Geoff Roberts: How Outseta Grew by Doing Less | Subscription Heroes #26

Geoff Roberts co-founded Outseta with a radical vision: make it as easy to launch a SaaS or subscription business as Shopify made it to launch an online store. Instead of stitching together payments, CRM, authentication, email, and support tools, Outseta bundles them all into a single platform.

But the journey was anything but easy. For the first three years, Outseta made almost no money—just $1,500 in monthly recurring revenue. Geoff admits that Outseta was “kind of a bad startup idea” in the traditional sense: a huge, labor-intensive product built for an audience with high churn. What kept him going wasn’t short-term traction, but stubborn conviction, the right co-founders, and the belief that a more integrated solution could actually make life easier for founders. By year four, the patience started paying off.

We sat down with Geoff to talk about why Outseta survived those lean years, how they built one of the most unconventional compensation models in SaaS, and why “growth by elimination” is the secret behind their success.

The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Compensation Model

Most startups mirror Silicon Valley playbooks: raise venture capital, scale fast, hope the founders and investors cash out big. Outseta chose another route.

At Outseta, every employee earns the same salary—currently $210,000 if working full-time. But here’s the twist: employees can choose how many days a week they work, from one to five, and get paid proportionally. On top of that, anyone can trade part of their cash comp for equity, earned on the exact same terms as the founders.

That means someone could work three days for cash, two days for equity, and literally own a bigger piece of the company because of it. “We want a small but mighty team of senior players,” Geoff explained. “The dream is everyone acts like an owner—because they actually are.”

Growth by Elimination

To make this radical model work, Outseta also eliminated almost everything most startups consider essential. No sales team. No dedicated support team. No fundraising, no board decks, no budgets.

Instead, the focus narrowed to four things: building product, marketing, customer support, and hiring. Everything else was stripped away.

That’s why at Outseta, even engineers with 20+ years of experience handle support tickets. Customers might be surprised to find their bug report answered directly by someone qualified to be a CTO—but it means faster fixes and less bureaucracy.

Geoff calls this approach “growth by elimination”—cutting away the non-essentials to concentrate only on what truly drives the business.

Life Profitability Over Financial Profitability

Geoff also believes that startups shouldn’t just be measured in revenue and profit. Borrowing from Adii Pienaar’s concept of Life Profitability, he’s built Outseta to enrich life—not just bank accounts.

For him, that means 40 focused hours a week and plenty of time for travel. In the last six months, he and his family lived in Barbados, Scotland, Italy, Spain, and Greece—often one month at a time. Outseta isn’t just a company that serves customers; it’s a company that gives its team the freedom to live on their own terms.

Lessons for Early-Stage Founders

If you’re building your first SaaS business, Geoff’s story is a masterclass in playing the long game. A few takeaways to steal:

• Conviction matters more than speed. The first three years were brutal, but sticking with it long enough for the product to mature made all the difference.
• Comp can be a competitive advantage. Outseta’s equal-pay, choose-your-own-adventure model attracts high-caliber talent who want more than just a paycheck.
• Eliminate the unnecessary. Sales teams, budgets, endless meetings—if it doesn’t directly serve the customer or product, cut it.
• Optimize for life, not just money. A startup should give you freedom, not take it away.

As Geoff puts it: “Competition is good—it means there’s a market there. The key is just giving yourself enough time to build something good enough.”

Outseta’s story shows that you don’t have to grow by addition. Sometimes, the most powerful growth strategy is subtraction.