The Beginning
If the runaway success of Slack is any proof, it's that word of mouth marketing has never been more alive!
Patrick Barnes from Advocately had a similar revelation at his previous company, where he was the VP of Sales. They found that leads with the highest conversion rates were those that came up from review sites or customer referrals versus outbound or organic leads.
His pursuit to find the happiest customers who would refer other customers, paved way to the idea of building an advocacy platform.
Ideas led to conversations. And 250 conversations later (yes!), Patrick and Lachlan validated the actual need for such an advocacy marketing platform. And hence, Advocately came into existence.
Before using Chargebee
As an early stage company, Advocately launched with Stripe Atlas. They researched for easier ways to handle recurring billing and their research led them to Chargebee.
"We were reviewing a couple of billing providers and raised a support ticket, simultaneously with all of them. Chargebee got back to us within 5 minutes. And their mature product plus pricing was a huge win for us."
In early 2016 Advocately started using Chargebee to manage their subscriptions and payments.
As an early stage company, we wanted to focus the limited engineering resources that we had on building our product. Chargebee helped us put in zero dev time for something as crucial as billing. We were up and running in an hour!"
When you're starting out, it's natural that most companies make do with a patchy billing solution that they put together.
Ask Patrick on why Advocately didn't go down the same route, he says, rather succinctly, "Use your resources for something else. Salesforce still continues to build its product. There's always something useful that you can add to your product. Build what you set out to."
Features they love
Plan Management
Creating new products is extremely simple. We now set up a new product under 30 seconds within Chargebee, and the dashboard gives you a good view, overall.
Hosted Checkout Page
As a startup, if you don't have to worry about security issues, getting started with Chargebee's hosted pages would be your best bet.
Invoicing and Accounting
Chargebee's automatic and recurring invoices are perfect and work well for accounting purposes.
SaaS Metrics & Reporting
Chargebee gives us a clear reporting dashboard with all the necessary metrics which is just perfect for an early stage company like ours.
We absolutely love using Chargebee, it has been a great decision. Their support team is super helpful!
Teams of all sizes and shapes use Chargebee to manage their subscription and billing ops. Sign up for a free trial today and your first $50K revenue is on us!
P.S. We're happy customers of Advocately and would highly recommend their advocacy marketing platform :)
Features they love
Plan Management
Creating new products in Chargebee is extremely simple and with Chargebee it's easy to create a hosted page payment link for the plan & just send it to customers. Learn more about Plan Management
Invoicing & Accounting
Chargebee's automatic and recurring invoices are great for a company of any scale. Learn more about Invoicing
SaaS Metrics & Reporting
Chargebee provides a reporting dashboard with all the necessary metrics which crunches numbers for different sources. Learn more about SaaS Reporting