10 lessons on bootstrapping a $200m business | Patrick Campbell (ProfitWell)

**Patrick Campbell** (0:00)
The bratty thing here is that real professionals ship. Like at the end of the day, like real profession, I don't care what, if you're a marketer, a product person, engineer, like it doesn't, like ops person, people ops, real professionals ship, and they ship at a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing. In my opinion, your tempo framework is more important than your org design.
And so if you've ever had like a team that seems really, really smart, but they're always planning, or they don't really like ship a lot, or you've had trouble where everyone kind of gets it at the leadership level, but then the team below them and below them seems to be kind of going in a different direction, you probably don't have enough alignment and you don't have enough alignment on like what good looks like in terms of like tempo.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:45)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Patrick Campbell. Patrick is the founder and CEO of ProfitWell, which he bootstrapped and sold without any funding for over $200 million. I've been a big fan of ProfitWell and of Patrick for many years. He's one of the most insightful and smartest people that I know, constantly sharing wisdom on Twitter and in his newsletter, primarily on pricing and retention and team building and all of the elements of building a successful SaaS business. I've been excited to get Patrick on the podcast since I launched it, and I think this may be the most action-packed Signal to Noise episode yet. We cover 10 topics in an hour, including hot takes on team building, bootstrapping, shipping, competitive analysis, user research, and of course, pricing and retention. Do not miss this episode. It is one of my new favorites. With that, I bring you Patrick Campbell after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Patrick, welcome to the podcast.

**Patrick Campbell** (3:33)
Thanks for having me, man. Good to finally, we've been texting, chatting for years now, and I just realized we've never had an actual conversation. So this is where the relationship and the friendship ends because we realize how awkward we are together, I guess.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:47)
I highly doubt it, I hope that doesn't happen. I wanted to get you on this podcast ever since I started this podcast. It's always been on my list.
You're just generally one of the smartest humans and most amazing humans I know. And so thank you for joining me on this podcast.

**Patrick Campbell** (4:01)
We gotta introduce you to more people, but I appreciate that, I appreciate that.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:06)
You're a humble, humble man.
So usually what I do with these podcasts is I have kind of just like one main topic that I focus on, but I feel like you're such a renaissance man of a brain that I thought it'd be more fun to go through 10 different topics and kind of like power through them and see your perspective. I feel like you have all these contrarian takes on things and these like interesting insights. And so what I wanna do is just go through 10 topics and kind of just get a sense of what's like a big mistake founders companies make in this area. What's maybe a big opportunity they miss or just like what's a hot take on this topic? How does that sound?