Last week, the Recharge team attended Recur and was immersed in a full day worth of strategic subscription content. Led by ProfitWell CEO Patrick Campbell, the content was intriguing and thought provoking and led to multiple actionable takeaways throughout the day. If you weren’t lucky enough to attend, here is a sample of our favorite content – but also make sure you attend next year!
UPDATE: All presentation videos are now hosted on the ProfitWell website. Check them out!
Recur 2019 just wrapped and we couldn’t have been more pumped to have the Recharge team along for the ride with us. Aside from being awesome integration partners, COO, Chathri Ali, brought the knowledge to our crowd with her top takeaways on global ecommerce growth at scale.”Patrick Campbell, Founder and CEO, ProfitWell
First up was April Dunford. Not only is April an accomplished startup positioning consultant, but this was her forty-third speaking engagement of the year. 43/52 weeks in 2019 April was on stage, and for good reason. Positioning is one of those buzz-words all startups think about but never seriously work through. Positioning your product is arguably the most important thing a company can do in its early stages because of what it does for your buyers.
To quote April herself, “We do not buy what we do not understand.” Ensuring your target customers know exactly what you’re selling, what the benefit is, and why it’s better than the competition is what will drive sales. Gone are the days of launching your product and hoping it sells.
Plus she gave everyone a copy of her book, we’ll take free stuff any day of the week.
Chris Savage, Founder and CEO of Wistia, discussed his theory on SaaS companies acting more like media companies when delivering content. He hypothesized that the more content companies put out, the more engaged their followers became. By splitting one large campaign into multiple bite-size chunks, companies not only get more visibility across channels, but also can capitalize on continued engagement long after the original piece was created.
Along the same lines, Wistia developed a documentary called “One, Ten, One Hundred” where they work with a video production company to create three ads for $1k, $10k, and a whopping $100k. This tested the relationship between creativity and dollars, check out the results for yourself and start delivering content more effectively.
Recharge was lucky enough to have our very own COO, Chathri Ali, invited to speak on growing and scaling a remote-first team. In one of the most anticipated talks of the day, Chathri laid out the history at Recharge and how it was a goal from the start to hire the best talent regardless of location.
With over 130 employees in 10 countries, Recharge has become a veteran in the remote workforce space and Chathri was able to divulge a few of our secrets as to how we got there.
Up next was Dan Martell, Founder of Saas Academy. Dan’s talk was all about removing friction from the customer journey. In his own words, “The next wave of Enterprise Software companies are removing friction & creating a consumer-level customer experience.” The best tech companies are filling a gap in functionality, but not at the expense of their end customers.
The B2B2C world is rapidly filling up, there is no more room for a product that is difficult to use or confusing in its implementation. A frictionless experience from your business is not a nice-to-have, it’s table stakes.
Finally, Patrick Campbell returned to the stage to deliver his closing keynote which focused in on the theme of Recur 2019: time. How can business owners make the most of the available time to drive the biggest impact to their end subscribers? Patrick dove deep into the ProfitWell data to deliver some intriguing conclusions from their 10,000 merchants.
Do Founders and CEOs with hobbies produce a faster or slower growing company from $1-10 million ARR? Turns out, companies grow faster when the leader is solely focused on the company’s growth. Hobbies and activities outside work tend to keep a person refreshed, avoiding the ever-growing ‘burnout.’ However, the data points to exponential growth with a sole focus on business. While it may not be the most sustainable way to grow a company, it is the fastest.
Do remote-first companies grow from $1-10 million ARR faster or slower than their in-office counterparts? This was a particularly interesting data point because of Recharge’s culture rooted in remote work. One might assume because of the flexibility and eliminated commute, these types of companies have more dedicated workers and therefore grow faster. However, the data points the other way.
Companies with employees in the office every day grow faster than remote-first companies. There are clearly pros and cons to both sides, there may even be a critical point where remote-first companies grow faster at a revenue figure north of $10 million. However, data is king and it doesn’t lie.
Our week in Boston helped us reflect on our data collected in 2019 and re-center our focus moving into 2020. The ProfitWell team was hospitable and knowledgeable and provided one of the better event experiences of the year. Cheers to a successful event and anticipated growth to all parties involved in the future.
