Report
Our SaaS Start-up’s Expenses, Equity Allocation, & Marketing Results After Six Years | Outseta
All things considered, I think it’s fair to say that 2022 was Outseta’s first big year.
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I haven't come across this type of comp structure and I think it's really great for small teams, everyone can be entirely bought in and at the same time feel complete agency!
That's the hope! More here if interested: https://www.outseta.com/posts/payment-structure
This is a really honest read.
I try to tell it like it is!
Really useful. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for checking it out!
So that's pretty interesting, so with Outseta being bootstrapped, and the option for contributors to be paid in equity rather than cash, is there a scenario where the equity pool dries up and that option goes away? Is the benefit of owning that equity in dividends since the business is bootstrapped or tied to an IPO event?
Insanely cool product, and looks like a great journey to get there! Thanks for sharing.
Good question. In short the size of the equity pool continues to grow as members of our team elect to spend time working for equity. So the size of the total equity pool equals the total amount of hours, all-time, that employees have elected to work for equity. Your ownership percentage is based on what percentage of that time you've elected to work for equity.
The value of the equity comes into play primarily if the business is sold, but we also do profit sharing for employees as well. This is based on tenure rather than your ownership.
Great post, thanks for sharing Geoff!
Thanks for checking it out!
Yes, really insightful. Great to follow along on the sideline (also via MM).
Thanks for following along!
Thanks Geoff, I always love hearing your updates. :)
Thanks Rosie! Appreciate you following along!
This is a really great breakdown. Well done. I am curious what percentage of your spend is actually being spent on your cloud and infrastructure hosting needs. Full disclosure, our company, OpenMetal, is an OpenStack Private Cloud company. The reason I ask is that we have been engaging with different SaaS companies who have confessed that their cloud and infrastructure hosting costs on AWS, GCP, etc. are actually one of their most significant operating costs. But, many have just sort of accepted it as cost of business. Curious to see if you tried to find an alternative to these clouds to bring those costs down to make your operations costs even more lean. One of our SaaS clients dropped their bill over 50% and used those funds to employee additional staff.