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Indie Hackers

#145 – The Slow, Deliberate Process of Making a SaaS Business Work with Jane Portman of Userlist

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9606 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2020

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jane Portman (@uibreakfast) is no stranger to making money online. Not only has she run a successful consultancy for nearly a decade, but she's also published 4 books and become a leading authority on UX and product design. So when Jane decided to start a SaaS company—Userlist— she was surprised to learn just slow and difficult the process can be. In this episode, Jane and I discuss the variables that makes companies faster or slower to grow, the importance of nailing your customer messaging so people understand what it is that you do, and her tips for how other founders can stick through the tough times to turn their side projects into successful SaaS businesses.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/145-jane-portman-of-userlist

Transcript

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0:00.0

What's up, everybody?

0:08.6

This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to The IndieHackers podcast.

0:13.0

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

0:18.6

How do they get to where they are today?

0:20.1

How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. Today I'm talking to Jane Portman, the founder of the user list. Jane, welcome to the show. Hi, Cortland.

0:38.1

It's a great pleasure to be here in your show

0:40.7

and to just be talking to your amazing, widest audience here.

0:45.8

My pleasure to have you, Jane.

0:47.4

You are the founder of a company called Usurlist.

0:50.8

Tell us a little bit about what Usselist is and how it works.

0:54.4

UserList is a tool for customer messaging and you can use it to send a lifecycle email

1:01.2

to your SaaS customers. And unlike other email automation tools, we are focusing entirely

1:07.7

on SaaS companies. So we're a bit of like a more focused, more streamlined

1:13.1

version of Intercom slash customer.com. And we've been out for two years by now, publicly

1:19.7

launched in August and have been growing much better ever since. And I do this together with

1:26.0

my co-founder, Benedict, and my co-founder, Claire

1:29.4

Sellen-trop, and I think she was on your show sometime. Yeah, big fan of Claire's. You know,

1:35.3

it strikes me when I hear you describe UserList. I've been following your story, and I know that if I

1:39.8

had asked you a year ago what Usualist does, you probably would have described it very differently.

1:45.2

You've had quite a journey with the evolution of exactly what it is that you're building,

1:48.9

but also how you describe it to people.

1:51.5

Exactly.

...

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