Below, check out some of the awesome ways FastSpring team members have been celebrating around the globe. 

To learn more about FastSpring’s meaningful history in the fintech and ecommerce space, check out our podcast episode with one of the original cofounders and the original CEO of FastSpring Dan Engel, and current CEO David Nachman. Read more, watch, or listen here. 

FastSpring Celebrates 20 Years Around the World

There were many ways we made sure to celebrate this impressive milestone for FastSpring — from employee swag boxes and cookie deliveries to office parties with cake cuttings and toasts! 

Employee Swag and Remote Celebrations

FastSpring’s success wouldn’t be possible without our amazing team members, many of whom are distributed and remote across North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond. 

To help thank everyone for their contribution to this momentous achievement, employees received gifts such as premium travel backpacks and gourmet stuffed cookies!

Amsterdam

At FastSpring’s Amsterdam office, team members went all out to decorate the office space and celebrate with cake and champagne! 

Belfast

The Belfast team supported a local LGBTQ+ baker in Lisburn called Frootcake, which was a great way to recognize FastSpring’s anniversary and celebrate Pride Month at the same time!

Halifax

Since a few of our team members throughout Canada are originally from Ukraine, the Halifax office celebrated FastSpring’s birthday with a Київський торт (Kyiv Cake) and Живчик (Zhyvchyk), which are traditional Ukrainian treats. 

Austin

In Austin, Texas, a crew got together to celebrate with a lot of FastSpring orange! 

Santa Barbara

At our home office in Santa Barbara, California, the party planning committee went above and beyond!

FastSpring: Powering the Digital Economy® for Two Decades!

For twenty years, FastSpring has been powering global payments for SaaS and software companies, video game publishers, and other digital goods businesses. As a merchant of record, FastSpring provides a fully managed payment solution including checkout, fraud mitigation, comprehensive sales tax and VAT compliance, and more. Founded in 2005, FastSpring is a privately owned company headquartered in California with offices in the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada.

To learn more about FastSpring’s meaningful history in the fintech and ecommerce space, check out our podcast episode with one of the original cofounders and the original CEO of FastSpring Dan Engel, and current CEO David Nachman. Read more, watch, or listen here.

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post It’s Our Cake Day! FastSpring Turns 20 appeared first on FastSpring.

Likewise, in the tech-meets-ecommerce space, there were very few SaaS companies out there, live service gaming didn’t really exist yet, and software companies wanting to sell their software globally had very, very few options.

And the options that were available left a lot to be desired. 

That’s why on June 28, 2005, four tech founders — including Dan Engel, current Founder and Managing Partner of Santa Barbara Venture Partners — got together to found FastSpring. 

Twenty years later, we’re still going strong! Now led by CEO David Nachman and backed by Accel-KKR — and with technology more advanced and stronger than ever — FastSpring is celebrating its 20th anniversary by looking back on how we got here, applauding today’s team for our current successes, and looking forward to a bright future in the payments industry as an experienced partner our customers can trust. 

In this special celebratory post, we share:

• A special twentieth anniversary episode of Growth Stage, interviewing both FastSpring’s co-founder & first CEO Dan Engel and FastSpring’s current CEO David Nachman. Jump to podcast.
• A brief history of FastSpring, with some fantastically nostalgic photos of the team throughout the years. Jump to history. 

Growth Stage Podcast EP34: What It Takes to Build an Enduring Business

Building a lasting business isn’t easy. 

Knowing what really makes a company succeed long term can be even harder.

That’s why it can be helpful to learn from companies that have stood the test of time.

In this episode of Growth Stage, we celebrate FastSpring’s 20th anniversary with insights from its first CEO, Dan Engel, and current CEO, David Nachman. They share:

• What has helped FastSpring thrive for two decades.
• What mistakes to avoid when building your own business.
• What it really takes to build something that lasts.

Whether you’re planning to exit in two years or fifty, take a moment to step back and think about the long term future of your business. Watch or listen now!

Jump to video.  |  Jump to history. |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript available at the end of this post.

A Brief History of FastSpring (With Photos)

FastSpring was founded in 2005 with only $30,000, by a distributed team of four tech founders who only all got connected “through the transitive property,” Dan explains. “I only knew Jason, but then he knew Ken, and Ken knew Ryan.” 

Dan had had an idea for a shopping cart upsell product — which didn’t come to fruition — but after meeting Jason Foodman in 2005, Jason pointed out that the upsell product couldn’t even exist unless they owned the shopping cart in the first place. So Dan asked, “Well, what if we create our own shopping cart?” 

And since Jason was already working with someone who wanted to create a product with the ecommerce infrastructure to compete with Digital River, FastSpring was born. 

Dan recalls that he, Jason, Ken White, and Ryan Dewell all connected remotely from four different U.S. states via email and messengers, not even meeting in person for about the first four years as they worked on FastSpring; “Maybe every six months there’d be a phone call.” Dan and Jason handled front-end sales, while Ken led “phenomenal customer service,” and Ryan “just was an awesome coder.” He recalls Ken describing Ryan as “probably the best guy on the planet to build what we were building.”

Since all four guys had been CEOs already, they were all familiar with working on their own areas without needing much guidance. “We split up the business into silos, Dan explains. “Ken handled support, Ryan development, me on the sales side and also all the CEO role, and Jason on the sales side and some other stuff too. And that worked really well.”

The First Mission of FastSpring: The Golden Rule

Just what were the founders of FastSpring trying to build? 

“I think we wanted to build a business that treated its customers the way we thought we should have been treated as software vendors,” Dan says. They each had felt wronged in some way when working with Digital River or with payment companies that weren’t built to work with software companies, so they set out to build a solution with a driving force to “put some good into an industry that had a lot of bad experiences.”

He also describes Digital River in 2005 — only about nine years old then — as already having become an inflexible “technology dinosaur.” 

“So we wanted to build that next generation system.”

“I think that’s really what our driving force was: to put some good into an industry that had a lot of bad experiences.”

Dan Engel, Co-Founder and first CEO of FastSpring

“And we thought if we were just normal, nice people that cared, we could accomplish that,” he recalls. “And we did. Took a while, but we did.”

FastSpring’s Growth Trajectory

After a humble start in 2005 with only four ambitious people and $30,000, FastSpring took a little while to get off the ground. Dan remembers that “Not raising capital, going slower, sticking with Java, sticking with one developer — all those things made us go slower.”

But FastSpring eventually began growing quickly when they became popular in the Mac software community, which became their initial niche. “Eventually, we took over for Digital River and others as kind of the leading provider for Mac developers,” Dan explains. “But until then, it was a very slow moving train and we didn’t know what was around the corner.”

Besides having next generation technology and blowing away customers with service, FastSpring also offered pricing that contemporary competitors couldn’t beat.

“So how do you get anyone to switch away from FastSpring? They didn’t. We had retained I think 98.7 % of our customers, year after year after year, in an SMB business with thousands of customers,” Dan recalls. “I’m a venture capitalist now; I invest in software companies. I’m yet to find a company in all these years that matches what FastSpring obtained in its metrics.”

“I’m yet to find a company in all these years that matches what FastSpring obtained in its metrics.”

Dan Engel, Co-Founder and first CEO of FastSpring

By 2010, FastSpring had grown significantly, with Deloitte & Touche’s 2011 Technology Fast 500 awards ranking FastSpring the #1 fastest-growing company in the Greater L.A. area and #13 in North America. 

Then in 2018, Accel-KKR purchased a majority stake in FastSpring. By then, FastSpring counted companies such as Microsoft and Adobe among its customers, with services provided by around 80 FastSpring employees. 

FastSpring’s Mission Today: Unleashing Innovation Around the World

Today, FastSpring is a global leader in the payments, subscriptions, and tax management space as a leading merchant of record. With offices in Santa Barbara, Amsterdam, Belfast, and Halifax, FastSpring has grown to have over 130 employees serving 3200+ companies throughout more than 200 regions, with support for 21+ languages and 23+ currencies — all while filing over 1,000 tax returns every year, so that the companies who use FastSpring don’t have to.

Providing an industry leading platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital products businesses to sell and monetize their products around the world is a privilege we’ve earned over the last 20 years, but we haven’t forgotten where we came from. 

Current CEO David Nachman echoes original CEO Dan Engel’s thoughts about FastSpring’s mission, but builds upon it. What gets David excited is enabling and democratizing the software industry so that people anywhere in the world can build software and compete with bigger, more capitalized players in highly developed markets.

“It’s gotten dramatically easier to build software anywhere and do it in a really, really competitive way,” David explains. “What hasn’t gotten easier is selling it globally.” In fact, in many ways, thanks to increasingly complex tax codes, proliferating payments options, and the increase of fraud, selling software cross-borders or monetizing a game outside of an app marketplace has only gotten harder. 

“So you’ve got this paradox of, you can develop software now at any scale anywhere in the world, but it’s not easy to bring it to market successfully without a solution like ours,” he says. “And that’s what we do.”

“By democratizing software development and commercialization of it, ultimately, we’re playing into a trend of unleashing more innovation around the world.”

David Nachman, CEO of FastSpring

“By democratizing software development and commercialization of it, ultimately, we’re playing into a trend of unleashing more innovation around the world,” David continues. “That’s kind of the big lofty mission that excites me. And I think it excites a lot of people here.”

Twenty years is quite a milestone, so we’ll be celebrating all month! That includes cake cuttings and toasts with our team members around the world on June 28, our official incorporation day and 20th birthday. Check back later this month for photos, and here’s to the next 20! 🥂

Podcast Transcript

David Vogelpohl (00:04)

Hello everyone, and welcome to Growth Stage by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their businesses. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In today’s episode, I’m super excited. What we’re going to be talking about is what it takes to build an enduring business.

David Vogelpohl (00:32)

We’re going to do that through the lens of celebrating 20 years of FastSpring, the company that puts on Growth Stage and joining us for that conversation to celebrate FastSpring and talk about building an enduring business. I’d like to welcome first FastSpring’s original CEO and one of the original cofounders, Mr. Dan Engel. Dan, welcome to Growth Stage.

Dan Engel (00:53)

Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here and I’m excited we made it to such a successful 20 year journey.

David Vogelpohl (01:00)

I can’t imagine what it must be like to look back on your legacy and have this be something so enduring be part of that. And I know you’ve done a lot since then. And I’m kind of curious to learn a little bit more about that here in a bit. Also joining us for this conversation to kind of take a look at the past and where we are now. I’d like to welcome FastSpring’s current CEO, Mr. David Nachman. David, welcome.

David Nachman (01:23)

Great. Well, thank you, David. I’m also super excited to be here and I definitely owe some gratitude to Dan. Wouldn’t be in my role today if it weren’t for what he did 20 years ago today.

Dan Engel (01:30)

Mm-hmm.

David Vogelpohl (01:33)

Now it’s so interesting to think about those long-term effects our short-term decisions sometimes have. And so we’re going to try to peel back as much as we can here on this episode, ⁓ to give folks a view into what it takes to build an enduring business, what mistakes to avoid along the way and how to build a business that stands the test of time.

