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Patrick Campbell
Today’s story: Patrick Campbell, the self-taught pricing guy who built ProfitWell into one of SaaS’s most beloved platforms—not with venture funding or flashy marketing, but with relentless research, a freemium bet that paid off, and an almost unhealthy obsession with spreadsheets.
What you’ll learn:
Why giving away your product might be the smartest strategy
How he turned boring SaaS data into an addictive product
Lessons on bootstrapping, accuracy, and pricing psychology
Why “free” was his greatest marketing weapon, Patrick Campbell
Patrick Campbell didn’t come from the VC pipeline or Y Combinator.
He grew up in small-town Wisconsin. His dad was a factory worker, and his mom was a stay-at-home parent. No legacy network. No tech mentors. No funding safety net.
What did he have? A job at Google, and an itch to solve a problem founders didn’t know they had: pricing.
“Most startups treat pricing like a one-time guess,” he said. “That’s like treating your go-to-market like a coin toss.”
In 2012, he left Google, liquidated his 401(k), and launched Price Intelligently—a bootstrapped consultancy focused on subscription pricing.
The problem was… no one cared.
“I thought you were a VC.”
In the early days, Patrick hustled nonstop—cold-emailing founders, knocking on doors, offering pricing audits just to get conversations started.
He got ghosted constantly.
One time, he walked into a meeting only to hear:
“I only took this because I thought you were with a VC”
Still, he stayed and pitched.
Rejection taught him something crucial: you can't sell vitamins—you need to sell painkillers.
So he pivoted. Instead of selling pricing advice, he built software that exposed the pain: ProfitWell Metrics, a free product that gave SaaS companies deep visibility into their revenue and churn.
It worked like a charm.
The Human Flywheel
In those early years, Patrick was not the “CEO” type sitting back and strategizing.
He was the strategy. And the customer success team. And the content marketer. And the guy fixing Stripe bugs at 2 a.m.
He ran demos. Answered every support ticket. Edited every blog post. Rewrote copy on the homepage daily if it meant 0.1% more conversions.
One night, a free user threatened to churn over a bug. Patrick stayed up all night rebuilding their Stripe integration.
I didn’t care that they hadn’t paid us yet. I cared that they were trusting us.
That obsession created loyalty. And the loyalty fed growth.
Free Made $200M
The decision to make ProfitWell Metrics free wasn’t a growth hack. It was a strategy.
Metrics gave him a wedge into companies’ financials. Once users were hooked, ProfitWell could upsell its two paid products: Retain (churn recovery) and Price Intelligently (pricing strategy). Together, they formed a full revenue automation stack.
By 2022, ProfitWell had:
30K+ companies using Metrics
Millions in recurring revenue
Zero dollars raised
Paddle acquired it that year for $200M+.
1. Obsess over the data.
ProfitWell’s metrics were known for being the most accurate in the business. That wasn’t luck—it was the result of months of brutal QA. Trust came from precision.
2. Don’t charge first. Serve first.
Giving away your best product can be a brilliant move—if it gets you embedded in your customers’ workflow. Campbell’s freemium strategy was sharp, narrow, and intentional.
3. Price = perception.
He knew that pricing is not just math—it’s psychology. The way you frame and package value matters just as much as what you’re selling.
4. Bootstrapping breeds focus.
No VC money meant no distractions. Campbell had to build something customers loved—and paid for—fast. Constraints = clarity.
5. Build a media machine.
Campbell didn’t just run a product company—he built a media arm. Podcasts, YouTube shows, blog series… ProfitWell created more SaaS content than most VCs. And it converted.