For the past two years we’ve been hard at work building Outseta, an undertaking that was a direct response to our own experience launching and scaling a successful SaaS start-up.

As an early stage company, we found that a lot of stuff we had to build had nothing to do with our core product; authentication for existing users, lost password workflows, subscription management logic—that kind of thing. Then we did what everyone else in SaaS does—we evaluated, bought, integrated, and maintained a whole bunch of other SaaS products. A CRM. A billing system. Email marketing software and a help desk. Should we build our own subscription management logic again?

At the end of the day we decided to build Outseta because:

  1. We saw an opportunity to help SaaS founders get products to market much faster.
  2. The status quo was ridiculously inefficient—we saw an opportunity to give SaaS start-ups the tools they need to scale to about $5M in ARR for a fraction of the price.

If you’ve been following our progress something exciting happened since our last company update—we launched an entirely new SaaS product of our own. Here’s how we got that product to market about 50% faster while also gaining significant efficiencies that will help us scale well into the future.

Introducing CompareRentalBookings.com

Let’s get a few things out of the way first—yes, we launched this product partially to highlight how easy it is to launch a SaaS company with Outseta.

Second, while that was the case, this is a legitimate product that we only built because we realized a true need for it ourselves—this was not a creative exercise.

Finally, there are all kinds of “Launch your product today” or “Launch 10 products next week!” contests flying around the internet of varying pedigrees. The product that we launched is not a one page website, and it’s not a hack to validate your idea overnight. It’s a full-fledged, well designed, and fully functional SaaS application. You can call it a micro-SaaS project if you like or you can check it out for yourself by signing up for a trial at CompareRentalBookings.com.

CompareRentalBookings.com

The idea behind the product

My Co-founder Dimitris has built software products for the real estate rental market before, Co-founding Buildium in 2004. While he’s still actively involved in the company as a board member, more recently he’s been working on Outseta as well as an Airbnb rental business in his hometown of Athens, Greece.

Unsure of the nightly rate he should be charging for each of his rentals, Dimitris began using Airbnb’s own smart pricing tools. He found that the tool consistently told him to drop his prices down to his base price—the lowest nightly rate he’d allow his property to rent at. He had a hunch he was leaving money on the table.

Next, he tried a number of the other Airbnb pricing tools on the market. Again, he found his nightly rates were dropping prematurely. These tools were also expensive and they didn’t tell him anything about how often competitive properties were being booked and at what nightly rate. He wanted to know exactly how his property was performing against the properties he was most often competing with for bookings. He could get at this information but it was a manual process that he found himself performing over and over again—a perfect problem to solve with software.

That’s the problem we set out to solve with CompareRentalBookings.com—a tool for hands-on Airbnb hosts and management companies who, armed with the best data possible, can make better pricing decisions to maximize their Airbnb hosting earnings.

Product Design

The very first version of the product pulled data from Airbnb’s API into a Google Sheet. Dimitris was finally able to see how much competitive properties were actually making, so he could benchmark his own performance and price his properties more appropriately.

Compare Rental Bookings V1 design (Google Sheets)

Realizing that this data was proving valuable to him, he pulled together a prototype of what the product might look like in Moqups and shared it with Dave and I in late October.

“This is a product we could build pretty quickly, and it’s been really valuable to me,” Dimitris said. “What do you think?”

Compare Rental Bookings V2 design (Moqups)

We were all a bit gun shy about taking time and energy away from our product backlog at Outseta, but we realized that by using Outseta we could dramatically cut down on the time required to deliver the product.

We looped in our design lead, James, and decided the product would consist of a SaaS application that allows hosts to choose the competitive properties that they want to track as well as email notifications highlighting new bookings. We decided hosts could track 5 comparison properties for each of their own for $5 per month—if hosts get even one additional reservation by using the tool, the product likely pays for itself 20 times over.

James delivered some final designs for the email and SaaS product using Invision. Here are the design files.

Compare Rental Bookings V3 design (Invision)

Product Development

With the designs in hand, Dimitris and Dave began development in mid October. Dimitris had already requested access to Airbnb’s API, which we use to pull in the pricing and occupancy data the product relies on. In terms of technical architecture, the product is built using .NET and the base angular framework.

The product would likely have taken 3-4 weeks to build if we’d focused on it full-time—instead we built it over about 6 weeks in a very part-time capacity. Here’s how that time was split up.

  • 1-2 days to setup the development environment
  • 1 week to create the algorithm that downloads the data and creates summary data
  • 1 week to build the APIs
  • 2 weeks for front-end development
  • 2 weeks to build the email notifications

Standing up the business and implementing Outseta

During product development, Dimitris and Dave were able to spend all of their time and energy on building “core” product functionality because they knew we’d be launching the product with Outseta.

As a relatively non-technical person, I was able to instrument much of the functionality they would have otherwise had to build. First, I bought the domain comparerentalbookings.com and created a Squarespace website using the “Bedford” theme. I paid $20 for the domain and the website is $18 per month.