So ⁓ we’ll kick it off. David Nachman, I’d like to start with you. ⁓ For those, maybe this is their first time seeing the Growth Stage podcast or they’re not familiar with FastSpring. Could you explain what FastSpring is and what you do here?

David Nachman (02:13)

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. What we do is pretty straightforward. We are an end to end e-commerce platform for companies that sell digital goods on a global basis. So it’s often software companies, it may be gaming companies, maybe other forms of digital goods, but the commonality for everybody that’s selling on our platform is they’re trying to reach a global audience, which isn’t really an easy thing to do.

in commerce and payments. There’s a tremendous amount of complexity there. And they’re all selling digital goods. So that’s what we do. I am the CEO of the company. I joined the company about six years ago, just over about a month ago from six years ago.

David Vogelpohl (02:55)

Oh, wow. Congratulations on the six year mark there. A little over 25 % of FastSpring’s history, it sounds like. And then Dan, tell us about your connection to FastSpring and what you’re doing now.

David Nachman (03:01)

⁓ yeah.

Dan Engel (03:07)

Well, let’s see. It was ⁓ 2005 that ⁓ I met our co-founder Jason Foodman. And I had an idea for something we wanted to do having to do with upselling into shopping carts. And Jason said, well, that is a really good idea, but we’re not going to be able to do it unless we own the shopping cart. ⁓

And I said, well, what if we create our own shopping cart? And Jason said, well, it just so happens I’m working with a guy on that concept to compete with Digital River, which was the 800 pound gorilla at the time that had come out in 1994, went public, became worth a billion dollars. And so we decided that we would build that e-commerce infrastructure and shopping cart capability. We never ended up doing my idea

having to do with upsells, but obviously the foundational part that we needed is what became the business over time.

David Vogelpohl (04:05)

And this is you, right? Is this from around the time of the founding? These are the original founders, correct?

Dan Engel (04:11)

Yeah, that could be. I’d have to see exactly what year that was, but that’s uh — Jason’s all the way to the right hand side on the other opposite end of me. then Ken and Ryan. And what’s interesting is I only knew Jason, but then he knew Ken and Ken knew Ryan. So through the, I don’t know, transitive property or whatever it is, we all kind of knew each other. And that’s how we started working together. And we were all in four different states from one another.

And ⁓ we did it despite not being in the same place. And we actually went for about four years, I believe, without ever even seeing each other. Everything was just email and ICQ, which is chat. And maybe every six months there’d be a phone call. But some of the guys weren’t the type of people that were dying to get on the phone or meet in person that didn’t have the same personality as maybe Jason and I did as kind of the more salesy front of the business.

David Nachman (04:50)

Thanks

David Vogelpohl (05:05)

Was that the balance between you four where you and Jason were more on the business side and the other two for Ken and what’s the other person’s name? Yeah, Ryan. ⁓ and they were more technically focused.

Dan Engel (05:15)

Ken and Ryan. Yeah, totally. Yeah,

Ryan just was an awesome coder. He was probably the best guy on the planet to build what we were building. I mean, that’s what Ken said at the time, because he had built a company called RegNow, sold it to Digital River. By the way, all three of the other guys built and sold companies like FastSpring to Digital River. So we knew this space really well, and they knew it even better than I did. But yeah, Jason and I were on the business side, and Ken…

is amazing dealing with people through email. But he won’t pick up the phone. But we had phenomenal customer service that he led. And Ryan just wanted to code and wanted to own it himself. Didn’t want other coders. Didn’t want to spend time managing other coders. He just wanted to build his dream, again, the next generation of what he had built before using Java technology and doing things in a way that would be much more beneficial over the long term.

David Nachman (05:46)

answer.

you

Dan Engel (06:08)

over the existing solutions like Digital River, which became kind of the technology dinosaur that was inflexible. So we wanted to build that next generation system.

David Vogelpohl (06:17)

It sounds like there was a lot of synergy there between you four and a good balance. And it seems like you and Jason were able to kind of team up, I guess, on the business side and then Ken and Ryan on the technical and customer success side. It’s also interesting to hear about your virtual posture as co-founders back in that day and using ICQ and thriving in that kind of environment.

Um, of course, way pre pandemic, this was 2005 when the company was founded. Um, and then to hear about how much Digital River played a role in your company, in your lives back then, and to think of FastSpring’s enduring nature, even going beyond, you know, Digital River, um, uh, offering in existence, I guess, uh, recently kind of winding down there. Um, and to think about how that’s an interesting representation of FastSpring’s enduring

Dan Engel (07:06)

Mm

David Vogelpohl (07:13)

⁓ but maybe that’s one of the ways I might think about an enduring business. ⁓ I’ll start with Nachman on this question. David, to you, what does it mean to build an enduring business? What is that? How do you define that?

David Nachman (07:29)

Yeah, I think, I mean, the first thing I would say for a business to be enduring is it’s got to be adaptable. This business, like just about any business, there’s ebbs and flows and there’s times when everything is going great and there’s times when it’s a lot more challenging. And, you know, in my experience, like there’s a lot of things that need to go into strategy and execution to succeed as an enduring business. But I think the foundation of all of it is the team and the culture.

If you look at the businesses that I think have endured over time, it’s often the team and the culture that really, really stand out because the challenges are going to change over time. And you need a team that knows how to adapt to that. And if you’ve got the right team and people are passionate about what they’re doing, know, in my experience, generally they’re going to figure it out.

None of us have a perfect crystal ball. Certainly, I’m sure Dan, when you started this company 20 years ago, you had no idea what some of the challenges might look like today. But I think you built a great cultural foundation that I think still persists today. I think a lot of the elements of the culture that were there when you started it are still like a real, real strength for us. So to me, that’s kind of the foundation of all of it to build an enduring business.

David Vogelpohl (08:47)

Yeah. I like that idea of flexibility. What’s the saying — “Steady seas don’t make skilled sailors,” and like,

Dan Engel (08:48)

you

David Vogelpohl (08:53)

⁓ being able to roll with the punches and adapt and survive and thrive. I could see that being critical to building an enduring business. ⁓ Dan, what about you? What does it mean to build an enduring business?

Dan Engel (09:06)

Well, it’s kind of the same things because what he’s talking about there about adaptability and flexibility, that’s exactly what I was saying earlier. We specifically built a system from the ground up ⁓ that had the adaptability component that was missing from the competition.

That’s why Digital River doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why we were able to ultimately leave them some degree in the dust because they weren’t able to change with the times. And we knew, because we all had been customers of Digital River. mean, everybody was back then. It’s a long time ago. And we knew that they couldn’t deliver when we needed new functionality and features. They were stuck. Right. So that was a really big part of it. But I think culturally, you know, the biggest advantage FastSpring ever had

was based on culture and how we treated our people, meaning like the employees, the partners we had, and then how that trickled down to how they treated the customers. And we had a theory, which is not too novel, but isn’t practiced as much as it should be, that customers should be treated like gold. And we had happened to be in an industry where the competition felt very much the opposite. ⁓ They just

A lot of these companies were led by kind of arrogant folks that didn’t think too much about the customers. And, you know, you’d write into PayPal, nobody had ever sent you anything back or Digital River couldn’t get your account manager to respond. So we came up with rules like you’re going to hear a response within, I think it was 24 hours, even on weekends, even on holidays, ⁓ guarantees like that. And we absolutely delivered on it. We strive to wow.

every single customer, both the end user and our merchants, you know, the software companies. And the kind of things that they were saying were, and I don’t know if it’s still on the website anymore, but the old testimonials that I used to throw up on the website were like, I feel like I just left the spa, or I’ve never had this kind of experience in a services business before. We were blowing people away. And how were we able to do that when we had like four support reps and our competition had like 250?

because we’re just normal people that cared. That’s all. And those were the kind of people that hired and people like themselves who gave a damn. And we had been in the shoes of the customers who were frustrated working with Digital River. So we tried to build a business that would be the opposite. And it totally worked. And also it’s an advantage that we had, which didn’t really cost money, that nobody could beat. No competitor could beat. They could try to match it.

you know, blowing away your customers and wowing them with the experience, but they couldn’t ever beat it. And so part of what made the company so enduring is we had low prices and couldn’t really beat us on pricing. We had next generation technology instead of kind of the inflexible dinosaur tech of our competitors. And we blew you away with customer service. So how do you, how do you get anyone to switch away from FastSpring? They didn’t. We had retained

think 98.7 % of our customers year after year after year in an SMB business with thousands of customers. I’m a venture capitalist now, I invest in software companies. I’m yet to find a company in all these years that matches what FastSpring obtained in its metrics.

David Vogelpohl (12:16)

I can attest that nature has lived on and we see similar levels of success in ⁓ our business today, including winning awards like a ⁓ gold Globee and silver Stevie for that customer success. I think that foundation you laid and the seeds you planted are still bearing fruit.

Dan Engel (12:37)

Good. That’s great to hear.

David Vogelpohl (12:39)

Excellent. Yeah. Super cool to see that, ⁓ endure the test of time. Cause I know service can be one of those areas that definitely erodes over time, especially over like a 20 year history. ⁓ it was also interesting to hear you talk about how, if you have a team, if you hire a team and develop a team who cares, that’s like so critical to building that differentiation in that enduring nature.

And I thought that connected well to what David had shared a little earlier around flexibility and developing teams in that same way to address challenges that you have no idea what’s coming around the corner. ⁓ and I thought that was an interesting connection there. ⁓ speaking of like how, speaking of missions by sake of example, what was FastSpring’s mission in the beginning, you talked about like being better than Digital River, but like, was it more than that? Like, how did you view the mission of the company at that time?

Dan Engel (13:33)

I think we wanted to build a business that treated its customers the way we thought we should have been treated as software vendors. Everything that was wrong with the experience of working with Digital River and its competitors and non-software specific platforms like PayPal, we wanted to correct that because we felt wronged ourselves.

⁓ So I think that was a big part of the mission. And we thought if we were just normal, nice people that cared, we could accomplish that. ⁓ And we did, took a while, but we did. And we did displace a lot of those alternatives. ⁓ mission-wise, I think that’s really what our driving force was, ⁓ is to put some good into an industry that had a lot of bad experiences.

David Vogelpohl (14:21)

David, 20 years later, how do you define FastSpring’s mission now?

