Productsup Charges for One Thing Only: SKUs
Productsup spent four years as an agency, then rebuilt as pure software with exactly one pricing lever. Expansion of 25-30% comes from customers loading more SKUs, and nothing else.
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Most SaaS companies have three or four levers to pull when they want an account to pay more: seats, features, usage, tiers. Productsup has one. You are charged for the number of SKUs you put through the platform, and that is the entire pricing surface.
Latka checked this twice, because it is unusual.
So it doesn’t matter how many API calls per month, or how many times they’re pushing a SKU to a particular network — just pure number of SKUs?
Nathan Latka, interviewing Johannes Hatt
“Exactly. We want them to use the platform as much as possible, so we don’t have any additional pricing that comes with the usage.”
The single axis is the growth engine. Because expansion can only come from customers loading more SKUs, Productsup’s net revenue retention of 120 percent is a by-product of customers using the product more — not of a sales team selling them something else.
What the product actually does
Productsup moves product information between the people who make things and the places those things get sold. Latka’s framing of it was the right one: Gillette posting a razor on Amazon needs the data in one format; the same razor on Walmart.com needs a different one. Hatt’s own description is grander — “we tear down digital walls” — but the mechanism is the same. The company optimises product content “based on the individual requirements of the marketing channels they feed it into.”
It is pure software, and Hatt is emphatic about the line: “We’re 100 percent SaaS business — no customer support or agency model involved.”
That emphasis is earned, because the company spent four years as exactly that.
Four years as an agency first
Productsup was founded in 2010 and ran as an agency until 2014, when it “transformed the company into a pure SaaS play.” By the time of this conversation it had been a software business for five years and had the numbers to show for it.
Twelve months earlier that number was half of it. “About $500,000 a month a year ago,” Hatt confirmed — a doubling. The GetLatka profile records the February 2019 figure as $11,988,000, which is $999,000 a month multiplied out.
The capital behind it was $5 million. Hatt’s own view of that: “For a software company that does SaaS only, you somehow can call it bootstrapped — it’s not a lot of capital that went into the company.” The business sat around break-even, burning roughly $50,000 a month depending on hiring. “It evolves around the zero line.”
The list that started it
The best answer in the interview is about getting the first customers, and it is unglamorous in a way that makes it useful.
In 2014 Hatt was selling the product himself into a market that did not yet believe in the problem. “It was more like Google Shopping — what is that, do I really have to use their channel? So we did a lot of market education, at least here in Germany, and explained to people that they should use their channel.” At the time it was still called Google Base, then Froogle.
The targeting was the clever part. He needed brands with enough product complexity to feel the pain, so he bought a list.
- Buy the cheapest possible proxy for scale. A list called Top 200 E-commerce in Germany, which cost “just thousands of euros. Not a lot.”
- Then look at the actual inventory. “You browse their inventory and you get an idea how much SKUs they offer.”
- Ignore revenue as the signal. “For us the revenue is not the biggest indicator — it’s more complexity on the product data setup, which can be driven by the amount of SKUs but could also be driven by the amount of countries they export to.”
Asked whether the list was worth it, Hatt was careful: “You have to put a lot of work into it in order to do so. It was worth it, yes.”
The numbers underneath the single axis
The retention profile is what makes the pricing decision defensible. Logo churn runs about 5 percent a year; net revenue retention sits at 120 percent, which means expansion of 25 to 30 percent on the historical cohort.
120%net revenue retention, from SKU growth alone
“The expansion comes from an increased number of SKUs within our customers,” Hatt said. “That is the one factor why we grow within our existing customers.” There is a single feature upsell in the business and he dismisses it himself: “That accounts for like five percent of our business, so it’s not material.”
He does not rule out changing his mind — “in the future there might be potential to increase prices based on the metrics that you mentioned” — but names the trade explicitly: “For the time being what we want to do is scale the amount of customers, and not so much increase the revenue based on additional seats or additional channels, because we really want our customers to use this solution.”
Acquisition is expensive and slow in the way enterprise software usually is. Full-weighted customer acquisition cost runs $33,000 to $40,000 against an annual contract value around $44,000, giving roughly an 11-month payback. Most of that spend is the sales team and its commissions rather than paid media.
The conference that cost nothing
Asked which event had actually produced results, Hatt named the SAP Hybris conference in Barcelona in 2018 — a keynote on stage plus a booth people came to afterwards.
Latka, reasonably: “What does that run, a hundred grand? Fifty grand?”
No, basically we didn’t have to pay for it. We are partnered with SAP, so basically they were so kind to invite us.
Johannes Hatt, CEO, Productsup
A hundred people in Berlin, roughly ten each in the US and the UK, and a handful selling in Australia and Mexico. Twenty in sales and inside sales, twenty in customer support, twenty in marketing, ten in HR and finance.
One figure on the profile deserves a caveat while we are here. Productsup’s recorded total funding is $10 million, drawn from a single 2021 round — which means the $5 million Hatt describes here, raised before this conversation, is not in the total at all. The company’s later figures are on the profile: $63 million in revenue recorded for November 2024, against a team of 345.
Asked what he wished he had known at twenty, the founder of a company that prices on one axis and refuses the others gave an answer in the same spirit: “Sometimes, in order to achieve a goal, the best way is to relax — and not stress out that much.”
Sources — Johannes Hatt interviewed by Nathan Latka, recorded 13 February 2019. Revenue, headcount, customer and funding figures from the Productsup profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded.
