Profit Well

Patrick Campbell was working as an economist at Google when he decided to cash in his 401k at age 24—a decision his blue-collar father thought was insane. But Patrick had spotted a problem in the market: subscription companies had no way to accurately measure their pricing and monetization strategies. He started Price Intelligently in mid-2012, spending his first six months working alone in a room.

Price Intelligently launched as a tech-enabled service—you couldn't buy the software without the people, and you couldn't buy the people without the software. It was a high-touch, consulting-style business focused on helping companies optimize their pricing through value-based methodologies. The unit economics were strong from the start, with target customers paying around $150,000 per year. By the end of 2012, Patrick had closed $126,000 in bookings working solo.

Growth came through word-of-mouth and the strength of the core offering. In the first full year of 2013, Price Intelligently closed $468,000 in revenue. The company continued doubling revenue year-over-year. By December 2016, the company had reached a $2.6M ARR run rate, growing to $3.6M just twelve months later. Patrick bootstrapped the entire operation without taking outside capital, reinvesting profits into the business.

The turning point came when Patrick was helping a company prepare for an IPO and discovered their MRR was completely miscalculated. This sparked the idea for Profit Well—a free, scalable software product that could provide subscription financial metrics without requiring expensive consulting. Profit Well launched as a free product with two years of development before monetization began. The free offering proved brilliant: over 8,000 companies were using it by 2017.

To improve their funding profile, Patrick shifted Price Intelligently's revenue model to be predominantly subscription-based, hitting 85% subscription revenue by late 2017. He also launched Retain, a churn-reduction product priced based on cash recovered for customers. The company maintained exceptional metrics: less than 1% gross logo churn, net negative revenue churn, and a 20:1 LTV to CAC ratio despite spending virtually nothing on paid acquisition (just $10k/month on people). The payback period for customer acquisition was typically one to two months.

By late 2017, Profit Well and Price Intelligently combined for $8M in ARR with a team of 38 people split between Boston and Rosario, Argentina. Patrick was planning to announce an acquisition in the subscription analytics space within a month and shift the revenue split away from Price Intelligently being two-thirds of revenue toward a more balanced portfolio. The company remained bootstrapped and profitable, with Patrick turning down venture capital because he didn't have a clear use case for it. At 30 years old, he reflected that his main regret was not taking better care of his health during the growth phase, having gained significant weight in the process of building the business.