Episode 747 | Evolving SaaS Customer Success Over 7 Years (with Jane Portman)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode 747, Rob Walling interviews Jane Portman, co-founder of Userlist, to discuss the evolution of their SaaS customer success strategy. Jane shares the four stages of Userlist’s customer success journey, from the early days of trial and error to implementing done-for-you services. They also discuss the challenges of customer onboarding for complex products. Topics we cover: (2:20) – How customer success works at Userlist (5:27) – Dealing with upfront onboarding friction (9:51) – Stage 1, “young and naive” (12:16) – Stage 2, “hire someone” (19:06) – Stage 3, “done for you services” (25:47) – Leveraging the Userlist blog (29:26) – Stage 4, “developing your own frameworks” Links from the Show: SaaS Institute TinySeed Jane Portman (@uibreakfast) | X Jane Portman (@uibreakfast.com) | Bluesky Userlist Episode 471 | Fighting to Gain Traction in a Crowded Space with Jane Portman of Userlist Episode 742 | Normalizing Hard Things, Facing Your Biggest Threat, and Making it Fast (A Rob Solo Adventure) Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore Userlist Closes a Pre-Seed Round with 21 Angel Investors SaaS Email Marketing Strategy: Everything You Need to Know 20+ “Invite Your Team” Email Examples Atomic Emails: Our Proven Method for Writing Email Campaigns If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Start Up to the Rest of Us.
0:02.0	I'm Rob Walling, and in this episode, I speak with Jane Portman, the co-founder of UserList,
0:07.9	about how they've evolved their SaaS customer success process over the past seven years of running their mostly bootstrap company.
0:16.4	In this episode, we cover the four stages that their customer success process has traveled as it's evolved over this time.
0:27.2	Before we dive into the conversation, I wanted to let you know about an effort that the team, a Tiny Seed and I have been working on here in late 2024.
0:38.2	It's premium coaching and community for SaaS founders doing 1 million ARR and up.
0:46.2	Right now we have a teaser page up at SaaS Institute.com.
0:50.2	If you are a founder who is at or in the neighborhood of 1 million ARR, any your email there,
0:58.7	and we will be reaching out with more information.
1:02.6	This is going to be an elite and exclusive community application only, hand chosen.
1:09.3	It's not intended to be an extremely large group of people,
1:13.6	but it's intended to get those that are at that point where YouTube videos and podcasts
1:20.9	and even books are less and less helpful because you need more one-on-one focus
1:27.1	and you want to be matched in a
1:28.5	mastermind with other ambitious like-minded founders and you want to receive direct advice
1:33.8	from handpick mentors and who better to do that than tiny seed this is separate from our
1:40.1	accelerator right our accelerator is where we invest in early stage startups that are doing
1:45.2	what between, you know, 1 and 2K MRR on the low end and maybe 40K, 50K on the high end.
1:52.6	This is a high end and highly curated premium coaching offering for those that are further
1:59.0	along, basically doing seven or eight figures in
2:01.5	ARR. So if you're interested, SaaS Institute.com. And with that, let's dive into my conversation
2:07.3	with Jane Portman. Jane Portman, welcome back to start up for the rest of us.
	...

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