4x founder, 3 exits — currently building Podia, an OG in the creator economy since 2014, AMA!

Hi Spencer,

Thanks for the detailed post. Couple of questions from me:

  1. How did Podia land on its pricing strategy in the early days? Do you have any advice on how to find a consistent, and non-negotiable, price that you can offer to self-serve customers? (we could A/B test, but unlikely to have quite enough traffic for this to be worthwhile yet!)

  2. Podia was your first VC backed business. A) What were the positives you experienced from raising from venture? B) What were the negatives / shocks of raising from venture? C) What would be the 1 or 2 pieces of advice or things to think about for a business that is about to flip from bootstrapped to VC backed?

I’ve somehow managed to cheekily throw a lot of questions at you there! Hugely appreciated Spencer, and love to see your 1st creator prediction, exactly why we founded our business!

Best,

Tom

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Podia’s alternative page SEO strategy is legendary.

-What SEO strategies have been most effective for your companies?
-For alternative pages, how do you manage competitors complaining about what is listed on their page?
-What is your Google Ad strategy? Ie - target competitor keywords with link to your alternative page on them?
-Any additional SEO strategies like alternative pages that are big wins for your companies?

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I’ve got another one, Spencer! :slight_smile:

This is something I’m keen on learning from anyone building an all-in-one sort of SaaS, where each feature is essentially a product category on its own. I think Podia is going in a similar direction. What have been some of the product-related challenges and unexpected benefits of that approach?

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Hi Spencer, thanks so much for offering to participate in the AMA here! I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time, and the design of Podia has always impressed me. I also remember Carbonmade — this brings back memories!

Very interested in your journey to where Podia is today — how has raising money changed the way you run Podia? It’s awesome to hear you’re profitable (rock on!) — but do your investors expect a big return in the next 5-10 years?

Also vaguely related — has your routine and lifestyle changed at all since raising money and having a larger team? Have you managed to maintain a level of freedom and work/life balance successfully?

Thanks Spencer, and congrats on such an epic journey so far!

James

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Hello Spencer,

Thanks for doing the session…!

  1. What is the key learning across three bootstrapped organization exits? What kept you motivated on each exit and come up with the next one, throw some light on the approach towards a product, marketing, customer, etc?
  2. One thing that you would highlight, that made you a bootstrapper-turned-fundraiser. What made the VC fund you!.
  3. And, 7 years with 28 people being a single founder and profitable since 2019, what are the qualities that any single founder should pay more attention to or direction to succeed?
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Happy to be here!

Aside from founder-market fit, which you’ve stated you’ve found in serving individuals over orgs, what are some other unique requirements of getting B2C (or rather prosumer?) SaaS right?

I’m not sure if B2C businesses have unique requirements. I do think community and brand building are a lot more important in B2C. Treating your customers like they’re an extension of your team is a useful tactic.

To add some more context to this. Most industry benchmarks and the overall discourse tends to be heavily skewed towards B2B startups. The few relevant pieces of advice that do come through, don’t miss out on highlighting that the B2C/prosumer model is prone to significantly higher churn and fewer account expansion opportunities.

You’re correct that churn is significantly higher for B2C startups (4 to 5% if you’re good) versus B2B (net negative churn to 2% if you’re good). What I always say about this is that while that is true, there are far more B2C customers than there are B2B customers. Your pool of customers as a B2C startup could easily be in the tens or hundreds of millions like we see at Podia.

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I’m curious to learn, what are some of the org-wide, cultural practices and rituals that emphasize the written word and how have those helped you scale so efficiently with such a lean team. Especially significant given the rise and growing acceptance of remote work.

Great question!

Excellent communication and written documentation are two of our most important principles. Those extend to everything we do. Here are a few examples:

  1. We use Slab for internal documentation and every time anything significant happens that we’ll want to look back at, we’ll create a new entry. That’s anything from an incident report from a downed server to documenting how we work as a team.
  2. Every project leader (we call them Champions) writes a Friday update documenting their team’s progress for the week.
  3. I write a weekly summary email on Saturdays that highlights all of our projects and everything happening across the company (support, marketing, hiring, etc.)
  4. We are really great at keeping all long discussions out of Slack and into Basecamp. That way, people are taking their time to write out their thoughts rather than just blurting it out in Slack.
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Saw that Podia accomplished the rare feat of becoming a profitable, venture-backed startup a couple of years ago. Kudos on that!

