Here's how it went down:
Jeff (our CEO): Hey, I was thinking about Text-to-Give yesterday.
Me (Giving product manager): Yeah? What's up?
Jeff: What if we made it free?
Me: Well, it takes money to run that service. Like, the short code and the SMS messages themselves. And we'll have those costs when we release in Canada too.
Jeff: Yeah.
Me: You're saying, we'll just eat that? Let me crunch some num–
Jeff: I've never liked that it was an add-on. Have you?
Me: No. We could roll it into the cost some other way. What if–
Jeff: I'm sure it'll all work out in the long run. Let's just make it free.
Me: Okay cool. Wow, so is that it?
Jeff: Yeah! I'll remove it from the billing system.
Me: Rad. I'll start working on a blog post.
And that was that.
Learn more about Text-to-Give.
"I love red tape!" ~ no one ever
If you follow tech startups or you have an interest in learning how the sauce is made at Planning Center, lean in. A little closer. Okay, I want to share with you a secret weapon of ours. Something that helps us make business decisions like the one in this blog post.
I've been a product manager at Planning Center for a little over three years now. When I arrived, the product line looked like this:
Planning Center Services (we'd just started calling it "Services")
Smart Events (which was a precursor to Registrations)
Planning Center Resources (my very first day, I wrote this announcement post)
There was no Planning Center People, no Check-Ins, no Registrations, no Giving, and no Groups. There were no mobile apps for People or Check-Ins either.
Lately, it seems like we've been getting this question: "How do you move at this pace?" We especially get it from people in the software industry that also work at small'ish companies. There's certainly no single answer to it, but it mostly comes down to the people. We hire the best people we can find (wherever they live), pay them competitively, trust them to manage their time, value work-life balance, and have incredibly low turnover. And we have fun.
There's something else though.
Planning Center is free of outside investors and has been bootstrapped from the beginning. That has a real, practical effect on how we make decisions. There's no venture capital firm holding us to a revenue flow. There are no angel investors trying to position the company for a buyout. There's no equity firm to answer to. We only answer to customers.
As a product manager, I answer to Jeff and Jeff only has three questions for me:
Are you proud of this product?
Are customers getting value from it?
Is it growing?
Revenue is part of that, but it's only one part. My team and I don't worry about it. Most of the time, when it comes to a decision, we just listen to our customers and go with our gut.