Paddle Billing
ProfitWell Metrics
The company
TeamGantt offers online project management software. It strives to deliver an intuitive, collaborative experience for users so that they can execute tasks without losing sight of the big picture.
The company was co-founded in 2009 by John Correlli and Nathan Gilmore, who were both developing software for a large roofing contractor in Baltimore, Maryland. Having become increasingly frustrated with managing projects on static Gantt charts, they decided to develop their own.
Back then, we’d create a Gantt chart and then, to share it, we would have to either print it out or email it around. But then it was immediately out of date. Nathan and I wanted to create something far more collaborative.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
And so TeamGantt was born. After iterating on user feedback and paying close attention to usability, the company was officially launched on 20th November 2010. “We’ve slowly grown the business since then,” John said. “It’s a bootstrapped business, so we haven’t had any outside funding.”
Today, 3 million people worldwide have used TeamGantt to schedule over 150 million tasks. Users can visualize their work in a Gantt chart and easily switch into a calendar view, list, or Kanban which can be shared with the click of a button. Tasks can be synced to a mobile or desktop calendar, and since all files are stored in a single, centralized hub, version control is easy.
The challenge
As TeamGantt grew and began selling to customers outside the US, it found that managing sales tax was becoming a burden for its small team.
We're a US company with customers in every state, but more than half of our business is from outside the US. The sales tax laws were changing in every state and internationally, too. Trying to manage this ourselves was a painstaking process.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
At the same time, TeamGantt wanted to experiment with pricing localization to improve conversions from customers worldwide.
“We were doing currency conversion on the fly,” John said. “So, at checkout, the customer would see an estimated price in their local currency, but with a disclaimer to say they would actually be charged in US dollars.”
This was proving to be a point of friction for customers.
“Our payment success rate was dropping and got to around 69%.”
With little support from their existing payment and billing provider and a steadily growing business that needed heavy engineering input just to make small changes to billing and subscriptions, the TeamGantt team felt that something had to change.
“Everything was taking longer than necessary, and this was taking our focus away from our product,” John said. “We were ready to move on from that.”
Our payment success rate was dropping and got to around 69%.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
The solution
Changing your payments and billing system is a pretty big deal, especially for a SaaS company like ours where 98% of our revenue comes through automated recurring subscriptions.
It was a nerve-wracking decision. We wanted to make sure everyone was onboard.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
John and his team began to review the market, gathering opinions from their network and assessing the various product features, commission rates and support on offer. Paddle, with its Merchant of Record model, immediately stood out to the team.
As a Merchant of Record, Paddle acts as the middleman between Team Gantt and their customers. It takes on all the risks and responsibilities associated with taking payments, honoring refunds and chargebacks, fraud protection, and sales tax.
This would allow Team Gantt to hand off international tax compliance and payments complexity and keep their focus on improving the product.
We had been aware of Paddle for a few years. We’d used ProfitWell Metrics and Price Intelligently in the past and we’d used some Paddle documentation when trying to manage our own sales tax. We’d found that helpful.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
“We were reassured by the Paddle team right away,” John said. “We had a million questions, but they were all answered.”
The Paddle team explained the mechanics of how everything worked and provided a sandbox environment for TeamGantt to experiment in.
"Having a testing environment where we could kick the tires of the software was really useful."
The implementation followed without a hitch.
“The Developer Docs were really helpful for us. In fact, this was the best documented integration we have ever experienced. We also had a single point of contact at Paddle who was very responsive and ensured everything went smoothly.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
It was then time to migrate TeamGantt’s customers over to Paddle from its existing payment solution.
“Our goal was to have all customers purchasing through Paddle by the anniversary of our inception – 20th November,” John said. “We hit that date, which was super exciting.”
The results
19% boost in checkout conversions & 90%+ payment acceptance
Paddle immediately drove higher customer conversions with the addition of more payment methods, smart payment routing and the ability to localize pricing.
John breaks down a TeamGantt customer’s purchase journey into 3 steps:
- Customers pick a plan, the number of users they need, how often they want to be billed and see what the cost will be.
- They select their preferred payment method and enter their payment details.
- Confirmation of the order and that the purchase is successful.
Once TeamGantt implemented Paddle, they saw an 8% improvement in customers that loaded step one and went through to complete the purchase.
“I attribute a lot of that to the fact we take more payment methods now and the smart payment routing that is going to charge a customer in their region which improves payment acceptance.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
From here, John and the team looked to further optimize the checkout flow by introducing localized pricing, with 29 currencies available in Paddle.
“Before, everything was just in USD. We started to charge in the local currency and, this was wild, but we saw just short of an 11 % improvement going from step one to step three. And that 11 % improvement is on top of the original 8% improvement. So just a huge success rate of people going through the checkout flow.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
TeamGantt is also benefiting from a significant improvement in payment acceptance from customers around the world by using Paddle.
Before, only about 70% of payments were going through but now its overall payment acceptance rate is over 90%.
This is achieved through a combination of offering customers multiple payment methods, routing payments through local banks so they aren’t flagged as suspicious, and automatic reminders to update payment details before a renewal date.
20% increase in customer retention
Using Paddle Retain, TeamGantt has dramatically reduced delinquent churn.
“With our old payment processor, Paddle’s Retain product was reporting a 40% recovery rate. Since we've moved across to Paddle Billing, we're seeing closer to 60%. To me, that's a huge lift.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
The company has also begun to use Retain’s Term Optimization features to help it move existing monthly subscribers to annual plans. “We've started running that and seen some success,” John said.
Meanwhile, Retain Cancellation Flows is helping TeamGantt prevent customer cancellations by presenting them with dynamic salvage attempts while gathering cancellation insights that help prevent the same thing from happening in the future.
Sales tax taken care of
With Paddle now automatically collecting sales tax and VAT on every transaction worldwide, TeamGantt is confident it complies with the latest regulations.
“It has been a huge burden off our plate. Sales tax liability is something we can’t afford to get wrong, but we don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“We're not building tools to collect taxes, we're building things to help customers bring calm and clarity to their work environment.
It has been a huge burden off our plate. Sales tax liability is something we can’t afford to get wrong, but we don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
Clarity to focus on what matters
By leveraging all the pieces of the Paddle ecosystem, TeamGantt has been able to offload a significant amount of work and keep their focus on their product and their customers.
“It’s exciting to see how Paddle, ProfitWell Metrics, and Retain fit together and how they remove a lot of engineering and operational complexity for us.”
We don’t have to worry about building features or integrations for managing sales tax. Instead, we can focus on building the app and serving our customers as best we can.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
Building a successful future
Going forward, TeamGantt expects to leverage more of Paddle’s features to help it continue growing its revenue and user base worldwide, such as introducing new offers and discounts. This will help the business grow but also help TeamGantt better serve its customers.
We're really focused on bringing calm and clarity to teams that work together. If you oversee projects directly, or if you oversee people that oversee projects, TeamGantt is already a great solution.
But we've got some new things coming that we're just really excited about. We're going to take TeamGantt to the next level, and Paddle will help us get there.”
John Correlli, co-founder, Team Gantt
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