Price Intelligently

Patrick Campbell's journey to founding Price Intelligently began with his background in econometrics and math, combined with work at the US intelligence community and Google doing economic modeling and optimization. While working at a startup after leaving Google, he began applying econometric models to pricing and realized how fundamental and underexplored the problem was. His co-founders Aaron White and Christopher O'Donnell were also working on pricing from a product perspective. Rather than seeing a brilliant "aha moment," Campbell describes it more pragmatically: "There's something here, like there's definitely a market, everything has a price and I don't like my job and I want to leave."

The three co-founders built basic models for measuring price elasticity and relative preference analysis. Initially, they attempted to sell it as traditional software, but it showed only modest traction. Campbell worked solo for the first nine months, cashing out his 401k to survive while bootstrapping the business. Rather than hiring immediately, he focused on customer development and marketing, specifically implementing the HubSpot playbook: creating deep content (blog posts, ebooks on pricing strategy), atomizing that content across channels (Twitter, LinkedIn), and using a bottom-of-funnel offer called a "price optimization assessment" to qualify leads.

While executing this inbound strategy, something unexpected happened. As customers interacted with their software and data, many came back saying: "We really like this data, we really like what you're doing, but we don't want to do the work. Can you do it for us?" This pivot transformed Price Intelligently from pure software into a tech-enabled managed service where customers had to purchase both software and services together. This hybrid model allowed Campbell to close the first six months with approximately $130,000 in revenue, enabling him to hire Peter Zotto as General Manager and begin building out sales and services organizations.

The company's growth was driven almost entirely by content marketing—Campbell estimates 80-90% of early revenue came from this channel. However, he acknowledges the grind: writing deep, substantive blog posts that initially got 30 views, with no guarantee they'd ever gain traction. The flywheel eventually kicked in as posts accumulated authority and began ranking, but early persistence was critical. Campbell personally handled all inbound marketing for four and a half years, only recently hiring a full-time director of marketing. The managed service model, while capital-efficient, meant the company lacked full-time engineering and product talent for the first two years since customers primarily valued the data and insights rather than the software interface. Hiring mistakes were made (optimizing for immediate needs rather than scalability), and the slow, bootstrapped growth meant Campbell didn't take a decent salary until about a year before this interview.

By late 2016, Price Intelligently had grown to approximately 30 employees (just accepting an offer for the 30th hire), scaling from nine to 30 people in roughly nine months. The company serves major customers including Wistia, BigCommerce, Optimize.ly, and Zapier, with a minimum contract value of $30,000 per month. The team is now split roughly 50/50 between engineering/product and sales/account management. Campbell also launched ProfitWell, a free SaaS metrics tool that plugs into billing systems, positioning it as the only free and 100% accurate solution in the market. The vision is to eventually fuse ProfitWell, Price Intelligently services, and productized services into a unified platform where every customer has a software instance alongside human support. Throughout the company's growth, Campbell faced personal health challenges including a cancer diagnosis (now in remission), which reinforced his philosophy of playing the long game and taking care of oneself as a founder.