The podcast discusses building a SaaS product, overcoming growth plateaus, and strategies for improving free trial to paid conversion. The speaker shares advice on team happiness, personal passions, and explores optimized hosting solutions for SaaS startups.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Built By Product Managers For Product Managers
Janna and her co-founder built ProdPad because they couldn't find a product management tool that worked for them.
They used the tool internally for two years before deciding to productize and sell it.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Quit Early After Landing Page Traction
Janna quit her job before having external customers after seeing interest from an early landing page.
They launched a purchasable version six months later and got their first paying customer within weeks.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Use Content To Attract First Customers
Use content to teach your audience and build credibility before and after launch.
Write practical posts, speak at meetups, and let educational content attract the right customers.
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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.
🔑 Key Lessons
🎯 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.
🛠️ 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.
📉 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.
🧠 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.
🔄 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
The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders