Launched new website and branding for Outseta
Hey all!
This past weekend we launched new website and a completely refreshed brand—the first "rebrand" since we launched Outseta 3.5 years ago. I'd love any and all feedback! What could be clearer? What's confusing?
One challenge in particular that we're still working through is that we launched Outseta initially with SaaS start-ups as our target customer. Since we launched, there's been an explosion of similar product offerings for membership sites, productized services, SaaS, and even consultants that just sell their services on a retainer basis.
Outseta is really a great fit for any of those use cases—if you're a start-up looking to build a recurring revenue stream, we're a very complete all-in-one offering to help you out. The new site de-emphasizes our previous sole focus on SaaS, but could probably speak to the additional use cases more broadly.
What's your take?
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Hey Geoff, just created a quick video about the layout https://www.loom.com/share/0dd1aa30992545dd803f7adc083b3025
Looks like it was designed by a designer and a committee not a marketer focused on conversions.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.outseta.com%2F
33/100 a ton of visitors will be bouncing.
Hey @volkandkaya! Thanks for taking the time to give the site a look and send along that video! Good stuff and I agree with your points around adding a CTA to the primary nav and content often getting lost in carousels.
We're definitely planning to spend our next cycles improving the page speed issues, there's some low hanging fruit for us to go after there. Let me know how I can repay the favor!
Geoff
I would love to know the painpoints you're having with your current CMS which I believe is Squarespace
Also we built https://versoly.com/ to replace Squarespace and Wordpress.
We have already took a ton of their customers.
If you know anyone about to build or redo their marketing site please let them know about us!
Our USPs
Hey Volkan,
Yes, the site is built on Squarespace which I'm generally happy with. It certainly has some limitations but I think it's a good fit for someone relatively non-technical in that it allows me to build attractive looking pages easily without needing a designer / developer. Page speed is probably one of the downsides, but that's also at least partially self-inflicted pain that we can clean up further.
I get asked about website CMS tools all the time (particularly from Indie Hackers) because Outseta can integrate with any CMS. I'm happy to encourage them to give Versoly a look—looks like a solid tool, the pricing is definitely IH friendly, and your focus on SaaS pairs well with Outseta.
Great!
Let me know when you have updated the landing page will give it a second look.
It looks great! Added to the todo list to check it out in more detail later, maybe I'll even signup.
It reminds me a lot of https://basecamp.com/ , they do a great job in landing pages so be sure to check that out!
Before I share some tips I should mention I love the website, and the whole looks and feel. Great job. The feedback below could sound negative, but it really is just my opinion perfectionisme on something already great so take it in a helpful way:
But once again, it already looks great! I would suggest a lot of A/B testing anyway, try different landing pages. Basecamp (example I mentioned earlier) changes their landing page so much I have never seen the same twice, and they do a good job.
Anyway; good luck! Hope it helps a little or gives some new insights. If you have the time, could you also provide some feedback on my post? Would mean a lot! Thanks. https://www.indiehackers.com/post/validation-a-wireless-time-machine-backup-saas-3e3555e130
That's awesome @marijnroukens—thanks so much for taking the time to provide some feedback. I'm happy you like the site overall and your feedback is nothing but constructive!
Totally agreed, we're removing the fading in of page content altogether.
Good suggestion as well, others have called this out below too.
This is one I always wrestle with—we'd prefer to funnel people into the free version of the product so they can actually start engaging with it, but there's definitely plenty of users who come to the site looking for a demo. The feature animations are a step in that direction, but certainly aren't a full-fledged demo. There's no reason we can't do both...
This has proven to be very polarizing. The intent—and we've had the "Sales Pitch" page for 2+ years—is to sort of be explicit with users. You want a sales pitch? Here it is. We're trying to build a brand that's as "un-salesy" as possible and the idea is if you're evaluating our product and want to check out our sales materials, here they are. If you don't, we're not going to harass you. People either love this (and often ask if they can steal the idea) or hate it (and say they'd never read this page).
And of course I would love to repay the favor and provide some feedback on your post. Jumping over there now...
Thanks again!
-Geoff
I like it much better than the old branding and the old website. Great improvement!
May I ask which tool you used to capture & edit the screen capture videos?
Thanks!
Thank you! We used Screenflow. http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm
Very cool. I didn't know that Outseta was built by an IH member. We've actually been looking at your product for our own SaaS as a possibility to replace a lot of our current stack.