David Nachman (14:26)

Yeah, so I think a lot of what Dan just shared is still very true and very important in what we’re doing. ⁓ What gets me excited is kind of the bigger trend we’re playing into in enabling. And for me, it’s about democratizing the software development industry. And what I mean by that is if you look over the last 20 years, since the company was founded, barrier after barrier has come down that allows people

to build software anywhere in the world at any scale and compete with much bigger, much better capitalized players in highly developed markets. going way back, open source, developer tools, cloud computing, online marketing, now we’ve got the AI boom. So it’s gotten dramatically easier to build software anywhere and do it in a really, really competitive way. What hasn’t gotten easier?

is selling it globally. It’s actually kind of gone in some respects in the opposite direction. Tax complexity around the world has gone up a ton. Enforcement has gone up a ton.  The regulatory environment around data has gone up. Payments has gotten a lot more complex. The proliferation of payment methods around the world uh is pretty incredible, and the adoption of a lot of these payment methods  is really high. Fraud

⁓ is going up. I don’t know if it’s exponentially, but it’s certainly going up at a high rate and the complexity of that fraud is going up. So you’ve got this paradox of, you can develop software now at any scale anywhere in the world, but it’s not easy to bring it to market successfully without a solution like ours. And that’s what we do. ⁓ and if you look around the world, there’s, know, no monopoly on development talent in places like Silicon Valley. And there’s talented developers everywhere in the world now.

but there were barriers to them competing. So By democratizing software development and commercialization of it, ultimately, we’re playing into a trend of unleashing more innovation around the world. That’s kind of the big lofty mission that excites me. And I think it does excite a lot of people here.

Dan Engel (16:18)

you

David Vogelpohl (16:39)

Excellent. Love hearing that. ⁓ Dan, so we’ve talked about like it’s a 20 year episode, right? So we’re doing like the worm and fuzzy stuff, but I want to go to like the stuff that made you lose sleep at night in the early days of FastSpring. Tell me about a big mistake you made that like almost tank the company or just like took you in a really bad direction. I mean, we are publishing this, so like take that into heart there, but

Dan Engel (16:53)

So.

David Vogelpohl (17:08)

Was it, was it deprecating this website? mean, this is a fire of a 2025 website, but like, me about the mistakes you

Dan Engel (17:11)

Ha ha!

looks a little pruney to me. ⁓ Well, obviously we made lots of mistakes. think, you know, one key decision was we kept coding really just within Ryan’s domain and didn’t hire a bunch of developers. And I think there were benefits to that and costs. And sometimes we were frustrated we weren’t going faster. ⁓ Because when we came out, a company also came out around the same time. unlike us who did everything

by the way, with $30,000, I put ten grand in, that’s all I ever put into FastSpring. We had a competitor, the head also sold their company to Digital River and they put like 35 or 50 million into their company and they started eating our lunch. So that made us kind of frustrated and concerned because they were getting a lot of clients we had hoped to get. So that was one decision. And also I think using

Java, think, had a lot of benefits, but also I think it slowed us down as well. Now, in the long term, it was beneficial and a great decision because it kept us flexible and extensible. But let’s see. So one of the scarier things that happen is, so when you’re processing payments, there’s risks that you might process in payments that are violations of, say, your relationship.

in your agreement with say a Visa or MasterCard. And we got really good at policing and avoiding any transactions going through the system that would violate any of those agreements. like with hackers, you figure out a solution to avoid the hacking and then the hackers find a way around it and then you find a solution to solve that and then they find a way. So it wasn’t perfect, you know, it’s life. And we had a particular incident where some

content got through that we did processing for is a tiny amount, but it still was very problematic. And that was very costly to us. We had to deal with MasterCard and you know, to have an angry MasterCard is a real problem because you can’t stop working with MasterCard if you’re accepting credit cards, right? That kind of got this duopoly or whatever you want to call it. So that was an example of a really scary experience when we had to deal with, you know, people like Visa MasterCard and

some of the risks around processing that could have really hurt our business and changed things. ⁓ And I would say, in terms of the team that we had, we got along incredibly well. It probably didn’t hurt that we weren’t in the same office and hardly ever saw each other. That can really have a lot of benefits. The biggest fight we ever had, and when we had it, I thought, my God, this is gonna be such a battle for years, was picking the name.

⁓ After we had that, that was like a real battle and I didn’t know what the future would bring. And we went years and years with really not having any fights, maybe until the end when we were selling the business and not everyone wanted to necessarily sell at the same price and money gets people to fight. But ⁓ other than that, ⁓ we really made a great call with the kind of team that we had as founders because we had a team of four former CEOs.

which meant we were all able to kind of do our own stuff without anybody needing to help us. Right. And so we, we, we, we, we split up the business into silos, Ken handled support, Ryan development, me on the sales side and also all the CEO role and Jason on the sales side and some other stuff too. And that worked really well. but, ⁓ anyway, so those are some thoughts on some of the things that were challenges over the years. and,

not, raising capital, going slower, sticking with Java, sticking with one developer. All those things made us go slower. And for me, made me anxious. ⁓ but some of the other partners, they were okay with waiting and having the business take a long time. And it sure did. My wife, ⁓ nicknamed it “SlowSpring,” ⁓ because, ⁓ you know, it was like year three and a half or something and we still weren’t getting anywhere. And I kept telling her, it’s right around the corner.

David Nachman (21:15)

it.

Dan Engel (21:22)

Finally, things picked up. They picked up because we became popular in the Mac software community. We found a niche, right? ⁓ I don’t know what would have happened to FastSpring if we hadn’t found that niche. ⁓ But eventually we took over for Digital River and others as kind of the leading provider for Mac developers. But until then, it was a very slow moving train and we didn’t know what was around the corner.

David Vogelpohl (21:44)

think that’s a bold lesson for people watching and listening who are just starting out and thinking about how to get traction about how you were able to kind of niche down in your core ICP and find that, you know, kind of handhold foothold to start moving further up the mountain. I also thought you had tension in some of the mistakes where you talked about the desire to go faster and invest more, but then you talked about growing pains around things like dealing with hackers and

maybe processing transactions you shouldn’t have and how that affected and put risk into your business. And so like with FastSpring, you know, we’re offering payments and subscriptions and tax compliance and a lot of startups are like compliance. What are you talking about? I’m blowing and growing. I’m, ready to go. Do you think that like maybe moving slow and being more purposeful did have value other than just being, you know, “SlowSpring” and making you a little frustrated with the growth?

Dan Engel (22:41)

Probably. Two of my partners would say definitely yes. They would be, yes, they are more patient people than I am.

David Vogelpohl (22:44)

Would those be Ken and Ryan?

Nice. I like that. ⁓ But yeah, I think about that a lot, you know, in this day, I don’t know how much you’ve kept up with the merchant of record space, but there’s a decent number of startups getting into it. And so I just imagine what it must be like to start from near zero and develop these rules, and this experience, and this understanding, and a platform that reacts to it all. ⁓ Certainly a grand adventure, but definitely no easy task.

Dan Engel (23:15)

Yeah.

It

was, and I think one error was that we didn’t really have expertise in the whole merchant account payment processing business. I mean, yes, software and what used to be called shareware, and the Digital River side of things. But the actual — like all the intricacies of working with like, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AmEx, PayPal, and doing global payments and different currencies and different really didn’t know that stuff.

And so sometimes we learned some hard lessons because of our ignorance. ⁓ It would have, if I were to do it again, I would bring someone involved in the early days who really had spent, I don’t know, 20 years in that payment we didn’t have to figure out what we didn’t know. I think that was costly to us. And I think that was something missing, a missing ingredient that fortunately, we were successful despite it.

David Vogelpohl (24:07)

Did you underestimate the complexity of payments?

Dan Engel (24:10)

I think so. Yeah, I think so. ⁓ And the deep understanding that was needed to really know what we were working with and what we were doing and how it was viewed by others playing all different roles in the industry, the ISOs, IPSPs, the Visas and Mastercards, the acquiring banks, the gateways, we just didn’t really have a great understanding of how all of those different parties were seeing us in their world.

And so we didn’t necessarily navigate it the best way that we could have if we had known more.

David Vogelpohl (24:45)

Sage advice. ⁓ As you look back at your time with FastSpring, founding it, bringing it up, eventually selling it, and the roles and companies you’ve led since then, what lessons did you learn in your FastSpring days that you took forward into your future adventures?

Dan Engel (25:03)

Well, you know, we built FastSpring to not be able to fail because we had all been serial entrepreneurs and had built businesses. Some worked, some didn’t. And one thing that I figured out is if you don’t have a clock tied to money and burn, it’s really hard to go out of business. so…

We built the business from scratch with almost no money. Like I said, I put in 10 grand and the co-founders contributed their time for no cash, just for equity, right? Significant equity, founders equity. ⁓ And so the only way the business could fail is if we lost interest. Nothing external could really make us fail. It really was in our control. So it’s a question of, we lose interest before we get enough customers that this business is big enough that we care about it? And it’s making a difference for us. So with that,

⁓ It gave us quite a runway to be able to figure things out, which took really four years to really start taking off. And believe me, the first three years wasn’t just fun. And of course, while you’re building it, you don’t know if you’re ever going to make it, so you might be wasting your time. So it’s not always the most motivating every day. But I’ve built every business since like that, ⁓ where it’s either profitable for day one or it just doesn’t have that burn and that pressure.

Because what’s the number one reason businesses go out of business? They run out of cash. So if you can get rid of that risk, you’ve got a really good chance of making it. So I’ve had a lot of successes in my career. FastSpring is one of them. There’s a whole bunch of other things I’ve done and all that. And the thing that they all have in common is they all failed before they succeeded. I mean, people don’t see that. They just see the news headlines and great exit for FastSpring, or Picasa, or what I did at Google, or

GoTo Meeting in Santa Barbara. But all those things failed first. So the only reason I’ve been able to figure out how to build these businesses successfully now, including my venture capital firm, is because of all the things I did that failed in the past. And so I think that’s the biggest lesson that I bring forward to every business I do and hope to pass on to other entrepreneurs and to my children and whatnot, that it’s really the failures where you learn how to succeed.

David Vogelpohl (27:12)

I imagine what that must be like. So these are the years and the number of employees from back in those days. And you were saying like, it really took you better part of this time period to get it ramped up. And then you can start to see the business grow over time. It’s very efficient business still during that time.

Dan Engel (27:29)

Well, keep in mind, so in 2013, that was 23. They weren’t really employees, 12 full-time. The rest were part-time contractors. We made them employees later after we sold the business. But that was at a time we were doing over $100 million in revenue. We had 12 full-timers. So it was very efficient and we did not in any way measure ourselves by number of people. It was by revenue and profit.

David Vogelpohl (27:51)

That’s great to hear. ⁓ so Dan has founded the business with his co-founders and they’ve gone on this grand adventure, eventually selling the business. ⁓ Nachman, tell me the backstory between about when you joined the business and what you were kind of doing right before that.

David Nachman (28:11)

Yeah,

I’ve been in B2B tech just about my whole career. Immediately before joining FastSpring, I was running a business that had a very highly tailored content management platform for local government.

So it was cities and counties, they would host a website on it, but also we would power a lot of the constituent facing functionality. you we sort of powered the digital city hall strategy that, you know, a lot of local governments are moving towards. We had sold that business to someone who was really consolidating all of the gov tech industry.

Dan Engel (28:32)

.

David Nachman (28:53)

And I found my way indirectly to FastSpring, was drawn to it for a whole host of reasons. But that’s ultimately, you know, what brought me here or the backstory in terms of what I was doing before I got here.

David Vogelpohl (29:08)

And then as you entered the business, what were your perceptions at that time? ⁓ How did you think about FastSpring’s mission then versus now? ⁓ We had this great meeting the other day where we were like, where did you get wrong about FastSpring when you first joined the company? What about for you, David? What did you get wrong about FastSpring when you first joined?

