Geoff's Marketing Experiments

Co-founder, Outseta

About

Hi, I'm Geoff. I'm a Co-founder of a SaaS start-up called Outseta.On this site you can follow along as I run marketing experiments to grow my SaaS start-up. Each post includes what I'm working on, the strategy behind it, screenshots or videos showcasing the actual work, and results whenever possible.It's always free for Outseta customers—anyone else access the full library of experiments for a one-time fee of $149.This is not a course—it's an inside look at scaling a SaaS start-up.

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Follow along as I run marketing experiments to scale my SaaS.

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Experiment Library

This page contains a chronological list of all experiments published on this site along with a brief explanation, so you can easily find ones that are of particular interest to you.

1 - The First 500—I created a course on how Outseta landed it's first 500 customers, which this site gives you free access to.
2- Marketing attribution—This experiment focuses on building a Zapier automation to aggregate responses to a "How did you hear about us" email sent to new customers.
3- Updating our Webflow App listing—We have real estate on our most important technology partners website—this experiment is a round of copy updates.
4 - Marketing our pricing advantages—We have a significant competitive advantage around pricing, albeit one that's hard wrap your head around. This experiment is hard core product / pricing marketing.
5 - Using Transparency to compete—Two competitors in the email marketing space had some beef—I used it as an opportunity to shine some light on Outseta by sharing our metrics openly.
6 - Onboarding Feedback—This experiment details how I changed the sign up links on our website to prompt users to submit feedback on our software's sign up and onboarding experience.
7 - Wappalyzer—This experiment covers how I use a tool called Wappalyzer to win customers away from competitors or businesses using a certain combination of technologies that I know Outseta competes well with.

The First 500

So let's start here... I already created a course on how my start-up, Outseta, landed it's first 500 customers. This site is more focused on scaling up whereas that course focuses on starting up.But hey, you purchased a lifetime membership to this site—the least I can do is give you access to that.The First 500Just enter the code Outseta500 at checkout and it's free.

Attribution

In this experiment I share how I think about marketing attribution in general. I use "Visit Goals" configured in Plausible Analytics to get a sense of which traffic is driving conversions. But this experiment focuses on how I built a Zapier automation to aggregate responses to a "How did you hear about us?" email that is automatically sent to new subscribers. This providers great qualitative feedback all pulled together in one place, without any ongoing effort.

Updating our Webflow App Listing

Webflow is our most important technology partner—Outseta offers a "Webflow App" and thus has a listing on their website. It's important real estate—I can see that website visitors coming to our website from Webflow's spend about twice as long on our site and convert at a higher rate than other customers.The copy on our initial submission focused heavily on what our Webflow App does, and not what Outseta does more broadly.That's the primary thing we're trying to address in updating our listing.

You can see some of the adjustments I made for our V2 submission below. This listing focuses a lot more on Outseta's ability to give your Webflow site authentication and payments tools (what buyers are typically looking for), then speaks to our feature set more broadly.V2 SubmissionOutseta All-in-one membership software for Webflow. Payments, authentication, CRM, email & more.Features

Authentication: Email & password, Google Auth, or use Outseta as your SSO provider
Payments: Offer free trials, subscriptions, one-time products, per user pricing, and add-ons
Leverage powerful CRM, email, help desk, and reporting tools to grow your business
Automatically sync data between Outseta and Webflow CMS—no third party tools required
Save thousands with payment processing fees that are consistently 1%-4% lower than other membership software providers

The V2 listing is now live on Webflow's site.Recognize where your most important real estate is online and focus heavily on optimizing it! There's likely a small number of places that really warrant your consistent attention and updates.

Marketing our pricing advantages

Outseta has a pretty massive advantage when around pricing, but it's one that's tough to communicate.In short, we built our own subscription management and invoicing tools back in 2016—before Stripe's own subscription management and invoicing tools even existed (it's part of the reason we started the company). As a result, Outseta does not use "Stripe Billing" under the hood—which almost all of our competitors do. Stripe Billing costs an additional .8% per transaction, so our customers don't pay these fees but customers of our competitors do.But the problem is this—we charge our own transaction fees, in addition to Stripe's transaction fees.And our competitors advertise that they charge their own transaction fees, in addition to "Stripe Fees."Those Stripe Fees are higher than ours! But almost no one realizes that.For this experiment I updated our pricing page to include a video where I explain this difference in our pricing.I also updated this page where I explain this difference in detail.This one is tough, because it's not easy to explain quickly and can feel kind of nit-picky.But it's also something users deserve to know—every customer that's migrated to Outseta has reported saving between 1% and 4% per transaction on payment processing fees.For one customer that was processing about $500k in payments annually, he saved enough by switching to Outseta from Memberstack that he paid his Outseta subscription fees for the next 3 years.Here's the video I added to the pricing page as well.

Using Transparency to compete with bigger competitors

Today's experiement is a quick one—it's a good example of:1) How you can use current events in your marketing
2) How transparency can help you compete with bigger competitorsI came across a Twitter post where two of the major players in the email marketing space, ConvertKit and Beehiiv, were fighting with one another. Specifically, ConvertKit posted an article basically calling Beehiiv out for poor email deliverability. Beehiiv's CEO responded with this tweet.I decided this was a good opportunity to share Outseta own email deliverability metrics by directly sharing a screenshot of them from our SendGrid account on Twitter.

Transparency builds trust and the truth is our metrics are as good as either of theirs. For our own customers, I think this builds loyalty. And for prospective customers, our name gets out there with some credibility behind it—it introduces us a viable alternative.There's nothing groundbreaking here, but industry news and happenings often present an opportunity for you to join the discussion in a credible way.

Hijacking our sign up links to capture onboarding feedback

This experiment is really simple as was inspired by Ruben Gamez.I was looking to improve our sign up and onboarding processes, as these represent a critical part of the user experience and have the potential to improve the performance of all of our marketing channels.To that end, I updated both of the primary call-to-action buttons on our home page. These usually direct a user to a sign up form, but instead I just redirected users to a landing page with a simple offer.Record yourself going through the sign up and onboarding process, and we'll give you a month of Outseta for free.While this temporarily hurt our conversion rates, it gave us really valuable user feedback captured directly from users who were organically going through our sign up process anyways.In less than 24 hours I captured 7 really detailed video walkthroughs of customers going through our onboarding process. These insights are already being used to build a better sign up and onboarding process for all users—which dramatically outweighs the very temporary downsides.I built this page and made these updates in less than 10 minutes—user research doesn't need to be difficult!

Using Wappalyzer to Win Business from Competitors

In this experiment I share how I'm experimenting with a tool that's new to me—Wappalyzer—to win business away from competitors and businesses that are using a certain combination of technologies that I know Outseta competes well with.Wappalyzer allows me to easily identify these sites and also gives me contact information for contacts at these companies. I then follow up with an email like the one below.

I generally don't spend a lot of time on campaigns focused on winning business from competitors—it's just a tougher battle than focusing on finding buyers who are searching for products like yours and haven't bought a competitive solution yet. But this has been working well because my outreach is super targeted and relevant given I know which tools the company is already using.