Retro on Schematic's First Year

This week marks Schematic's 1-year anniversary, so I wanted to reflect on some of what we’ve learned.

In June ‘23, Ben, Jas, Gio, and I co-founded Schematic. We’ve worked together across several software companies for most of the last 9 years.

First Six Months: Discovery and Problem Validation

Our initial focus was on market discovery, problem validation, shaping our product thesis, and finding design partners who believed in our vision.

Here’s what we learned and validated in the first six months:

1. In B2B SaaS businesses, pricing & packaging is expensive and complex for product & engineering to support.

2. There’s no standard for how B2B SaaS companies implement pricing & packaging. This led us to thinking deeply about what an architectural standard could look like and proposing one here.

3. The absence of a standard leads to familiar and expensive problems for both engineering and GTM

Product & Engineering have to deal with tradeoffs between supporting monetization initiatives & releasing new product. Meanwhile, GTM deals with delayed monetization initiatives, a bunch of ops problems, and poor CX.

4. CTOs have a strong understanding of the costs they’re incurring to build & maintain homegrown systems to support pricing, packaging, and monetization.

5. Feature flagging could be a natural and elegant solution, but engineering leaders will need the tooling to extend flags beyond deployment and rollout and into entitlements, packaging, pricing, and subscription management.

Reimagining feature flagging to extend across the full lifecycle of a feature, from rollout, all the way through revenue?

Second Six Months: Product Development & Proving Willingness to Pay

In the second half of the year, we focused on delivering a solution that our alpha customers could rely on in production. These customers played a crucial role in our product development. Their usage drove oxygen into the product and their trust in our service validated its commercial viability.

As I reflect on the second six months of our first year in business, 2 observations standout about what our customers expect today and over the next year:

• Today our customers expect of Schematic that it manages their plans, entitlements, and limits in a way that allows them to package their offerings flexibly.

The way we view the world is that if a B2B SaaS business wants flexible control over monetization ops, pricing & packaging has to be abstracted from business systems (right-hand side of the diagram), but also from the application (left-hand side).

• Over the next year our early customers have a compelling vision for where we need to go, and they've pushed us to expand our service to handle the entire lifecycle of a feature from rollout to revenue. In so doing, they expect that Schematic delivers an end to end use case that allows them do something that they're unable to do today: define an offering and have it flow through to their tools (CRM, billing system, etc), their product, and & ultimately to their customers via a full suite of best-in-class customer-facing monetization experiences (e.g. pricing tables, paywalls, limit adjustments, promotions, etc.)

What we have to prove next:

Will Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of Whoop, once said,

“I think a lot of building a company from scratch is figuring out what you need to prove at what stage.”

Now, 12 months in, we have new milestones to achieve over the next six months:

1. That our product earns mission critical status for our existing customers & attracts new customers.

2. That our product can catalyze the emergence of a standard for implementing & operating pricing & packaging that helps B2B SaaS companies be more agile and competitive.

Many people have played a significant role in our pursuit of building Schematic, for which I’m grateful.