Dan Engel (29:24)

Okay.

David Nachman (29:29)

Yes, I think some of

the same things that Dan mentioned. I’m not sure that I necessarily underestimated the complexity of payments, but I’m not a payments guy by trade and experience. We had a lot of generalists even at that point in the company. We had a lot of really passionate, a lot of really talented people. And I’ve kind of always been one of those people who believes, OK, if you get the

know, get smart people that are driven, they’re going to figure out problems. And yes, but they’re not going to figure them out as quickly. In many cases, it’s someone who’s got the pattern recognition of having seen that same problem 15 times before. ⁓ And I think I waited a little too long ⁓ to really bolster a lot of our domain expertise in the business. And as I started to do that, ⁓ just

Dan Engel (30:05)

you ⁓

David Nachman (30:23)

What it did in terms of accelerating the business was pretty profound. And it was one of those where I sort of stepped back and said, wow, I should have done that a long time ago. I’d say the other thing is when I came into the business, my perceptions were very positive of the business. Great solution, great customers, business growing at a very healthy clip. So it was a very healthy business. wasn’t a turnaround of any sort. It was how do we take it to the next level?

Dan Engel (30:30)

Okay.

David Nachman (30:52)

So what was missing in my mind was that it really wasn’t built to scale

to anywhere, you the size we are today or, where we think we’ll be over the coming few years. And like a lot of small businesses, a lot of single points of failure, you know, some of that was people, some of that was vendors, some of that was technology. The business sort of survived and thrived on individual heroics. So, you know.

not a lot of ⁓ systems in place, processes, et cetera. And we didn’t really have a leadership team that had scaled to where we wanted to go. So I felt like we did need to bring in people that were more experienced and kind of knew the journey that we were embarking on. And I think a little bit of what I got wrong there.

⁓ in some of these initial hires was I was very focused on getting people that, you know, kind of knew how to operate at scale. And culturally I missed on some of them in terms of abandoning a lot of what’s made the company so special and so effective, which is kind of the entrepreneurial scrappiness. And it’s a, you know, it’s a rare breed of person that has that hands on entrepreneurial scrappiness and can also scale. ⁓ you know,

Dan Engel (32:08)

you

David Nachman (32:14)

Often those are great founder type people that could do magic that a lot of more experienced company people can’t do, but they don’t scale as well. ⁓ So initially I did bring some of those people in and it just, they weren’t the right fit. ⁓ And over my first few years here, I started to really realize what’s the culture that really correlates with

success in our particular business. And part of it is this is the most dynamic, most complex business I’ve ever been at for its scale. I mean, we’ve got a very global footprint. We’re operating in highly regulated industries. We’re dealing with payments. We’re dealing with software. We’re dealing with complexity around tax. We’re dealing with a lot of regulation around data. It’s kind of infinitely complex. And this goes back to this notion of adaptability. ⁓

Dan Engel (32:47)

Okay.

David Nachman (33:11)

You have to have some level of scrappy entrepreneurialism to thrive in this business. But it also has to be paired with, you know how to scale a business and it’s not all about, hey, I’m just going to do the heroics to get us to the next challenge. It’s no, I’m going to build a foundation where if I’m not here, this business will still run quite well. So.

Dan Engel (33:25)

you

David Nachman (33:37)

So I think, you know, there are definitely things I got right, but there were some things I got wrong in trying to make that transition from more of a startup company to a really scalable company.

David Vogelpohl (33:48)

Yeah, that’s kind of like an awkward teenager-y zone a little bit. that’s a whole, sorry, go ahead.

Dan Engel (33:48)

Hm.

David Nachman (33:51)

That’s right. ⁓

We definitely went through our awkward teenage phase. I hope we’re out of that now.

David Vogelpohl (33:57)

Yeah.

Knock on wood on that one for sure. I still got to build the enduring business of the future, right? ⁓ We’re kind of getting towards the end here, so I want to make sure to hit on a couple of things here in the last little bit. Nachman, since I’m on you, I’ll stick with you for this one. But if somebody’s out there and they have a startup and they’re listening to all these points of view,

David Nachman (34:03)

That’s right.

David Vogelpohl (34:22)

maybe taking some notes along the way, but what’s the one thing that that person should ⁓ get from listening to you about building an enduring business? What’s your number one piece of advice?

David Nachman (34:33)

It’s embrace change and change before you have to. ⁓ You can’t build an enduring business doing the same thing for any period of time. period of time is shrinking with every given year. mean, given what’s going on with AI right now, ⁓ know, the timeframes over which things evolve is just collapsing. it’s, you know, constantly think about how your business is going to be.

reimagined and go do that. ⁓ Don’t let somebody else do that to you. You’ve got to get out in front of it.

David Vogelpohl (35:08)

Great one, embrace change and change before you have to. ⁓ Dan, what about you?

Dan Engel (35:14)

⁓ I would say treating your own people extremely well and having that then trickle down to how they treat your customers and the concept of treating your customers like gold and bending over backwards to ensure that they are just wowed by the experience of working with you compared to what they’re used to from alternatives. And then I think in terms of building a business, removing the obstacles as much as possible that

lead companies to fail, including dealing with things like burn upfront.

David Vogelpohl (35:46)

I it. I love the people first thing. I think this is like the Dan Golden Rule. Treat others as you want them to treat your customers. I love it. ⁓ All right. ⁓ Last question. Sorry about that little mic pop there. Dan, um we’re going to show this recording to the FastSpring team and they’re pretty much all going to listen to it and watch it. Do you have a special message for them to celebrate the 20 year FastSpring anniversary?

David Nachman (35:53)

Thank

Dan Engel (36:16)

A special message. Well, you know, I guess, you know, it’s I’m glad that everybody’s part of something with the humble roots and mission that we originally started on to try to offer a better alternative in an industry that was plagued with some negativity. But I think, ⁓ you know, I challenge everybody to really think about how to make the next 20 years of FastSpring successful, dealing with all the change. Change has been a big ⁓

theme here in our conversation. So we have all the different things happening around, say, AI, or how people purchase software, or what Apple’s Store looks like, and what they can and can’t do. All different facets are going to continuously change. And so I hope folks are thinking about how they can continuously adapt to ensure that FastSpring survives and thrives through all the shifts ahead. Some will be good and some will be bad for the company so that we can have this kind of a conversation again after another 20 years.

David Vogelpohl (37:12)

Nice, I like it. Dan, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. It was super interesting to hear about your backstory and some of the things that went into building such an enduring business. But thank you so much for joining us today.

Dan Engel (37:27)

You betcha. Thanks for having me and congratulations on the 20 years and thanks everyone for doing such a great job at the business.

David Vogelpohl (37:33)

Thank you, of course. then David, thank you for joining and picking up the torch and then sharing your backstory here at the helm.

David Nachman (37:41)

Well, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed the discussion. I’ve learned some things about the business. I don’t think I knew Dan, so it’s fantastic to get the time to interact and learn a little bit about our roots and history.

Dan Engel (37:50)

Okay.

David Vogelpohl (37:52)

Excellent. And for those watching and listening, if you’d like to learn more about FastSpring, you can visit FastSpring.com. Thanks for joining us for the Growth Stage podcast. I’ve been your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role here at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.

The post What It Takes to Build an Enduring Business: Celebrating 20 Years of FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

Missed the chance to chat with one of our expert team members in person at the shows? You can still schedule a personalized demo, or to read more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.

Pocket Gamer Connects 2025

The FastSpring team kicked off the week at PGC San Francisco 2025 with a strong presence on the show floor. If you stopped by our booth, you may have chatted with Sr. Account Executive Leif Bisping, Sr. Account Executive Brandon Smith, Key Sales Development Representative Arturo Rubio, Key SDR and Team Lead Melvin Zaid, Sr. Director of Pre-Sales and Implementation Adam Cohen, CMO David Vogelpohl, or Head of Gaming Chip Thurston.

Besides repping FastSpring at our booth, on Monday Chip Thurston presented “Marketing Web Shops – Forbidden Fruit Or Ripe Opportunity?” As someone who has himself refined D2C marketing and monetization strategies at major mobile publishers, Chip knows the impact web shops can have on a game when marketed properly. 

Chip’s presentation covered key points such as:

• Why conversations about D2C marketing seem to start with “the first rule about web shops is that you don’t talk about web shops.” 
• What we do know about what game publishers can and cannot do to market their web shops.
• Some of the more unique aspects of D2C marketing, such as how you can reach players, what you can say, and where you can land your players. 
• What we can learn from specific use cases, such as leveraging free daily claims to drive web portal traffic.

You can check out PGC’s video of Chip’s session here. 

Community Clubhouse @ GDC 2025

From PGC, the FastSpring team transitioned right into GDC with a Community Clubhouse event on Tuesday, which we sponsored in partnership with Keywords Studios, alongside industry leaders like AWS for Games, Microsoft, and more. 

We kicked off GDC by sharing the stage with Nexus and Keywords Studios in a panel covering “D2C X-Ray Vision: What Top Publishers Do to Scale Web Shop Success.” 

The panel discussed looking ahead to D2C in 2025, including:

• How publishers are seeing success and where they’re going to double down their efforts.
• The current state of regulations and how those are likely to change this year.
• Sources of player hesitation for D2C purchasing and opportunities to mitigate them.

Read more about the panel on GDC’s 2025 schedule. 

That night, FastSpring hosted a happy hour with some of the best and brightest at GDC!

We then had a fantastic presence in the GDC expo hall Wednesday through Friday, with Senior Tax Manager JT Grewal and Senior Product Marketing Manager Braden Steel joining the booth crew to add even more tax and product expertise to our onsite team. 

Join Us at the Next Show!

After a truly great week in San Francisco, we were sad to see it end, but we know there will be more! Be on the lookout for future updates showcasing our content from the show, and don’t forget to watch our events page to find out where you can meet up with us next! 

Monetize Your Game With FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.

The post GDC 2025 Recap: FastSpring Went Big in SF! appeared first on FastSpring.

The journey begins at PG Connects, the leading international conference that has facilitated over $1 billion in deals across its 12-year history. With over 55,000 industry professionals having attended their events, PG Connects creates the perfect environment for meaningful connections across all gaming platforms — from mobile and PC to emerging technologies like blockchain and AI. Find us at our booth or  just meet up with us at the Pocket Gamer Connects party at the end of Day 1 of the conference to discover how FastSpring can help you navigate the complexities of global game monetization.

During PG Connects, we’ll also be at the Community Clubhouse (Esplanade Rooms 158 and 160) at Moscone Center. It is an essential gathering for game community professionals. Now in its fifth edition, this free learning hub brings together industry leaders from powerhouses like Arrowhead, Activision, and Electronic Arts to share insights on player experience and community engagement. 

We’ll conclude our San Francisco tour at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Booth S569, where creativity, innovation, and excellence converge. For over three decades, GDC has been the premier destination for developers behind the games we love, fostering countless success stories in the industry. This five-day experience offers awe-inspiring talks, unparalleled networking opportunities, and a showcase of the latest technological achievements. As part of the community driving the future of games, FastSpring is ready to help you realize your potential in the global gaming market.