What caught my eye about your product was actually the fact that you targeted SaaS especially. Maybe instead of watering down your offering, you have separate landing pages based on your target market?
We've been evaluating products over the past couple of months, and yours stood out precisely because the (old) messaging seemed to speak to us as SaaS founders ourselves. Your current landing page is still good, but not sure if it would have grabbed us like the old one did.
Hey @Devan—that's awesome to hear! Happy to chat anytime—geoff(at)outseta(dot)com.
Outseta has definitely been designed (and marketed) since day one with a focus on SaaS businesses specifically. That said, we've caught the attention of customers building no-code membership sites and lots of consultants selling their services on a recurring basis pretty organically. What we've learned is that our value proposition (manage your business in one place, less technical and financial overhead, etc) is often more compelling to these groups because SaaS developers have the skills to integrate tools and build their own tech stacks—no-coders and consultants often don't. As a result, so the all-in-one nature of our product is really appealing to them.
Your suggestion of different landing pages is a good one—I expect to build out more targeted landing pages for the various use cases going forward. All of that aside, I can assure you Outseta is a great fit for an early stage SaaS business first and foremost!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts—it's great to hear from a SaaS founder that our focus on them specifically resonated.
-Geoff
My take is that I love the idea of having a tool-kit for SaaS companies. Who else would use it tho?
I just don't know how easy it is to go all-in into your product and be locked in for life.
With Stripe, Mailchimp, Hubspot, WhateverX if I lose faith in one service I can just swap it out.
I guess your angle is for new startups to test their water, but I expect huge churns to happen after the successful startups will see growth and will have to move onto the "big players"
I'm happy to hear that you like the idea! All other types of subscriptions businesses are a good fit as well.
The concern about vendor lock-in is one we hear all the time—we're addressed it directly here: https://www.outseta.com/posts/code-vs-no-code-and-fears-of-vendor-lock-in
Long story short:
It's actually much easier to move to other tools from Outseta than if you have 5-10 software tools in play because we have a single data record—that you own, it's your data—that you can easily export with all your financial transaction, CRM records, customer interactions, etc.
Integrating other tools introduces points of vulnerability—even if you're relying on Zapier—that you don't have with Outseta. There's far more potential for periods of data drop out and lost context on the customer.
An interesting observation regarding these points ^ is almost all industries outside of SaaS are dominated by platform solutions. People in tech just techy by nature and revel in over-optimizing their tech stack for gains that are very minimal at best, particularly at an early stage.
And yes, we're targeting new start-ups are by design our best customer will absolutely outgrow us. That said, even the fastest growing tech companies often take 5-6 years to go from start-up to $10M so that's plenty of customer lifetime for us to support them.
I see you and I reply to you with:
Yes but other tools are probably really really focused on 1 thing, so for example a CRM like hubspot is one of the best CRMs and they release constantly new features for making CRM's life easier, how do you compete with that when you have 20 things to run behind?
Are you hoping that you have enough features that keep your users engaged because they don't really need the rest? (trimming the fat kinda?)
That's a product bet that you can make, basically - keep it simple and stupid - until people churn because the shinier neighbour has more features.
Sure but yet - you get hacked once, you lose all your data because it's all centralized in 1 app?
I hear ya. A couple of additional points.
You can think of it as a trade-off—by using Outseta, you may be forgoing a shiny feature or two but you get lower costs, less technical complexity, and the advantages/alignment that comes with managing your business behind a single login. Particularly for this audience (Indie Hackers) where you're most off an individual or a small team, I really think this is less of a trade-off and more of a trade-up. Simplicity, speed to market, and scaleable systems that require little maintenance are huge advantages for Indie Hackers.
It sounds like you have a good understanding of what you're building and from reading your replies I can clearly see where you're coming from and I really hope it works out for you. You're right in the aspect that less is better and providing what matters first is the most important thing to sell.
I'm going to save you in my Trello list of companies to keep an eye out for since you've got a product that interests me and I might be using in the future. Thanks for the back and forth!
Thanks @orliesaurus! I appreciate all of your comments and feedback—that's the beauty of this site and it pushes us to build even better solutions to the problems we're tackling. Feel free to reach out anytime and let me know how/when I can repay the favor or provide feedback to you. Cheers!
-Geoff
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Thank you!