, like we'll make more money. Yeah, that's not the case. It's like we're charging a percentage. Like everything that we do is about how do we grow their revenue, retain customers for longer and help them build better experiences, Not about how do we arbitrarily kind of get this metric that we don't like uses on how do we get that higher so that we make more money?

00;20;19;17 - 00;20;19;26

Christian Owens

Yeah.

00;20;20;12 - 00;20;47;17

Patrick Campbell

Well, I think what's kind of cool that has even had your risk with the outcome because let's say I don't know and I don't believe you. If it's only about belief, let's say like, I don't know that I should be doing localized pricing or I don't know that I should be doing internationalization the way that I should, You just have a built in the product, at least that initial layer like you mentioned, so that for most of the product I can just automatically have it and then maybe I'll start listening to you on that access or this access.

00;20;47;17 - 00;20;47;26

Patrick Campbell

But yeah.

00;20;48;07 - 00;21;11;02

Christian Owens

This is cool. It's going from the point of like the difference between making the decision that we should do something to actually doing it, being as simple as like turning it on rather than it being okay. Now we have to like dedicate some engineering resources, yes, etc. etc., etc..

00;21;11;02 - 00;21;13;29

Patrick Campbell

What's it like doing in London? Are you from London? Like what's what's a person.

00;21;14;20 - 00;21;26;12

Christian Owens

From like 100 miles outside London, grew up in the countryside, moved here sort of six, seven months into Paddle 18 on Mother's Day. Never do. That's like Mom's like.

00;21;28;03 - 00;21;31;05

Patrick Campbell

Where you live in at home when you left. Yeah. I mean, because you're there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00;21;31;07 - 00;21;58;11

Christian Owens

So it was two of us at the time. We both moved, like we rented an apartment together. We, like, squatted in one of our investors offices. The reason that we did it was, I think, two things. One, access to talent. Yeah, like it's such a diverse kind of ecosystem of people. Diverse in terms of, like backgrounds where they're from or countries, but also like knowledge.

00;21;58;11 - 00;22;28;03

Christian Owens

There's a ton of different industries that sort of you can take the best of of everything. So that was like one of the reasons. And then the other reasons was just the pace. Like it's quite easy to get complacent when you're sort of like the only software company in a 20 mile radius of you. And, and whereas here kind of every single day, like there are other companies also trying to build something and there are people trying to build it.

00;22;28;03 - 00;22;44;01

Christian Owens

And it's an ecosystem of people who are going through the same stuff that you can go to dinner with and be like, Oh, that sucked. Like, and then everybody's like, Yeah, rather than like, rather than like, that sucks. And then it's like, what's software like here? And it's just kind of.

00;22;44;01 - 00;22;46;21

Patrick Campbell

Like, like that's cute. I had a problem with this cow today. Like.

00;22;47;18 - 00;23;17;22

Christian Owens

I just like, and like, I think for me as well, it was like, sort of didn't really have like a peer group of, like people where I grew up who were also my age and building software companies. So it was like, where do you go? That's not like highest hit rate of of like small people that you could potentially learn from and like absorb information and kind of London sort of seemed like the is the that it was just like the natural conclusion of like where do we go from from from where we were.

00;23;17;25 - 00;23;22;10

Patrick Campbell

Leaving makes London unique like compared to other ecosystems out there. If anything.

00;23;22;22 - 00;23;43;08

Christian Owens

I think it is like diversity of industry. I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and like you walk down the street and like everybody's talking either about the company that they work for and like how they're killing it and or sort of the company that is starting and how they're killing it. And everybody is sort of focused on the same things.

00;23;43;08 - 00;24;16;18

Christian Owens

It's like, how do you raise money? How do we build this thing? How do we hire this person? Whereas here, like there is a healthy and growing like ecosystem of people talking about this stuff. And then equally there are people in entirely different industries who like sort of actually can contribute to that, like sort of, I think in the world of like startups and as businesses, we get into this weird position of, of sort of wanting to solve problems, which is great, it's super healthy.

00;24;17;09 - 00;24;42;17

Christian Owens

But sometimes we try and solve problems that have already been solved. Yeah. And the only reason that we don't know that they've been solved is because we're so, like, insular about like we're only talking to other people who have also never done it. Yeah, Yeah. And like when you do that enough, like you realize maybe there's actually like a great like this person worked at like an ad agency or they built a restaurant and like, they were really good at that.

00;24;42;19 - 00;24;53;22

Christian Owens

Yeah. Whereas like, you just and the heart rate of that stuff is much, much higher. And also like the different different cultures, like different cultures with different languages and like all of these things come in.

00;24;53;23 - 00;24;58;12

Patrick Campbell

This is awesome. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's cool.

00;24;58;12 - 00;25;17;04

Patrick Campbell

A huge shout out to Christian Owen's My new Brother in Arms here for doing the podcast all those years ago. Now you as a listener have what it takes to grow in that the world of SaaS Today. We talked about early SaaS origins, solving customer problems, the roadmap to success, getting your customers to trust you, and what makes London perfect for SaaS.

00;25;17;04 - 00;25;41;16

Patrick Campbell

Oh, and if you want to support Paddle Christian and I and the show, we'd appreciate it if you left a five star review of this podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you listen and watch the podcast, Gods tend to like that sort of thing, and we like to appease the podcast gods. Thanks for listening and make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, a podcast from Padel Recover the largest, Fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.