Tradeoffs

In this episode of Tradeoffs, Patrick and Hiten dive deep on what to look for in 2021, defining your virtuous circle, customer development apathy, and a lot more to kick your week into gear.

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This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

In this episode of Tradeoffs, Hiten and I are talking about something that's near and dear to our hearts—being a transparent company. Spurred by the rise of self-funded companies in tech, transparency, both inside and outside a company, is a defining characteristic for a lot of successful SaaS businesses today. But fostering transparency requires making tradeoffs at every step of the journey.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

In this episode of Tradeoffs, Hiten and I take a break from talking about software products to dig into one of today’s most controversial rappers: Kanye West. That may sound a bit strange for a product-focused show, but the impact of Kanye’s music and personality on the world around him is an interesting example of how powerful personal brand really is. And with a successful musical career, fashion company, and design studio, Kanye definitely knows how to leverage that brand effectively.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

This episode of Tradeoffs is a big one.

Hiten Shah, co-founder of FYI and Product Habits, and ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell are tearing down the two biggest players in office productivity software: G Suite and Microsoft Office 365. With 36 years of experience and more than 180 million active monthly users, Office 365 dominated the market for more than 20 years. Going up against the only major player in the market must have seemed like a formidable task when G Suite came on the scene in 2006, but its native cloud platform is now Office 365’s major competitor.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

Can remote companies find success?

If you don’t already know, Hiten has founded several successful remote companies and is a strong proponent of the model. I’m still a bit skeptical. But the way Hiten talks about how he builds a remote team did a lot to alleviate my doubts.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

In this week’s episode of Tradeoffs, Hiten and I take a look at the fastest-growing company in SaaS history, Slack. Growing from a startup to a company with 1,664 employees in just five years, Slack is in a unique position to continue leading the charge in online business communication. But their insane growth may actually be hiding big issues for Slack’s future.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

In this week’s episode, Hiten and Patrick talk about something they both have a lot of experience with: freemium product strategy. With more startups looking into this model every day, they think it’s important to discuss the inherent tradeoffs of using freemium for your business. While both Hiten and Patrick are big proponents of freemium, it’s definitely not the easiest business model to work with if you don’t understand how to make it work.

During this conversation, Hiten and Patrick walk through how freemium acts as an acquisition strategy as opposed to a revenue driver, how product teams need to think about things differently, and why it’s important to understand customer psychology when building your own freemium product to make everything work together.

Take a listen to learn more.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

We’re tackling another big name in this week’s episode of Tradeoffs — music and audio content streaming provider Spotify. Hiten and I sit down to talk through Spotify’s successes and think about what they need to do to maintain their leading position in the market. It’s an interesting topic as, until now, Spotify’s maintained a singular focus on music discovery as their core value proposition.

The Tradeoffs

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

Welcome back for episode two of Tradeoffs, the show where Hiten Shah of FYI and Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell take a look at how popular companies make decisions and the impact of those decisions. This week, we’re investigating a company that've both looked up to in the past — note-taking and organization powerhouse Evernote. They’re an established leader in the market and one of the first movers in the space, but the tradeoffs they’ve made to get there have put the company in dire straits.

The biggest problem Evernote has is product-market fit. As big as Evernote is, they really don’t have a handle on what their customers actually want. And while a strong freemium acquisition strategy netted them 225M users, they’re not taking advantage of that base at all. As an 11-year-old company, we can assume that they’re battling some pretty strong tech debt issues as well, which really isn’t a good place to be with so many new competitors entering the market.

How can Evernote get themselves back on top? Take a listen to find out.

This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space. 

As one of the most popular and longest-running streaming services in the market, Netflix took a DVD rental service and transformed it into a cultural icon. We’ll show you how their relentless focus on quality content positioned the platform for impressive growth and how that has to change as the market evolves and expands.

The Tradeoffs

 This is a ProfitWell Recur production—the first media network dedicated entirely to the SaaS and subscription space.