Thank you so much. It meant a lot to me, because it gave us the freedom to take more product risks!

I’m assuming keeping costs low as you scaled was a big part of it. And so was your bootstrapping experience. What are some tactical mental models for early-stage folks who’d want to keep a handle on costs without adversely affecting their growth potential?

You’re totally right. Having bootstrapped my previous businesses, I was very cognizant about the value of a dollar. We’d never spend on anything we didn’t need to.

A few examples:

  • We’d never hire for roles we hadn’t already done ourselves. That way we’d make fewer hiring mistakes and only hire when we felt absolute internal pressure to do so.
  • Still to this day, we monitor every purchase we make and we routinely stop subscriptions to products we’re no longer using. Last time I looked, we’re paying subscribers to 80+ different tools.
  • We use a financial planning tool, so that we never over spend. That way we can tweak and adjust our hiring plan, future expenses, etc., to make sure that they’re within our budget.
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Thanks!

How did Podia land on its pricing strategy in the early days? Do you have any advice on how to find a consistent, and non-negotiable, price that you can offer to self-serve customers? (we could A/B test, but unlikely to have quite enough traffic for this to be worthwhile yet!)

We’ve changed our pricing around a lot as the product has improved over the past 7 years. When we first launched, we had a single pricing plan that was low cost ($19/month) simply to get customers in the door and to start learning from them.

Trying to remember back to that time and I believe the reasoning for $19/month was that it was half the cost of our closest competitors, so we could slip in under their pricing to get more price conscious customers.

Definitely not a good long-term strategy, but it got us the early customers we needed to build off of.

Then as things progressed and the product got better, we raised the starting price to $29/month and introduced a 2nd $49/month plan. Then raised those 2 plans again to $39/month and $79/month respectively. And then in 2021, we introduced a 3rd higher tier plan of $199/month.

TLDR: We mostly went with our gut early on and adjusted when it felt right.

Surprisingly, we’ve never done any A/B testing around price. We just hire data lead so we’ll soon start taking on more projects like that.

Podia was your first VC backed business. A) What were the positives you experienced from raising from venture? B) What were the negatives / shocks of raising from venture? C) What would be the 1 or 2 pieces of advice or things to think about for a business that is about to flip from bootstrapped to VC backed?

Honestly, the best advice I can give you is to pick the right investor over the valuation. We definitely could have gotten a higher valuation in our first round than we did, but a smart friend of mine said that you can always optimize for valuation in later rounds, so focus on finding a VC you can grow with.

The most positive bit about raising VC is obviously the money hehe. The money bought me time. I was then able to use time to focus on our long-term strategy rather than fighting for short-term wins, which I’d previously done as a bootstrapper.

I haven’t had any really negative issues since raising, but that may be mostly because we’ve been successful for most of our company’s life. It may be a lot worse for companies who aren’t.

And lastly my advice on switching from bootstrapped to VC: as I mentioned above, focus on the investor, not the term sheet.

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Podia’s alternative page SEO strategy is legendary.

Thank you! :smile:

What SEO strategies have been most effective for your companies?

Alternative pages by far as you mentioned above.

For alternative pages, how do you manage competitors complaining about what is listed on their page?

We’ve never heard any complaints from competitors. We make sure to keep our podia alternative pages informationally accurate. We never lie.

What is your Google Ad strategy? Ie - target competitor keywords with link to your alternative page on them?

That’s not our entire strategy, but we do some competitor targeting as warranted. We use a third party agency to handle our Google Ad strategy, though. We just give them benchmarks, budget, and creative and they do the rest.

Any additional SEO strategies like alternative pages that are big wins for your companies?

Alternative pages are :100: but having an SEO-driven blog is equally as important. To make that work, though, you need to have really talented writers who can write interesting articles that tie back to keywords.

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This is something I’m keen on learning from anyone building an all-in-one sort of SaaS, where each feature is essentially a product category on its own. I think Podia is going in a similar direction. What have been some of the product-related challenges and unexpected benefits of that approach?

