Nick Francis

speaker

323 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Nick Francis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Startups For the Rest of Us · Episode 839 | The Journey Growing Help Scout to $35M ARR · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

From, I'd say, 2017 on, we had a team, and I was on that team, of people that were always thinking about pricing and packaging, always optimizing and testing and moving the ball forward with regard to that aspect of our strategy.

And so very early on with these tools, as I mentioned, we were building a lot with AI.

We realized, wow, we're going to be able to create a lot of value for our customer that doesn't tie back to a seat.

And generally, you could sort of see like, hey, if you fast forward this 10 years, my sense is that a lot of businesses that are per seat today are not really going to make a lot of sense per seat tomorrow.

I felt like if you've read any Clayton Christensen, like I felt like we were about to live an innovator's dilemma.

where the incumbents were going to be, there was new technology coming in.

The incumbents were going to be at a strategic disadvantage.

They weren't going to adopt this new technology fast enough.

And there was going to be an opportunity for a little guy like Help Scout, still like, yes, you could say like tens of millions in revenue, but we're actually still the little guy.

There's an opportunity for us to outmaneuver the competition.

And so I felt like it was, yes, it was a massive swing, but I felt like customer support is moving away from seat-based pricing.

It's just not the correct value metric anymore.

So we did a bunch of research.

But at the time, it was just like, there's no research that's going to tell you to do something this crazy.

So we did the research.

We saw all the data points.

We talked to all the people.

And at the end of the day, I made a call to test it and just say, look, we have to test a fully usage-based pricing model.

And for us, that meant pricing per contact.

So if somebody reached out five times over the course of a month, we just charge for that one contact.

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