Whether you’re looking to expand your game’s global reach, go D2C, or simply connect with industry experts who understand your challenges, FastSpring’s team will be ready to help at all three events. Stop by any of our booths to learn how we can help you focus on what matters most — creating amazing games — while we handle the complexities of global commerce.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration pages for PG Connects SFO, Community Clubhouse, and GDC to grab your ticket and get access to incredible speakers, unparalleled networking opportunities, and proprietary software that will maximize your experience even more.

How to Connect With FastSpring in San Francisco

Stop by our booths or connect with the team via the PG Connects app or the GDC app to learn more about subscription management, international taxes, and how using a merchant of record can enable you to collect payments faster for your games. Schedule a demo now or at any time in San Francisco in person.

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Triple the Impact: FastSpring’s March Gaming Event Tour in San Francisco! appeared first on FastSpring.

The Taipei Game Show stands as a cornerstone event in the Asian gaming market, attracting over 1,800 industry professionals from more than 35 countries annually. Since its inception in 2003, the show has facilitated over 10,000 business matchmaking meetings, making it the perfect venue for gaming studios looking to tap into the vast Chinese-speaking market. The B2B Zone, where FastSpring will be located, serves as a dynamic hub for game developers, publishers, and service providers to forge valuable connections and explore new opportunities.

For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been empowering gaming studios to focus on what they do best: creating amazing games. At booth B36, our team will showcase how studios can leverage our fully customizable payment solutions to sell games and in-game items worldwide while automatically managing complex challenges such as global tax compliance and customer support. Whether you’re an established studio or an emerging indie developer, we invite you to discover how FastSpring can help you scale your gaming business across borders without the usual headaches of international commerce.

Visit FastSpring at booth B36 during the Taipei Game Show 2025 this January at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Hall 1. Let’s discuss how we can help you expand your gaming business globally while keeping your focus on game development.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket and get access to incredible speakers, unparalleled networking opportunities, and proprietary software that will maximize your experience even more.

How to Connect With FastSpring at Taipei Game Show 

Stop by our booth or connect with the team via the event app to learn more about subscription management, international taxes, and how using a merchant of record can enable you to collect payments faster for your games. Schedule a demo now or at Taipei Game Show in person.

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Expanding Horizons: FastSpring at Taipei Game Show 2025 appeared first on FastSpring.

Pocket Gamer Connects is the leading international conference series for the global games industry. It brings together delegates from across the entire ecosystem with all the key formats covered, from mobile, PC, and console to XR, AI, and blockchain technology. FastSpring’s Head of Gaming, Chip Thurston, will talk about best practices in developing your D2C strategy during “What Actually Works With D2C: Proven Insights From the Frontlines of Major Mobile Publishers” on January 20th.

After launching 10 years ago, the PG Connects roadshow has landed in America, Canada, Finland, Jordan, India, and Hong Kong, with a genuinely international client base. Its reputation is as a must-attend conference for meeting the most exciting game makers, developers, and publishers alike, as well as some of the world’s top investors, tools providers, platforms, and more. From indie to AAA, we’re looking forward to meeting the vast array of leaders and professionals in the gaming industry in person.

We hope to see you at the historic The Brewery London to discuss new technologies shaping the future of the gaming industry, webstores, different methods to boost revenue, and more. 

Be sure to stop by the parties as well, starting off with the Kick Off party on Sunday, and the flagship Global Connects Party on Monday. Veterans of these parties — and after nearly a decade of these shindigs, there are now a fair few of them out there — will confirm PG Connects knows how to have a good time. And this year will be no different, as we’ll all be celebrating extra hard with 10 years of PG Connects to toast!

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket and get access to incredible speakers, unparalleled networking opportunities, and proprietary software that will maximize your experience even more.

How to Connect With FastSpring at PG Connects

Stop by our booth or connect with the team via the PG Connects app to learn more about subscription management, international taxes, and how using a merchant of record can enable you to collect payments faster for your games. Schedule a demo now or at PG Connects in person.

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post FastSpring at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2025! appeared first on FastSpring.

devcom: Level Up Your Monetization Strategy

• Join us at Booth –B4 and connect with the team via the devcom app here.

gamescom: The Next Stage of Growth

• Join us at Hall 2.2, Booth C-045a and connect with the team via the gamescom app here. 

Why FastSpring Is the Level-Up Your Game Needs

• Don’t Compromise: We offer the convenience of a full-service solution with the flexibility to customize your experience. Go D2C with confidence.
• Complete Monetization: More than just payments, we handle everything from our hands-on implementation onboarding and global tax compliance to fraud prevention and subscription management.
• Global Reach: Sell your games worldwide with ease, supporting over 180 countries, 21+ languages,  multiple currencies, and a wide array of payment methods.
• Dedicated Support: Our team is your partner in success. We offer personalized support and resources to support your long-term growth goals.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration pages for devcom and gamescom to grab a ticket to each event and get access to incredible speakers, unparalleled networking opportunities, and even an entire festival that will maximize your experience even more! 

Let’s Connect and Level Up!

We can’t wait to meet you at devcom and gamescom 2024! Connect with the team on the event apps, or shoot over a quick note to request a meeting here. Let’s explore how FastSpring can help you achieve your monetization goals and propel your game business to new heights.

FastSpring is how gaming studios sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games!  Sign up for a free account or request a demo today to learn more.

The post FastSpring Levels Up Your Game Monetization at devcom & gamescom 2024! appeared first on FastSpring.

The 2024 edition of ChinaJoy, themed “Stay True, Game On,” is scheduled from July 26th to 29th at the Shanghai New International Expo Center (SNIEC). This year’s event will focus on deepening player experiences and supporting international growth for game companies. 

“‘Stay True’ is to express the deep love and persistent pursuit of the game industry for more than 20 years, whether it is the organizer of the exhibition or the members of the industry. Game, as a new cultural carrier, is not only a form of entertainment, but also represents a process of creation and exploration. ‘Game On’ emphasizes that ChinaJoy will continue to bring endless game experience and endless joy to the vast number of game players.”

FastSpring helps you bring that endless joy to players beyond the borders of any region by offloading the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games!   

For video game studios, attending ChinaJoy is a strategic move to expand your global reach and tap into the thriving Chinese gaming market. With a massive and engaged player base, China represents a lucrative opportunity for growth and innovation. ChinaJoy provides a unique platform to connect with local publishers, investors, and service providers, forging valuable partnerships and accelerating market entry. The event also offers a chance to gather crucial market intelligence, understand player preferences, and stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving industry. 

Also in the B2B section is the ChinaJoy x Game Connection Indie Game Festival which aims to promote new high-quality indie games worldwide, and will be presented online on Steam & Steam China.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket to get access to incredible speakers, unparalleled networking opportunities and proprietary software that will maximize your experience even more!

How to Connect With FastSpring at ChinaJoy

Stop by our booth B286 in hall W4 or connect with the team, (Jay and Leo) via the ChinaJoy WeChat to learn more about subscription management, international taxes, and how using a merchant of record can enable you to collect payments faster on your website. Schedule a demo now or at ChinaJoy in person!

The post Join FastSpring at ChinaJoy 2024! appeared first on FastSpring.

Will your existing users revolt to the change and switch to a new product? Will your subscriptions renew at a high enough rate to counteract a reduction in one-time sales? How do you even roll this out?

In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Fred Linfjärd of Planday about his experiences switching from a one-time billing model to subscriptions. Fred shares his thoughts on:

• Why digital product companies should embrace subscriptions.
• How to justify the switch to your customer base.
• Avoiding the worst of community blowback.
• Must-do tactics for your rollout plan.

As a bonus, our host David Vogelpohl also has experience moving massively popular digital products from one-time fees to subscriptions, so this interview is full of hard-learned insights you can use to find success in your own rollout of subscriptions.

Whether you’re considering switching to subscriptions or are in the middle of switching, don’t miss this chance to learn insider tips on how to make this transition successful for your business. Listen or watch now!

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will help you grow your subscription software business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including software management, VAT and sales tax management, global payments, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

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Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript

David Vogelpohl  

Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how SaaS, software, and digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their businesses. I’m David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In today’s episode, we’re gonna be talking about a topic that means a lot to me, very interesting and challenging part

I find of digital businesses, which is successfully switching from one time fees to subscriptions. We often see this in the software universe. And joining us for that conversation today is someone much like myself, who’s been through this before, a lot of war stories to tell. I’d like to welcome to Growth Stage, Mr. Fred Linfjärd. Fred, welcome to Growth Stage.

Fred Linfjärd  

Thank you David, great to be here.

David Vogelpohl  

And it’s Linfjärd I didn’t say that right. I like practiced and practiced and I got it wrong, Fred.

Fred Linfjärd  

You’re not the only one, it’s totally… Okay, it’s perfect.

David Vogelpohl  

Us, us Vogelpohls have no idea what you’re talking about. Uh, but, uh, thanks for, thanks for coming on. I’m really glad to have you here and really interested to hear your story around this idea of successfully switching from one time to recurring. So for those listening and watching, what Fred is going to talk about is that switch from one time to recurring billing models, but he’s going to share his thoughts on why digital product companies who aren’t doing that should embrace subscriptions.

Fred Linfjärd  

Hahaha

David Vogelpohl  

How to justify the switch to your one-time customer base so people who’ve already been buying your product for one-time fees avoiding the worst of community blowback change to subscription can cause some anxiety for folks and Some of the must-do tactics for your own rollout plan So if you’re in the midst of it or you’re planning a switch, this is gonna be a good episode for you

All right, Fred, I’m going to ask you the same question I ask every guest of Growth Stage. What was the first thing you bought online?

Fred Linfjärd  

I bought, it was a long time ago and I think it was a book from Amazon. I know it’s boring, but at the time I think they kind of only sold books. Or it wasn’t like it was today at least. So I would go with that book from Amazon.

David Vogelpohl  

Do you recall what the book was?

Was it how to buy things online?

Fred Linfjärd  

I think it was some type of, it was the early 2000s I guess. I think it was some kind of book on maybe affiliate marketing or maybe it was HTML for dummies. I don’t know.

David Vogelpohl  

Well, I know a lot of HTML and affiliate OGs, so I’m now dying to know the author, but maybe I’ll save that question for your next time on Growth Stage. But a book on Amazon, that’s pretty on the nose. I like that. Okay, and then you’re with a company called Planday. Can you tell us a little bit about what Planday does and what you do there?

Fred Linfjärd  

Sure, yeah. So Planday is, I think the category is called workforce management platform. So B2B SaaS solve needs when it comes to scheduling and time and attendance. So for shift workers serving industries like hospitality, restaurants, hotels, and all these things, and I’m the director of growth there. So yeah, I pretty much try to make sure.

everything from acquisition to monetization plays together well and we drive profitable growth.

