ProdPad

Jana Basto and her co-founder Simon were product managers at different London-based companies in the early 2010s. They both faced the same problem: they needed software to help them manage product roadmaps, ideas, and feedback, but nothing good existed. Instead of waiting for a solution, Simon said "this would be easy enough to do"—he'd build the backend, Jana would handle the frontend (even though she later admitted she "basically lied" about knowing how to code). Using jQuery and Bootstrap, they built a simple tool for themselves.

For two years (2010-2012), ProdPad existed only as an internal tool used by Jana, Simon, and their colleagues. They didn't set out to build a company. But something interesting happened: other product managers started asking for access. Jana intentionally stopped mentioning she'd built it, wanting honest feedback rather than politeness. She kept hearing: "We love this tool, but we can't find any record of it online." That was the signal. In parallel, Jana and Simon started organizing product management meetups with industry figure Martin Erickson, surrounding themselves with product people who gave brutal, honest feedback. They realized their problem wasn't unique to startups—enterprises in finance, retail, and media faced the same challenges.

In early 2013, they made a bold move: Jana quit her job (after putting up a landing page with a "Buy Now" button that went nowhere). It took another six months of engineering work to build the actual SaaS infrastructure—payment systems, onboarding flows, account management. But within weeks of launch in February 2013, their first paying customer signed up through organic search. They'd been blogging extensively about product management best practices (roadmaps, personas, user stories), which built credibility and drove SEO traffic. "For the few people who were looking for it, we were right there."

The first 10 customers came slowly—over four to six months—but entirely organically through search and word-of-mouth from their blog and meetup events. Jana spent countless hours on Skype and email gathering feedback, learning what was broken (you could tag products but not untag them; search was subpar). Every iteration was driven by customer needs. Around 100 customers, growth accelerated—an inflection point they never fully understood but attributed to completing core functionality. For the first year, it was just Jana and Simon. In 2014-2015, they hired their first support person (a former product manager), plus two outsourced developers who remained part of the team.

By 2015, ProdPad hit ~$30K MRR and the founders thought they had it figured out. Then everything stalled. Jana calls it "the year of faffing about." While rebuilding the entire tech stack, they stopped shipping features. With more cash, they dabbled in Google Ads, events, and random experiments. Growth flatlined for six months—a stark contrast to their previous upward trajectory. They nearly took external funding. But in conversations with investors asking "what will you do with a quarter million pounds to hit a 10x exit in two years?" Jana had an epiphany: instead of spreading resources thin, they should focus obsessively on one metric.

Using a spreadsheet, she analyzed the funnel: visitors → leads → trial signups → paid customers. Throwing money at traffic would bring in the wrong users. Improving retention required months of work. But conversion rate—turning free trial users into paying customers—was tractable, impactful, and didn't require hiring more people.

They set a goal of 15% conversion (elite SaaS like Slack convert at ~20%; industry average is 3-5%) and stopped everything else for three months.

First move: cut the trial from 30 days to 14 days. Counterintuitively, conversion doubled. Shorter deadlines created urgency; users squeezed more value into less time. But support tickets exploded: "Can we have more trial time?" So they shortened to seven days but made time unlock-able.

Second move: gamified onboarding. When you signed up, you saw "7 days of trial" at the top. Complete your product name? +1 day. Add an idea? +2 days. Set up an integration? +4 days. Give your credit card (before trial expired)? +more days. The steps weren't random—they were the exact actions that predicted conversion. Analyze showed by day nine, they could tell with 85% certainty who'd convert. Why wait 30 days? These actions taught users how to use ProdPad better than any tutorial.

Third move: smart email automation using Drip. They stopped sending generic welcome emails. After signup, they'd wait 10 minutes. Did the user take any key actions? If not, they sent: "That was weird. Is everything okay? You signed up and disappeared. Can we help?" The response rate was astonishing—25-30% of people came back. If they'd done everything already ("Super Sally"), the email highlighted secret features. Personalized workflows replaced one-size-fits-all sequences.

They never hit the 15% goal, reaching ~10% instead—still respectable and far above average. But the project's real value was the lesson: focus beats breadth. Three months of intense focus on one metric did more than a year of scattered experiments. Today ProdPad counts Disney, Automattic, and eBay among customers. Jana remains bootstrapped and independent. She's simultaneously co-founded Mind the Product, a product community with 50,000+ members and sold-out events in 100 cities. When asked what she'd tell her younger self, Jana said: "Quit earlier. Move faster. You learn everything on the job. No one knows what they're doing anyway."