Lots, but you have to be okay with that! :rofl:

If you’re going to build an all-in-one tool, you need to keep in mind that it’ll take 10 years to get to where you want it to be. You need time, resources, a big team, and a great strategy to be successful.

The biggest product-related challenges is just figuring out what part of your product to focus on and when. With an all-in-one, you can’t focus on everything at all times, so you need to hop around and always work on what’s most important at any given time.

For example, at the start of COVID-19, we focused a lot on our webinar feature as we knew that creators would need that during the pandemic.

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Hi Spencer, thanks so much for offering to participate in the AMA here! I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time, and the design of Podia has always impressed me. I also remember Carbonmade — this brings back memories!

Happy to be here! Your name is familiar too!

Very interested in your journey to where Podia is today — how has raising money changed the way you run Podia? It’s awesome to hear you’re profitable (rock on!) — but do your investors expect a big return in the next 5-10 years?

We’ve been really fortunate that our main investors are not concerned with liquidity any time soon. They simply want to see us continue to grow and innovate, which completely align with how I want to build Podia.

Raising money versus bootstrapping has meant:

  1. We can focus more on the long-term as we had money to get us through the early days. This is the key one.
  2. We have a board who we meet with quarterly and provides me with helpful external feedback. It provides me an opportunity to sit back and reflect on the business.
  3. It made it easier for us to hire new employees as they knew they were joining a “serious” business. Always found it tough hiring for my bootstrapped businesses until those became profitable.
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I really like how you’ve illustrated the evolving nature of both customer feedback and how startups should interpret it across various stages of growth. Would you ascribe a similar evolutionary nature to how you’ve come to think about competition as you’ve scaled from zero to thousands of customers? Read about your stirring, current stance, here. And was curious. :slight_smile:

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You’re welcome!

What is the key learning across three bootstrapped organization exits? What kept you motivated on each exit and come up with the next one, throw some light on the approach towards a product, marketing, customer, etc?

I wrote about it a bit on my blog a while back, but perseverance has been my key learning as an entrepreneur. No matter how early success your product/company has, you need to keep putting one fit in front of the other and continue to march forward every day. You’ll have days when you wanna quit, but you have to keep at it to be successful.

One thing that you would highlight, that made you a bootstrapper-turned-fundraiser. What made the VC fund you!.

Our first investor mostly invested in me as a serial entrepreneur, but I know he also liked the business and the potential size of our market. Keep in mind that we raised our first check in the summer of 2015, which was very early in the creator economy.

And, 7 years with 28 people being a single founder and profitable since 2019, what are the qualities that any single founder should pay more attention to or direction to succeed?

That’s a good question!

It’s really important as a solo founder that you have a great leadership team around you. You’re really only as good as those top 2-3 people you have in your inner circle. A great leadership team will take a lot of the work off your plate, which lets you focus on the long-term strategy of the business.

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I really like how you’ve illustrated the evolving nature of both customer feedback and how startups should interpret it across various stages of growth. Would you ascribe a similar evolutionary nature to how you’ve come to think about competition as you’ve scaled from zero to thousands of customers? Read about your stirring, current stance, here. And was curious. :slight_smile:

To be honest, I think about our competitors as much as I thought about them way back when I founded the business in 2014 and that’s very little. :rofl: I wrote about it a bit in this blog post about why your competitors don’t matter.

Competitors matter a lot more to your customers (and potential customers) than they should to you.

It’s not fair to say that I don’t check on them every so often, but much more from a marketing perspective than from a feature set. I like to see how we can continue to differentiate ourselves in our marketing, so I like to zig when they zag.

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Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing the inner workings of the much-admired Podia playbook, @spencerfry! There’s a contagious clarity to these responses that we can all take a page from. :raised_hands:

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And thanks, as ever, to Relay founders, @trappology, @TomG, @jamesgill, @Deepika, and @aditi1002, for joining us today with some great questions, equally informed by openness and ardor! :sunflower:

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Thanks for having me!

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Thanks Spencer!

That makes perfect sense. The B2C scale one can reach with community and brand efforts certainly has the potential to offset churn risk. And I love your crisp, zig-when-they-zag stance on competition. :slight_smile:

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These seem like some great practices to instil a calmer, async operating cadence.

Thanks for taking the time, Spencer!

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