David Vogelpohl  

Awesome, well that’s good to hear. And the topic we’re talking about today, the switch from one time to recurring subscriptions, a lot of your war stories are rooted in one particular company switched to that. What company was that? And from the high level, could you tell us about kind of what was happening at that time?

Fred Linfjärd  

Sure, yeah. So I worked at a company called Capture One a few years back and it’s a photo editing software, desktop software. And the biggest competitor is Adobe Lightroom and Capture One is really a software and the company was born out of a camera manufacturing business called Phase One

Fred Linfjärd  

and build that out, that software business.

David Vogelpohl  

And so it was image software effectively.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, raw converter. So a raw converter software to really get the big pictures in and you need a lot of power and that software became really, really good because it had to be good to power the phase one cameras. And then they wanted to kind of monetize that and open it up for other camera brands and make its own business out of it.

David Vogelpohl  

So you mentioned Adobe Lightroom is the biggest competitor. The switch from one time to subscription for Capture One, was this around the same time that Adobe’s creative suite was coming out and they themselves were adopting a more recurring revenue model?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, so I think so. So this was back in 2017, I think. So Capture One had sort of a kindling business on the software. We actually had a home-built ecommerce system and entitlement system, license management system. And we had some subscriptions,

it was a very, very small amount and the big business was perpetual and selling these licenses to the software.

David Vogelpohl  

I’m chuckling a little bit internally, Fred, because around that same year, I was in the middle of my own management of a switch from one-time software to recurring in the studio press business, the WordPress themes that were sold for one time that were going to a recurring model with a compact edge. And so I just imagined us both back in 2017 doing this together and not knowing each other at that time. So, you know.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

You talked about how Capture One kind of wanted to take advantage more of subscriptions. I mentioned how Adobe had made the shift from one time to subscription in the way they went to market. But I mean, like why? Why make this shift when your customers are so used to doing it a certain way, and you’re going to come in and disrupt everything? I mean, especially like Adobe was a massive business, but why do this?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, so I think the main thing is it’s a fundamentally…

different way on how you do business when you sell a perpetual versus when you sell a subscription obviously, right? So and so it means that You know you have to do so much stuff to be able to sustain a constant cash flow so, you know every time you release a software version and And you want people to upgrade you need to pay money for it, you know with paid ads your time on sending out emails

these things and it’s just very, it’s not a sustainable way to grow a business like that. And I think at that time, more and more companies really wanted to get into the subscription part because they know how much they can do within their company if they would have a working sustainable subscription model, you’d be able to grow faster, hire more people, you will have a, you don’t need to spend.

as much every time you’re trying to sell an upgrade to your software. So yeah, it’s kind of the holy grail you want.

David Vogelpohl  

It’s, yeah, and I have, I’ve known a lot of people that have one time software businesses and have participated in them at very deep levels on multiple occasions. And you know, you pointed out it was like the release is everything, right? Like the next version of Photoshop is like going to be the big moneymaker for Adobe or something. I mean, it sounds like that was the case at Capture One as well.

where these major releases have to be coupled with marketing and go-to-market efforts and the features in them and the go-to-market had better work or you’re gonna miss your revenue and there’s not much you can do about that because you’re not getting a lot of lift from the work you did before. Is that a fair way to assess that situation at Capture One?

Fred Linfjärd  

Absolutely and it’s not just about the go to market. This actually trickles down into product development, product management, the way you do releases is so different and more smoother and sustainable when you’re on a subscription model because when you do these upgrade releases, it gets very rushed, right? And you need to make sure that all these different features,

like if I hit the majority of people that has purchase power with the feature release, then I’ll get more money, right? But what if I hit the wrong one? Because some updates you have to do, right? Even if they’re boring, even if they don’t give you that wow thing, you know, to, oh wow, this is a new cool thing, now I’m going to get a lot of new people in, right?

struggle and you may start making wrong choices and you’re actually, you know, degrading your product, I would say even to some point.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. And then of course, you’re kind of incentivized to keep your best features for your next major release. And so the combination of those things really moves away from kind of agile methodologies and continuous improvement and really kind of creates these like blockbuster moments for your release, which can be put pressure on your roadmap in the ways you kind of talked about. So.

Fred Linfjärd  

You always have to trump them also, right? So every time there’s gotta be something more cooler and cooler.

David Vogelpohl  

All right, totally. And you’re really trying to earn the renewal, effectively, from the customer. The other issue I found, at least in my own experience, was this idea of maintenance, where especially if you don’t necessarily version it and charge for the next version or something, like maybe you’re giving away lifetime updates or something like that, it can start to put pressure on your return for maintaining that older software that people might

still rely on for some reason. Was that an issue at Capture One, or was maintenance of prior versions not much of a concern when you thought about subscriptions versus one time?

Fred Linfjärd  

I think that I, uh, capture one. I don’t, I think I never seen such a generous, uh, you know, maintenance thing. I think we were, uh, and I think we suffered off an old Yula or something because it’s like, yeah, we will make sure you have updates for, you know, the next 10 years or something. Yeah. And, and, I mean, obviously we had to go in and, and change that anyways, but it’s, uh, and, and even if you don’t even, people might not even write.

David Vogelpohl  

Forever!

Fred Linfjärd  

that in their Ula and then people might just, well you don’t, you’re not saying that you shouldn’t update and keep it up to date so where’s my update you know?

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, even if you don’t say it, you still might have negative community sentiment. If like your two versions prior torches someone’s photo business or something like that, um, and then that can have ramifications that put pressure on you to just do it anyways, basically.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, definitely.

David Vogelpohl  

Um, you know, it’s interesting. You, you brought up the kind of forever updates. I brought up updates, you know, kind of the conversation led to the idea of like forever maintenance. And, you know, I’ve worked in acquisitions and led acquisitions in the past. And one of the things that often comes up in diligence when a business has a product like that. And I remember hearing this one time from a finance person. That was really funny. Um, they were trying to understand the risk over time.

Fred Linfjärd  

Hehehe

David Vogelpohl  

of buying the business and what the business had to deliver for their customers. And they said, David, they promised infinite upgrade or updates. I can’t divide by infinity. And so I was like, yeah, you can’t look at that. So, uh, so, so this kind of gets us to the KPI side and we talked about, you know, I asked you like, why do this? And you know, it was funny. One thing you didn’t mention was a lot about was you’ll make a bunch more money because you can build on that revenue and success. You talked a lot about the.

Fred Linfjärd  

Hahaha

David Vogelpohl  

the kind of greater benefits. But let’s kind of get down to the KPI. Like what are the primary KPI people really should be paying attention to, you know, as they embark on an adventure to make this kind of shift? Like what should be on their dashboard?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, so I mean, so they’re fundamentally different when you think about, when I think back about how we ran the business on a perpetual metrics, like you wouldn’t see inkling or a metric that would indicate that our customers are satisfied. Like that usually don’t exist on a perpetual dashboard.

Contra to a subscription dashboard where you have metrics like CLV or customer lifetime value, that really indicates that if that goes down, it means really that people are not happy with the product. And follow up on that, you have the churn metric. So how many people are leaving your business either by voluntary churn, so they cancel it because they’re not happy.

And then you have, of course, the typical recurring revenue metrics like MRR or ARR, right, mostly recurring revenue and annual recurring revenue that just kind of builds up, right, that it’s like a stair. It will always go up, right? And you can work towards increasing those. So it’s a very different way of doing business. So it also goes into…

that this becomes a little bit of a change management exercise. There’s so many different things. This is not the traditional pricing exercise like you might do in SaaS or something like that where you go in and you have product marketing and you like you try different pricing. This is goes into the whole business, you know, how you go to market, how you measure your business, how you develop your product. And I think that’s where it usually fails.

or it becomes a struggle, it takes longer time, because there’s many different departments and people that need to basically follow a very disciplined plan, which you don’t really know yet. So you kind of have to chop it up and kind of test your way forward, have a very kind of, I mean, you really need like a project manager to say, or put together a…

Fred Linfjärd  

of people that are working with this, you know, dedicatedly and not have like five different other jobs to do, if that makes sense. I know I went over the off topic here a little bit with the key metrics but…

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah it does.

No, it’s good because I think you kind of clued in a little bit. When people make this change, there’s often the need to make changes. And to your point, you have to make changes in your organization. Like even your billing people need to be trained on the new thing. Their systems of course, need to be changed tech support people. And you kind of mentioned product. And it’s funny because when I’ve seen people make this, when I’ve seen companies make this shift. Wait.

The question that usually comes up from the audience is, why should I pay recurring now? And so this becomes like a driving force for these teams as they’re starting to think about how to roll it out. It’s like, how are we gonna justify it to the community? And I’ve seen many times that the new recurring offering has some sort of like new product features like baked into it that is an additional benefit above and beyond the one time. Has that been your experience or was that, you know,

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

Capture One approached it.

Fred Linfjärd  

Oh yeah, definitely. And that’s also, uh, the biggest, uh, I would say obstacle. It’s that fear that are we basically just nuking our business by doing this? Everyone’s going to, to leave, right? And it is not actually, uh, that because you have to think about it. Uh, you have, you have to segment your customers, right?

Right? So you have new people that are coming in. Like they don’t really know, right? So every new person that comes in, if you only have a subscription, they came to get your software. I mean, if they’re motivated, they’re not going to leave just because there’s no perpetual, right? So you can put them to the side there. And that’s really what your goal is to grow your business, right? Because if you think about it,

the metric of customer lifetime value, which means that you’re gonna work and make more money on your existing customers, that’s really a subscription metric. But you’re trying to apply it to a perpetual business that is not gonna be profitable. So I would segment it into these different buckets, new and current. And then I will take the current bucket and I would put in, you know.

the VIP group, the early adopters or the really hardcore people that can, if something happens and they are not happy, they could just blow up social media. You need to have a backup plan for these, right? And then you have the existing customers that, okay, well, we’re not making this much money. Like let’s say they buy the software and they’ve never upgraded. They buy the software and maybe upgrade every third time.

You try to just get those that upgrade every time. Every time there’s a new release. You… And you want to make an offer for them. So… That would work for them, right? Also.

David Vogelpohl  

Good.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, absolutely. And like you’re talking kind of about a bit of a recurring revenue model. And I think like when you have one time fees, but you charge for the next version, in other words, you don’t get free lifetime upgrades or something like that, then their rate of buying the updated versions essentially becomes their recurring revenue. And the collection of those transactions is their LTV.

And so like when you were thinking through the KPI, as you embarked on this, some of the things you said in this response so far was like my signups. Are they, I’m guessing you were looking at like, did they go up or down? Cause now we’re a subscription for new customers. Um, you were probably wondering about your, um, churn rate by the end of the year and what the, what you think the LTV of those subscriptions would be.

Fred Linfjärd  

Mm-hmm.

David Vogelpohl  

And then I’m guessing you might have compared that to what you thought the LTV of your one-time download customers were. Is this kind of how you might think of the blend, at least on the new customer side?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, I mean, we tried a lot to try to like, how do you calculate churn on upgrades, right? Because every time we need to sell an upgrade, they need to fork out their credit card. So it’s really hard. And especially when you’re doing the switch like us, we had, you’re living in that no man’s land where you have perpetual and you have subscriptions. And I hope we’ll get into that also because that is a place that’s hard to be in.

