SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1103 When should he quit his agency and go all in on software?
01 Aug 2018
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Stefan's companies, UserBrain and Simplease?
It is worthwhile to keep looking for answers, even if everyone else has given up. He's, again, has a successful agency, Simplice, and now they've launched a SaaS product, UserBrain. They're in that beautiful moment of kind of deciding where focus is going, what's growing. But, you know, it sounds like a really sharp team. They've stayed small and lean and fully in control, which I like.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich... or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was 160 million dollars, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Stefan Rossler.
He's the co-founder of UserBrain and SimpleEase, and he started working with his other three co-founders, Andreas, Markus, and Mathias, back in 2009 when they were studying information design in Graz, Austria. He teaches user experience, usability, and design to students and clients and gives talks on many of these topics. Stefan, are you ready to take us to the top?
I'm ready, yes.
Good. Let's start. So what's your main focus? Is it SimpleEase or UserBrain?
Main focus is still Simplice at the moment. This is how we started the whole thing. And with Simplice, we got into this whole field of user experience about almost 10 years ago, because we figured that this is going to be more important in the future, I guess.
And from starting with working together with clients, we realized that as long as we work together with them with Simplice, which is a kind of a UX consultancy company, they're doing really fine. They're doing all the user testing, they're doing all of this stuff and they get feedback.
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Chapter 2: How did the idea for UserBrain emerge from agency work?
Well, you're a teacher, right? So, I mean, this makes sense that you focus on people. You probably have patients like nobody else has.
I have a lot of patients. People sometimes try to get me on the hook or something, but then after a few hours, they usually give up and see that this just doesn't work.
Yeah. So going into user brain now, so you launch it because you understand it's going to help your customers have more success on the agency side because they'll keep using you. They'll at least get some value if they stop using you on the agency side or even when they are using you on the agency side. Yeah. On the user brain side, let's shift kind of the focus now.
How do you think about the utility metrics you price around in that company?
What do you mean with what I'm thinking about?
So in user brain, how does the pricing work? What do people pay?
It's a fairly simple pricing. So it starts at $49 per month. And we wanted to make something that looked like this very typical SaaS business. So that's very important for us. And so at the moment, it's really kind of figuring out how many features can we put into user brand? How many features do we have to put in there to still be like this typical SaaS priced product?
Because that's kind of like what we want is something that's easy to sell, something where if a customer, for example, kind of complains about something, you just transfer the money back to their account. No problem there. Not unlike the consultancy business where you're like, oh, no.
client has problems you really have to focus because it's a big project and so on and so forth uh so it's like this very typical sas product and just to give you a bit of an understanding of where it's coming from you're very inspired at least especially me personally from 37 signals jason fried david hannemeyer they were doing things and the whole story about Basecamp.
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Chapter 3: Why hasn't Stefan gone all in on UserBrain yet?
uh and i think just a week ago we hit 10 000 so 10 000 people around the world who are who are testing with user brand and i don't know that's that's one number i know and i know that we in the beginning we had this idea that we want to make make it possible for people to kind of like make a living from being a user brain tester so those are kind of like numbers that are important for us and another number that's important that i it's important for me personally also is the number of user exposure hours one of our customers gets how many minutes of videos do
Do they actually watch people really using their product? Not just reading feedback from people, not just reading people being excited or positive on Twitter or on social media or anything, but really watching real people in the moment of using their product and seeing whether they're delighted or frustrated.
So if you care most about these users, these 10,000 user testers being able to make a living off your product, right? They obviously have to have income to make a living off of it. Do you know the number over the past 12 months, how much you've paid out to all your testers? No, I don't know that.
So how would you, if that's the number one thing for you, how do you, I don't understand how you don't know that number.
As I said in the beginning, main focus is on simply it's not on user brand. So, and this is a number that we want to keep increasing and so on. Uh, but it's something, it's not really important to measure this number at this point because we're definitely just said it's the number one thing for you.
I said that in the beginning, this was the main idea to have people making the whole income from doing user brand tests. At the moment, what we realize is that it's not really possible at this very moment because people, all the customers, they want to test with different users and so on. And at the moment, we're kind of a juncture point where we're thinking about, well,
Should we start going into this direction or not? Because many customers are asking for kind of like targeting options. So you want to target very specific people, which makes a lot of sense, especially from a marketing perspective. But as we've learned from the usability perspective and UX perspective, it's oftentimes not really important who you're testing with.
Why is it not important who you're testing with? You want to most closely match the demographic who's going to be using your tool when you find the tester.
How is that not important? That's the obvious thing. And everyone is talking about this. I mean, the first time we were thinking about it really was by reading Steve Krug. So he's kind of like the web usability guy. And he had made this comment about that people are not aware of how it's actually not really important who you're testing with, especially on the web side.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Stefan face in transitioning from agency to SaaS?
You could bootstrap this.
Yeah, that's, that's what we're doing. Um, but as you said, the intentional is, it's actually a very good word. We should start using it internally. Also that this is really about being intentional. Uh, and it's very important that you are, you are the person who can make decisions. And so for me, there is no real war between the two of them.
It's not really an issue because I don't have stress with this. It doesn't have to be at whatever number.
Yeah, yeah. No, no. It's not about stress or worry, but you only have 24 hours in the day. You're either doing agency work or you're doing user brain work. And there are two separate things. You've told me there are two very separate things. What I'm hearing you say is you have a very safe living and a very safe income from the agency.
And you don't have the risk appetite to give that up to go all in on the software. None of you guys, none of the four founders do. That's what I'm hearing you say. You're hedging the risks.
You mean we're not forced to?
to not forced, not forced. You don't, you don't believe in the user brain concept enough to go all in on it. You want the agency there as a safety net.
I'm not sure if this was, this is a bit flawed. No, I don't. I'm not sure if it's, if this implies that we don't believe in it. I'm not sure about this. Uh, I mean, yes, we don't, we don't have the, uh, sorry.
Uh,
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