Building a media asset inside a B2B SaaS company - with Patrick Campbell, Founder and CEO ProfitWell (Paddle)

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by a guest that I've been working almost two years doing the podcast. I'm just so excited to have Patrick Campbell, the founder and CEO of ProfitWell, now part of Paddle as our guest today. We'll be covering three main topics with Patrick because he's such a pioneer in this. Number one, the strategic inflection point leading to Patrick building a brand media into the Insight at ProfitWell. Second, the insights to building a successful media asset inside a SaaS company. And third, the metrics that informed the return on that brand media investment as a content marketing strategy. So with that, Patrick, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Patrick Campbell** (1:22)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Ray, especially with that introduction.
Now I feel like I got to live up to it, so I appreciate the kind words. Yeah, so quick background on me. My background is in econometrics and math, which means I'm a really great party guest, really good with spreadsheets here and there. But I started my career, worked in US intelligence in DC, then I worked at Google and then jumped into the startup world by founding ProfitWell. In ProfitWell, we exist or we existed, I guess, because technically we got bought by Paddle. So maybe I should say, Paddle, we exist to run and grow subscription companies automatically, so you can plug it in and we take care of all of your billing, your currencies, your taxes, your churn, everything just automatically. We're really well-known through the ProfitWell acquisition, which I founded and led as a bootstrap founder for nine years, was our content, which it sounds like we're going to talk about today. Then also, we were freemium with our Metrics products. We had about 37,000 subscription SaaS companies using our free financial metrics tool, which was really influential on our success and a whole battery of ways. But yeah, that's my background. I started the company in Boston, opened our sales office in Utah and lived out there for a while, and now I'm in sunny Puerto Rico, living the post-exit life, which is busier than the pre-exit life. It's interesting how those things work out.

**Ray Rike** (2:44)
San Juan where the sun is fun?

**Patrick Campbell** (2:46)
Yeah, that's right. I'm going to have 80 degrees here every single day. Every day, it's 80 degrees. So yeah, it's interesting.

**Ray Rike** (2:53)
Well, Patrick, you're a little self-effacing by saying, being a mathematician, econometrics background, you don't get invited to parties, but my wife is a double engineering major at MIT. My son's a data scientist and I'm a benchmark skeek, so you would be invited to any of my parties.

**Patrick Campbell** (3:08)
That's amazing. That's an amazing party. Holy cow. You guys must have a fascinating conversation.

**Ray Rike** (3:14)
We may find them fascinating, but some of our guests don't. But I was listening to one of your videos because you have so many media assets, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But you were talking about why you decided to build a brand media entity within ProfitWell, and you brought up some interesting competitive industry data points. There was over 15x increase in the number of competitors over a few years ago. customer acquisition cost is up 128 percent. The team tenure is down 35 percent. Tech wages are up 27 percent. How did all this data inform your decision to make the high-risk decision to build a media strategy within a SaaS company?

**Patrick Campbell** (3:55)
Yeah, it's a good question and to unpack it, I think you need to take a step back about what is your goal as a company.
It's to grow. It doesn't matter if you're bootstrapped, well-funded, whatever it is. I guess if you're trying to create a lifestyle business, you care about growth, but not as much as if you're trying to build a big business. We faced eight years ago the same problem that every other company faces, which is like, how do you grow? How do you grow efficiently? I think that what a lot of us miss as companies is, one, what are the macroeconomic trends that are happening in our sphere? Then also, what are the things we're going to do to get an outsized impact on growth? because if we do everything that everyone else is doing, we're going to get very similar results at best and let alone probably worse results because the circumstances are different. With those two things in mind, the first thing is the macroeconomic environment, and you teed me up for that with some of the data that we published. What we found, and this is something that's facing all of us in our businesses, is that when you were building a product in the early 2000s, it wasn't easy to build, but it was easy to market because you had the Internet basically opening up these new marketing and sales channels every single quarter. You had email marketing with 98 percent open rates. You had Google AdWords at a penny a click. You had remarketing open up, then Facebook, then LinkedIn, and all these other channels. What's happened in the past five to eight years has basically been, we've lost a lot of those new channels, not because they've gone away, but because everyone's using them now. Everyone's got Facebook ads, everyone's got a sales channel, everyone's got email marketing, outbound sales. We haven't had a brand new marketing channel since 2015, and that was Snapchat, which really isn't applicable to B2B. Then now we have TikTok, which maybe these are B2B, but they're B2B supplemental. This is why we're all reinventing channels. This is like ABM. ABM is like great outbound sales, and great targeted sales of 10 years ago, but now we have a system and tools and all these other things. The reason I bring that up is because since 2012, the number of competitors has increased 16x, it has caused CAC to go up by 130% as you stated, and team 10 years down because there's a lot more job mobility. The market that we're in is really, really hard. You can do a lot of these me too type of tactics and strategies, but you need to find where the leverage is. For us being a bootstrap company, which is even worse if you're trying to build a big company because you don't have as many resources, what I started noticing is that content did really well for us, because we talked about things like pricing and churn, which didn't get all the play. All the sales and marketing products, there's so much content out there about sales and marketing. For us, there wasn't a lot out there about pricing, there wasn't a lot out there about retention, and then even metrics. We just started publishing and we would get this outsized impact based on the effort because of the topic that we were talking about. It was just me publishing content once a week, then twice a week, then we had some contractors help us write. But then it was like, well, I'm going to hire a marketing team. How am I going to build that out? Well, what's your strategy be?