Episode 471 | Fighting to Gain Traction in a Crowded Space with Jane Portman of Userlist
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob talks with Jane Portman of Userlist. They discuss the struggles of growing slowly, gaining traction in the crowded space, and some of the lessons learned from her first SaaS app.
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Transcript
Rob: In this week’s episode of Startups For The Rest of Us, I talk with Jane Portman of Userlist, about their fight to gain traction in a crowded space. This is Startups For The Rest of Us episode 471.
Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing startups, whether you’ve built your fifth start up or you’re thinking about your first. I’m Rob and today with Jane Portman, we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the mistakes we’ve made.
Welcome to this week’s episode. I’m your host, Rob Walling. Each week on the show. We cover topics relating to building and growing ambitious startups that we grow, because we want to improve our lives. We want to improve the lives of those around us, but we’re not willing to sacrifice ourselves, our lives, our relationships, our health to grow these companies. We believe in relentless execution with a long-term mindset. We think in terms of years, not months. As such, we don’t burn ourselves out by working crazy hours, sacrificing our health, or relationships.
Over the past 470 episodes, we’ve espoused things like freedom, purpose, and relationships. Freedom is the freedom to work on what you want, when you want, without a boss breathing down your neck. The freedom to go on your kids baseball game on a Thursday afternoon without asking anyone’s permission. Purpose, the ability to work on something that fascinates you and drives you everyday to make it better. The purpose of building something that tens and thousands of people are getting value out of and it makes you feel great. Relationships, deep and meaningful relationships with your family, your significant other, your kids, your friends.That’s what Startups for the Rest of Us is all about. That’s the lens through which we view startups.
Today, I’ve invited Jane Portman on the show. Have known Jane for several years. She spoke at MicroConf Europe back in 2014. We’re going to talk about the app userlist.com that she co-founded with her co-founder Benedikt Deicke. They started working on Userlist about two years ago. They did a bunch of customer interviews. Then, almost a year later, they sold pre-orders. That was about one year ago. Really, it was a little bit less than a year ago when they started onboarding people and turned on billing towards the end of 2018.
Userlist, which used to be userlist.io, but they just recently got the .com, so now it’s userlist.com is customer life cycle email, perfect for your SaaS business. It’s event-based email, behavior tracking, lifecycle automation, segmentation, they have broadcast, and that kind of stuff. You can imagine competitors of Userlist might be something like an Intercom, customer.io and maybe even a tool like, Vero. To be honest, I’m so much less clear on the whole email marketing space. Know that I’m not in it day-to-day. But, at one point Vero was in this stuff as well.
Both Benedikt and Jane have been to many MicroConfs. I’ve had dinner with them multiple times. They are just fixtures of the community and good people who are working hard, essentially Bootstrap SaaS app. It’s always fun to have conversations with folks who are doing it. Benedikt is a developer and Jane is a really solid UX/UI designer. They make a good tea