And you’re trying to also calculate the business with these two very, very different motions and becomes really, really hard to do. Right. Um, so I don’t have that answered.

David Vogelpohl  

Did you look at the data separately for brand new customers versus the one-time download historical customers? In other words, were you tracking the adoption rate from the old customers for the new offering?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, we looked at that and we tried to look at it separately and here it —

David Vogelpohl  

Was it a focus or was it just like leave them alone? They already bought it. If they want the new thing, they’ll buy it. Or did you actively try to get them to convert?

Fred Linfjärd  

Well, we tried to actively get them to convert, but we also saw that was really hard because you’re talking with everyone, right? Especially, I don’t know if you’re, if you don’t have the most advanced automation setup, which we, in the end, we actually did have a good setup, but you’re talking with everyone, which means that you’re going to talk to these people that I bought the perpetual license, I own this and now I’m going to rent it, you know? And it’s like, you know,

David Vogelpohl  

That right, right.

Fred Linfjärd  

And you know, and they’re gonna make noise, right? So you need to have a plan for that and not try to, yeah, and not try to look at it in the same way. But the problem here, David, is that it’s focus. Like how are you going to focus on switching to perpetual when you’re doing that, you know, your peak revenues?

Right? Every upgrade. That’s where all the money comes in. Right? And now you’re going to switch to, you know, that instead you don’t get that focus, which means you’re kind of slowly dying or, or it’s really, really hard to, to maintain a business like that. That’s why you need a really, really solid plan with steps and success metrics and also have the, have the, have the guts to kind of follow in on it. Then you see some company does and there’s going to be people leaving. Right?

but you gotta have faith in your product and the offer that you create on that subscription that it’s fair, that it makes sense, that it’s easy to get out of and then come into again, that kind of stuff. I don’t know, I’m babbling here. The message sends. Ha ha.

David Vogelpohl  

I do. Yeah, it does. It does. And I do want to kind of get in a little bit into the, like, the aspect of like, well, what entitlements do you offer? And how do you think about that in your strategy? But let’s just say entitlements are the same between your subscription and one time offering. What what are the benefits?

to the end customer for buying software through a subscription? Like, you know, nobody ever wants to rent their thing, I guess, but I mean, certainly there’s a benefit for them and not just the company, but what are some benefits of buying software and a subscription model over one time? Obviously costs might be a negative, but what are some good things about it for the end customer?

Fred Linfjärd  

Well, I mean, for once, if you do it right, you know, it’s always the latest version, right? When you’re on the subscription. So you don’t have to fork out 300 or 400 bucks to get that one feature.

And it’s a more, it can be a more maintainable steady sum that you paid 20, 20 euro or whatever it is monthly, or maybe it’s annually. And if you don’t need it anymore, then you don’t have to pay. Right. Then, and, and I think now that’s the normal, but I think back then it wasn’t really, especially not for

the people that feel that, well, I mean, I want to own it. I mean, so you kind of have to, I think maintenance is that one part. And I also think you can shape the offer. So it’s, you get something different with the subscription. Like you get something that you don’t get with the perpetual. And that would be a strategy to play around with, right? So.

So that’s the benefit of the subscription that I see, right? It’s the play, pause kinda thing, and you can kinda, it’s predictable, right? Your cost and what you get out of it. You know that you always will get the latest, and maybe some more, hopefully.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, and it’s interesting, you talked about how at that time, making a reference to the idea that people are more used to paying subscription fees for software products these days, I’m guessing a big part in thanks to the rise of SaaS, but also thanks in the rise of downloadable software companies switching to subscription for all the reasons we just talked about.

And so it does feel like there’s less and less options in particular niches to pay one-time fees for software. And it seems like people are getting more used to it. I do think there’s a decent amount of ignorance out there around what is required to properly maintain software and operate a successful software business. But I think just the emotional side of like I don’t wanna rent my software, especially if you’re in a space where that hasn’t really been done much.

be trouble, but it does seem like the sentiment has been changing, especially both from the consumer side, but also from the software company side. Do you agree with that or would you think of that differently?

Fred Linfjärd  

No, I think so. I definitely think so. And I think it’s important to also think in ways on kind of stretching your product offering. Like you can have both. It shouldn’t just, but it should never be the same with some exceptions. Like you have your base product, right? That should be your subscription, but then you can add on, you know, like with Capture One, we had style packs that we came up with.

and which filters that you can kind of sell and you can you can play around with those things and bundle it and include it in subscription or have it standalone or whatever. But you should have your core should always be in one model either perpetual or in subscription and I mean or you find a hybrid like Atlassian or some of those guys that you know I buy it.

for 300 bucks and then I pay a fee, monthly fee for having it fully up to date. And when I stopped paying, well, then I still own the software. I can still use it, but it’ll never get updated again. Stuff like that is, is things that you can think about. So it’s very dependent on how your business is. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

Pay for the updates model, yep. I like the pay for the updates model. The other one I really like is where you charge the subscription for feature sets within the software. So the core software stays the same, but you have like an add-on pack that’s like SAS enabled or something like that. And then you do the subscription that way. I’ve seen people find success with that.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I mean, I think, I mean, especially in, in B2B SaaS versus, I don’t know what you call it, like, uh, or other types of SaaS that, that maybe isn’t the type that Planday has, like a Planday type B2B SaaS, we have our three plans, right? But I think it’s important to think about different ways to monetize and use.

constantly modularize your software because that unlocks these different you know growth levers that you can work with because it’s always going to be a better business practice to get money from your existing customers Than always trying to get new right always trying to get new

David Vogelpohl  

Cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one, that’s for sure. OK, so it sounds like in general, though, when you think of subscriptions and the shift from one time to subscriptions,

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

It does sound like you do like to include additional features and not just like a one-for-one switch. And those new entitlements or features are kind of sweetening the pot for the existing customers to adopt the subscription model. Is that a fair summary?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, in the end of the day, you’re going to have to try to convince these customers. But I think it’s also important to, as I said in the beginning, it’s totally okay with doing grandfathering, right? And if you have these group of hardcore players, you can have something special, like kind

them to be quiet kind of deal or whatever like that because they are advocates right and you have to remember that but it doesn’t mean that applies to all so it’s important with the segmentation on your on your business and your existing customer base and also the customer base that you want or you’re trying to penetrate the new vertical or something.

David Vogelpohl  

You know, it’s funny you bring up this idea of legacy entitlements. Like I have old customers and I’m gonna let them keep the same entitlements. And it’s only new people that are affected by the new way. The idea of like grandfathering, I guess. Um, you know, I have a memory of my own rollout for this at one point. And, uh, we, you know, did legacy entitlements, let people keep their old stuff, but people didn’t.

read it that way. They thought we were changing it for them and they still got mad and social blew up. I spent the whole week on chasing down Facebook and Twitter threads. It was pretty bad. But we just didn’t clearly state, I guess, high enough in the announcement that it was their legacy entitlements. And so you try and try and try to make the rollout.

Accepted by the community and like no matter what you do Some people are gonna get mad and I’ve rarely seen a company rolled this out where there wasn’t The community kind of getting up and arms around it. I’ve seen people do better and worse jobs at it But it always happens in my view Or at least from what I’ve seen What are some techniques? How can you approach your rollout? Where you reduce the chances that people get mad?

Fred Linfjärd  

I mean, I think to me it’s simple. I’m not, and, and I don’t, the way I, if I would do this, uh, again, the way I would try to do it, it’s really, really going deep with the customers before you roll it out and really talk about it and, uh, and, uh, you know, have a, have a solid customer community where you can actually, I think it’s fair to be able to ask these questions and say why you’re doing it.

of the day you’re doing it to make the to be able to make the software better to add more people to have to continue on the business and like really be frank and that’s why we need to do this shift and like so you can talk with them and say and ask them questions so i would go much spend a lot of time with the focus groups and really trying to test the different aspects of what i’m

Fred Linfjärd  

Surprise!

David Vogelpohl  

And of course for everybody else it’ll be a surprise but it sounds like what you’re saying is by doing those focus groups you can kind of listen in advance and be prepared for your rollout plan.

Fred Linfjärd  

I mean, it’s only a surprise for existing customers. It’s not a surprise for your new customers because they don’t… That’s kind of how I… So we gotta make sure that the existing ones that it will work for that as well. I mean, it’s kind of the same as, you know, when you have a software that…

And you’re trying to hit the new vertical like I said and you need to do something with the software You got to make sure that you’re not screwing up for the other people that are depending on the software To do to do work, right? Because that’s very easy to do like you’re trying to make it simple the software and all of a sudden It becomes harder for the people that are advanced just adds on to their so So yeah trying to think of it in those ways

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, I remember. I remember working with some finance executives during some of these times from my past and I remember one of them asking like, all right, why is everybody getting so upset? And I’m like, they’re using this tool to do a job and you just messed up their workflow or, you know, we just messed up their workflow. So, um, it is really interesting to think about like the impact that you have on people when you make this change, does it.

change their underlying business model. Like if I’m a photographer and you go to subscription for Capture One software and then all of a sudden you jack it up, you know, 10X what I was gonna spend last year on it, maybe you messed up my photography business or something like that. I’m not saying they all went to that extreme, but I think the impact side is a really important side. I’m glad you brought that up.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely. And I even think that there were some instances where that happened and we had to roll back fairly fast. So it’s a tough one. I mean, I think it goes back into when you do this, that you also, I mean, the finance part is important, like, because there’s going to be a different type of.

money that’s coming in. Right? I mean, if you’re starting from no subscriptions, right, then you’re starting with very little money that will build up under slow time. So you need to be able to, okay, well, can we afford this switch and how much is going to this investment cost before we’re starting to see the flip where it starts to kind of the flywheel starts to…

uh, you know, actually be more and more profitable. So, uh, I think that’s important because that’s where that’s preventing this. You, oh no, we’re not getting enough money. Stop everything. Let’s do these, uh, you know, 50% campaigns, you know, 50% off, 50% off or, or stuff like that, you know.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, a good partnership with your finance team. That’s a great point. And so then on the keeping customers during the transition, managing the negative feedback from the community that such a shift might cause, it sounded like you were suggesting folks talk to their customers in advance and learn what the concerns will be. I also heard you mention Be Frank.

And I think like if I had two points, I would share about this transition. It would be in your announcement email. Put the legacy entitlements at the top of the email, start with who’s not affected because that’s the people that are going to complain first. And if they, if you start with your reasoning, like we we’re changing our business because of reasons, they’re just going to say you’re switching me to subscription and go, you know, go to hell or whatever.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

And so, and the second one is be frank though, and that was what you mentioned, and it was like, don’t use the flowery language, just tell them what you’re doing, like an adult, tell them why. And if it’s for business reasons, and you need a successful growing business to continue to invest in the software they love, be honest about that. That was my take, it sounded like some overlap with yours, but how do you think about that?

