Patrick Campbell grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and spent the start of his career inside two of the least entrepreneurial institutions available. He worked at the NSA, where he says he learned to hunt targets, and then at Google, and he describes himself as a statistician and economist rather than an engineer. On his own site he is blunt about why neither stuck: he quit the NSA because he hated government bureaucracy, and he quit Google because it was a golden prison. In 2012 he cashed out his 401k and started the company that would become ProfitWell.

The first product was not the free metrics tool most people know. It was called Price Intelligently, and Campbell describes it as a software and service combination that helped subscription companies work out their pricing. He is unsentimental about the early build. The initial version was, in his words, super super basic, and looking back he thinks they should have shipped a spreadsheet instead of a small app. He filled the gaps with spreadsheets and manual work on top of the software anyway.

The interesting part is how he found the first customers, because there was no audience and no budget. His account of it is a sequence, not a growth trick. Write an ebook about pricing. Write blog posts on the same topic and use them to drive downloads of the ebook. Email everyone who downloaded it and offer a free pricing audit so they can see what they could be doing better. Once they realise they have a problem, explain the product, answer the questions, ask for the money, then deliver. That is how the first 20 customers arrived. He points out that it was just him doing all of it, so as the first few customers signed, he had to keep the content going while also selling and implementing.

Paid acquisition never entered the picture early on. Campbell says paid was a waste for them because they could not spend enough to matter, so they went deep into content and became one of the first companies in their space to run a real media operation. His reasoning was structural rather than stylistic: there are only around 150,000 subscription companies in the world and fewer in SaaS, so there were not enough logos to grind out through volume. In a market that small, being widely known and talked about does more than any funnel. Outbound sales came later, layered on top once the brand existed.

Being a pricing company, they eventually ran their own methods on themselves. In a 2015 AMA he mentions that when they studied their own target customer personas, they found their value was ten times what they had assumed. That correction is what let them fund a team of twelve people out of customer revenue with no outside money. Their pricing page carried ranges rather than fixed numbers, because setup and scope moved the price a lot, and on sales calls they would say that eighty percent of implementations landed between two figures.

On timing, Campbell marks the company's birthday in mid June. He posted the sixth anniversary note on 15 June 2018, which puts the start of the company in mid June 2012. Asked how long the first million in ARR took, he answered that for the first product it came at the beginning of the third year, which is the anchor used for the milestone on this page: roughly 730 days from that mid June 2012 start. The same answer contains the more useful pattern. The second product took 18 months to a million, and the third took 12. Once an audience exists, he says, each new product gets easier, assuming the product is good.

The second act was ProfitWell Metrics, the free subscription metrics tool. That MVP was also basic, and Campbell admits it was a problem because competitors looked far ahead of them, so they iterated fast on feedback instead. He is honest that they never measured product market fit properly. What it felt like in hindsight was consistent inbound revenue on the paid products plus organic and word of mouth growth on the free one. The freemium tool was not built primarily as a lead machine, though he acknowledges it helped.

The numbers he has published at each stage show a steady bootstrapped climb rather than a spike. Twelve people and zero funding in 2015. Forty five people and still zero funding in 2018, with a free product carrying an NPS above 60 and under one percent annual churn on the paid side. By mid 2022, ninety people across Boston, Salt Lake City and Rosario in Argentina, and more than 30,000 subscription companies using the free metrics tool.

On 25 May 2022 he announced on X and LinkedIn that he had sold ProfitWell and was joining Paddle, summarising ten years in seven words: bootstrapped to over $200M, now to IPO. His own site puts it as sold to Paddle for over $200M, with 50,000 or more companies using the products.

Two of his own admissions are worth keeping. He built the thing with help from two friends but describes himself as having been net net solo for too long, and he counts finding real partners as the thing that unlocked the company. And on the part that gets skipped in retellings, he says the hard part was working through the no's, because people say no mostly because they have never heard of you and nobody they know has either.