[SaaS Club] Failed SaaS Launch to $1.4 Billion Valuation

Hey Reader

I hope you're doing well.

Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club:

🎧 Podcast

From Failed SaaS Launch to $1.4 Billion Valuation

Christian Owens started Paddle when he was 18 years old.

He was running another business and getting fed up figuring out how to accept payments, calculate taxes, deal with fraud etc.

So he emailed companies he'd done business with to ask how they solved these problems. He was hoping they'd give him a solution.

They didn't. They all told him that they had the same problems.

So Christian decided that he was going solve those problems.

In 2012, he built and launched the first version of Paddle.

It wasn't particularly good and customers weren't that interested.

But there was one feature that customers did like. So he scrapped 90% of the features and focused on the 10%.

Today, Paddle employs nearly 400 people, is approaching $100 million in ARR, and has raised $300M in funding.

I hope you enjoy it.

Listen to the full podcast episode


🖥 Planorama Design

You know that your customers need to experience the value of your SaaS product quickly, or they're not going to stick around.

So creating a great user experience is critical for every SaaS product. But the reality is that many SaaS companies struggle with UX design.

That's why Planorama Design offers professional UX & UI design services that reduce the complexity and make your SaaS product more intuitive to use.

Their team of experts will work with you to deliver UX & UI designs, user stories, and test cases that accelerate your dev team to bring your product to market faster, and done right the first time.

Learn more about Planorama Design


📗 Book of the Week

This week's book recommendation is from Christian:

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Why did Christian recommend this?

"It's one of those books that doesn't gloss over the mess that is sometimes creating a company. I really like it just for its honesty"

🌐 Around the Web

YouTube

We're now posting full-length video interviews on YouTube.

So if you want to watch the interview with Christian, check it out there:

😍 Let's Get Social
Want to get more social? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Have a great week!

- Omer


P.S. I've just launched a new coaching program (Accelerate 2.0). If you're interested in joining the first cohort you can learn more here.