Next, I decided that we’d offer a 14-day free trial prompting users for payment after the trial expires—I set this up as well a pricing plan to charge $5 per month per property tracked. I was able to do both of these tasks within Outseta, which can be connected to a payment gateway in seconds. If you have an existing Stripe account, here’s how to connect Stripe to Outseta (all you need is your “secret key.”)

Without using Outseta, we would have had to build the free trial logic manually. We probably would have billed manually for some time, as we would have had to write something automated to handle billing based on the number of properties tracked. This logic easily could have taken 3-4 weeks to complete and integrate with Stripe.

Next, we needed a way for people to sign-up and login to the product from our website. Using Outseta’s sign-up and login widgets, I was able to easily drop this code into our website pages.

Dropping Outseta’s sign-up and login widgets into our Squarespace website pages

Here’s documentation on how to integrate Outseta’s sign-up and login widgets with your website and product. I embedded the sign-up widget directly on our free trial page, which you can see here: https://www.comparerentalbookings.com/free-trial/. I used a pop-up for the login functionality so that users can come back to our website to login to their Compare Rental Bookings account.

Outseta’s login widget acting as a pop-up

Using these widgets also meant we didn’t need to build lost password workflows—realistically it could have easily taken a month to build the functionality that these widgets gave us out of the box.

“A major added benefit is that Outseta provides a way to easily manage all of this—we can change pricing plans or our free trial logic using Outseta’s user interface and the registration workflow on our website will update to the new pricing model automatically. This gives us the ability to experiment with new pricing models without needing to update our website or create new pricing plans and logic using Stripe.

We can also see who has registered for the product and who is logging into the product without needing to access our database or integrate with a CRM system. This is something we likely would have done further down the road if we weren’t using Outseta, but it’s a nice added benefit at this stage that makes it really easy to identify which accounts are engaged.

Next, we integrated Outseta’s profile widget with the product. This code provides out of the box functionality that allows users to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel their account. They can also add new users or edit their billing information. To do this, we’re simply passing a javascript token by adding it to a page within the application. Not needing to build this functionality saved us a few weeks of work. Again, necessary scaffolding for almost all SaaS applications but not core product.

With the technical implementation of Outseta complete, I set out to prepare us to bring on and support new customers.

First, I set up our sales pipeline stages within Outseta CRM so we can track sales.

Setting up sales pipeline stages in Outseta

Next, I added Outseta live chat to our website. All I needed to do here was add a script to the <body/> tag of our website pages. I also set up our shared customer support inbox so users can submit support requests by emailing us at at support(at)comparerentalbookings.com.

Mapping Compare Rental Booking’s knowledge base to a custom subdomain using Outseta

I then used Outseta’s knowledge base to author some articles that I thought would be helpful to our early customers. We mapped the knowledge base to a custom subdomain that’s accessible here: http://support.comparerentalbookings.com/support/kb#/categories.

As a final step, I set up activity notifications so that Dave, Dimitris, and myself get email updates whenever an account is created or updated. Again, this callback functionality is free and available to us out of the box.

Setting up activity notifications using Outseta

Just like that, we had a fully operational business ready to scale.

Using this process, we were able to launch CompareRentalBookings.com in about 6 weeks while working part-time. We have the tools in place that we can easily use to scale the business to thousands of users and millions in revenue. Perhaps most importantly, we have known, low overhead of $99/month and far fewer manual processes and disparate software tools.

How Outseta Helped Us Get Our Product To Market Faster

  1. We saved time by not needing to build free trial logic.
  2. We saved time by not needing to build lost password workflows.
  3. We saved time by not needing to build sign-up (product registration) or login (product authentication) functionality.
  4. We saved time by not needing to build infrastructure for activity notifications.
  5. We saved time by simply adding a script to our product that handles account upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, user management and permissions, and updates to billing information.
  6. We saved time by not needing to spend any time integrating software solutions—our CRM, help desk, marketing automation, and live chat tools work seamlessly together from the get-go.

Key Benefits Realized By Launching With Outseta

  1. We increased efficiency by not billing manually to start. We didn’t have to write an automated script to handle billing based on the number of properties tracked.
  2. We can now change pricing models and experiment with new pricing plans without any development help. We can change our pricing plans from within Outseta and our website and registration workflow will update to reflect the changes automatically.
  3. We can see who has registered for our product and who is logging in consistently (a useful barometer for user engagement) without accessing our database.
  4. Our technology stack is completely free and likely will be for several more months. Once we cross 250 contacts in our CRM, all of this functionality will cost us just $99 per month with no limits on users, contacts, emails, or conversations.

Have any questions about the process we used to launch CompareRentalBookings.com? Wondering if Outseta can help you get your SaaS product to market faster? We’d love to hear from you—drop us a note of sign-up for your free Outseta account at https://www.outseta.com/get-started/.