Janna Bastow and her co-founder built ProdPad for themselves as product managers who could not find the right tool. After two years of using it internally, they quit their jobs with zero customers. Growth was steady until they hit the "plateau of doom" at $30K MRR and had to fix their free trial conversion to survive.
Janna explains how cutting free trial conversion time from 30 days to 7 and gamifying onboarding doubled their trial to paid conversion rate. A single "that was weird" email sent 10 minutes after signup recovered 25-30% of lost signups. Focusing the entire team on improving trial conversion for three months broke through a six-month revenue plateau.
ProdPad's co-founder Simon Cast identified with 85% certainty by day 9 which free trial conversion users would become paying customers. That insight drove the decision to shorten trial time and focus on SaaS free trial optimization through early engagement. ProdPad's customers include Disney, Automattic, and eBay.
š Key Lessons
- šÆ Shorter trial times increase free trial conversion by creating urgency: ProdPad cut their trial from 30 to 14 days and immediately doubled conversions because users engaged faster with less time to procrastinate.
- š ļø Gamify onboarding to teach your product and improve free trial conversion: ProdPad let users earn extra trial days by completing key actions like adding ideas and setting up integrations - replacing product tours with incentive-driven education.
- š The "plateau of doom" at $30K MRR comes from losing focus: ProdPad's growth flatlined when the team experimented with AdWords and events instead of continuing the content strategy that built their customer base.
- š§ Focus your entire team on one metric for three months: Janna stopped everything and had every team member work on free trial conversion - no new features, no marketing experiments, just one number.
- š Behavior-based emails outperform generic onboarding sequences: ProdPad's "that was weird" email sent 10 minutes after signup recovered 25-30% of inactive users - far better than standard welcome messages.
Chapters
- Introduction
- Meet Janna Bastow and ProdPad overview
- How two product managers built ProdPad for themselves
- Using ProdPad internally for two years before launching
- Quitting jobs with zero customers
- Tipping points that led to going full time
- Building a landing page with a buy button that went nowhere
- Getting the first paying customer through organic search
- From first customer to first 10 through iteration and feedback
- Content strategy that was really just teaching and educating
- Hiring first team members after a year of bootstrapping
- Growing through reinvesting monthly recurring revenue
- Hitting the plateau of doom at $30K MRR
- The year of faffing about - losing focus in 2015
- Why free trial conversion was the right metric to fix
- Cutting trial from 30 to 14 days doubled free trial conversion
- Gamifying onboarding - earn trial days by completing key actions
- Behavior-based emails that recovered 25-30% of inactive signups
- The "that was weird" email with amazing response rates
- Results - reaching 10% free trial conversion rate
- Lightning round
Resources