Fred Linfjärd  

I mean…

Fred Linfjärd  

No, that is exactly that. Be frank and honest. And I think I would add another one. I mean, use your advocates. I mean, try to win over a customer like one-on-one or invite them in for drinks and try to get them to help, get them to help you in the community if you have that to try to help this transition. Because many times

And especially in the Capture One, a lot of customers that are like the old one, the really pros, they would help people, right? And they can help you advocate for it. And they kind of try to bicker with each other and like, well, you know, they’re just doing it for money. And then someone comes in and is like, well, yeah, I mean, but, you know, it takes money to continue to provide the software for us. So, you know, we got to…

that there that is a good reason so a lot of those conversations can be solved by you know advocate advocacy customers so

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, I’ve had success in the past with, I’ve had success, I’ve had success in the past with like advocacy boards, advisory, I’m sorry, advisory boards with software where you can start to build up.

you know, folks that are contributing and giving insights for the roadmap and how the community is managed. But then also, of course, they themselves can become advocates. And sometimes they agree with the decisions and sometimes they don’t, but I found that to be helpful. And then like you said, to being frank, what I found was that when we were frank, people would read it, understand it. And if somebody else in a thread or forum somewhere was complaining about it,

they would say, well, this was a reason and it seemed pretty reasonable to me, but I understand you don’t wanna pay more or something like that. But not even people we spoke to, but because we were frank, people started being frank with how they explained it to others when it came up. So did you have any similar experiences?

Fred Linfjärd  

Uh, yeah, uh, I’m just going to.

Fred Linfjärd  

silly uh… where we pick up

David Vogelpohl  

So that was my experience. Did you have anything similar?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, I mean, I think so. And I think it really, it’s really nice to see those communities fight for you. I mean, it’s really, really great. It’s such a tremendous help. And I think, you know, building a great product and building a brand, that’s what you get.

you can get these really advocates and you need to really, really take care of them. And with your customer support team being in the front lines or your CSMs, make sure that they get treated. And the way we did this, I think in Capture One, we looked at when we got customer support cases, we always looked…

try to look which group they were in. And if we saw that, okay, well, if this was a customer, if they asked a question like that, hey, even if they were wrong, if we see that they’ve been with us for 10 years and they’ve been an active user, I mean, we would do anything right for them to be happy, even if it’s like, well, it was their fault that they, whatever it may be, I can’t think of what it is. But I…

David Vogelpohl  

It’s such a great example because it in my mind is such a critical part of all this, which is to show folks that you care. Like if you care about the future of the product, if you care about the quality of the product, if you care about your customer’s experience with it, and you care about making the shift from one time to recurring successful for both the company and the customer. That goes so far in helping folks understand why a business might be changing the billing model and I think from my experience I’ve seen people really respond and recognize that it sounds like that was a strategy for you all there at Capture One.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, definitely.

David Vogelpohl  

Awesome. Well, this has been great. I wish we had more time next time we’re in person. We’ll have to run our next Zoom call together or something. We’ll have to nerd out about this. But thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story here. I think there’s folks who have a lot of value, especially if they’re thinking about going through this themselves. Thanks, Fred.

Fred  

Yeah.

Fred  

Yeah, thank you so much David. It’s a great topic to talk about.

David Vogelpohl  

Half my gray hairs are from that kind of migration. So good luck to anyone out there gaining your own gray hairs right now. If you’d like to learn more about what Fred is up to, you can look him up on LinkedIn. Thanks, everyone, for joining us here on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. Really appreciate you joining us today. And enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, everybody.

The post EP19: Successfully Switching From One-Time Fees to Subscriptions appeared first on FastSpring.

Join us at the Marina del Rey Marriott, in Los Angeles, CA, on May 20th and 21st, for an extraordinary event dedicated to all things video gaming. This year’s theme is Resilience and Adaptation, where we will all delve into the strategies needed to adapt and thrive.

Sessions will cover pivotal topics such as GenAI, cross-media adaptations, and addressing the complexities of layoffs in an industry now deeply ingrained in mainstream culture, we’ll uncover how innovation, creativity, resilience, and collaboration are shaping the future of gaming. Take the time to immerse yourself in a series of captivating roundtable discussions. These thoughtfully crafted roundtables are meticulously designed to facilitate engaging interactions and dynamic conversations between event attendees.

GamesBeat Summit brings together leaders across the spectrum of the video game industry ecosystem including entrepreneurs, talent, anchor corporations, support organizations, investment capital, and innovation enablers.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket to join fellow leaders across the spectrum of the video game industry ecosystem including entrepreneurs, talent, anchor corporations, support organizations, investment capital, and innovation enablers.

How to Connect With FastSpring at GamesBeat Summit 2024

Connect with the team after our panel session to learn more about subscription management, international taxes, and how using a merchant of record can enable you to collect payments faster for your games. Schedule a demo now or at GamesBeat Summit 2024 in person! 

FastSpring is how video game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need from subscription management to tax collection, remittance and more so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies — powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Sign up for a free account or request a demo today to learn more.

The post FastSpring at GamesBeat Summit 2024! appeared first on FastSpring.

Join us at the Palmer Events Center, in Austin, TX, from May 13th to 15th, for an extraordinary event dedicated to all things SaaS. Since 2016, SaaStock has helped more founders, investors, and operators connect, learn, and grow than any other SaaS conference globally. SaaStock at its heart is all about making connections that last a lifetime. 

SaaStock USA 2024 will bring together over 1,500 SaaS leaders for three days of actionable content, business development, networking, team-building, and fun. If your business is SaaS, then you need to be at SaaStock USA.

SaaS.City is a series of topic-specific workshops structured to facilitate learning and networking on May 13th. It is designed for senior executives at SaaS businesses who are looking to gain a deeper understanding in specific topic areas. Through interactive roundtable discussions and refreshment breaks, you’ll be able to share ideas, brainstorm solutions to your most pressing challenges, and form meaningful connections.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket to get access to over 60 talks from world-class speakers, dedicated roundtable and networking opportunities, and a custom event app that will maximize your experience even more!

How to Connect With FastSpring at SaaStock USA 2024

Stop by our booth or connect with the team via the SaaStock USA 2024 app to learn more about subscription management, international taxes, and how using a merchant of record can enable you to collect payments faster for your business model. Schedule a demo now or at SaaStock USA 2024 in person! 

FastSpring is how SaaS companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need from subscription management to tax collection, remittance and more so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies — powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Sign up for a free account or request a demo today to learn more.

The post FastSpring at SaaStock USA 2024! appeared first on FastSpring.

Here at FastSpring, we had a pretty great 2023. It was a record year for pipeline bookings and just about every big KPI we measure.

We’re pretty proud of that, but it begs the question: What next?

We want to have an even bigger 2024 — and we know you want the same for your business. We’ve decided we need to bet big if we’re going to top last year’s performance and meet our financial goals for this year.

If you need a little inspiration as you continue growing your business in 2024, that was the topic of the day when I stopped by to chat with Peep Laja, CEO at Wynter, about some of the big pushes we’re making this year. The chat was part of a Wynter Games event: Marketing leaders from several leading companies shared their biggest go-to-market bets for 2024.

You can watch the full conversation below, or read on below to learn about FastSpring’s three big bets:

• Bet #1: Further support our customers’ communities.
• Bet #2: Optimizing our free trial.
• Bet #3: Pushing beyond our boundaries.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Bet #1: Further Supporting Our Customer’s Communities

Marketing to communities you aren’t a part of is hard — especially specialized verticals such as the video game industry, SaaS, eLearning, etc. Being fully immersed in the community makes your marketing and customer communications that much more genuine and impactful. 

Because at the end of the day, all other things being equal, people prefer to do business with someone they know.

That’s why our first big bet for the year is to continue going deep into our customers’ communities and finding new and better ways to support them from the inside out. That means encouraging the team — from marketing and sales to product and engineering — to participate deeply in the spaces our customers belong to, not just observe them.

There’s a crucial mindset shift here, too. Instead of trying to study customer communities and learn how to market to them, our team is trying to figure out how to join them — to be peers, not scientists.

For us, that means:

• Showing up for community events, both as attendees and exhibitors.
• Hosting micro events such as happy hours.
• Being true and transparent about who we are and who we serve, so we can find and attract our ideal customers, even when they’re a small portion of the audience at a big event.

Measuring the Success of Community Participation

While becoming embedded in customer spaces can be a bit nebulous to measure, we’ll monitor pipeline and bookings from the events we participate in to gauge success.

Bet #2: Optimizing Our Free Trial

This one won’t come as a shock to any SaaS or software folks out there: We’re betting big on optimizing our free trial.

That strategy is twofold. We’ll optimize the trial from both the product side — how users experience the free trial — and from the marketing side. 

On the product side of things, we’re working to make it easier for new free trial users to more quickly uncover value from our platform. Once users really see that value and experience that “aha moment,” we’re making it even easier to move on to that next step and convert to a paid plan.

From the marketing side, we’re streamlining communications and automation to make it easier (read: fewer clicks) for free trial users to get in touch with our sales team. That effort includes channels such as our email nurture sequences, but also within the free trial portal experience directly. 

This one’s all about making the product so radically easy to use and reducing any and all friction that stands between free trial users and an upgrade.

Measuring the Success of Free Trial Optimization

We’ll measure success here by looking at growth in our conversion rate from free trial signups to sales meetings set, and we’ll also monitor pipeline and bookings from free trial users.

Bet #3: Pushing Beyond Boundaries

Our final bet for 2024 is to continue pushing beyond our existing boundaries within the business.

Last year was a record year all around for FastSpring. We’ve pretty much pushed all the way out to the boundaries. Now it’s time to push past them if we plan to continue growing, which — surprise! — we do. 

Looking for a merchant of record to partner with that will help you push past your own boundaries? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

One of the easiest boundaries to recognize is geographic, so expanding our global operation even further is a key initiative for this year and beyond. That starts in Asia with a single salesperson in Singapore, and the intention to grow the team as we grow our presence in the region.

We’re also expanding further into some of our growing segments, such as video games. 

These are two areas we’ve operated in in the past but haven’t really leaned into. That’s changing this year.

Now, we’re looking at an iterative approach to localizing the business to the Asian market. Once we establish our sales presence, we’ll start advertising in Asia-based publications, participating at events in the region, and experimenting with other channels such as local paid search campaigns.

And with a jam-packed product roadmap, we’re also expanding our emphasis on verticals such as the video game industry.

Measuring the Success of Expanding Our Boundaries

This is an easier bet to gauge success on: We’ll measure pipeline and bookings by geography, customer segment, and company type.

Watch the Full Conversation From the Wynter Games

How FastSpring Can Help Your Business Expand Beyond Boundaries

FastSpring is Powering the Digital Economy® for SaaS, software, video game, and digital product companies by delivering leading ecommerce, payments, subscription management, and tax management platform solutions. To partner with a merchant of record that includes global payments; payment localization; calculating, collecting, and remitting VAT and sales taxes; various checkout options; and even consumer support, set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Growth Ideas: 3 Go-to-Market Bets FastSpring Is Making in 2024 appeared first on FastSpring.