Why I Created Potio

Hi, I'm Serge 👋. I'm the founder of Potio. Before this, I spent years in the trenches building SaaS companies just like yours.

Here are some of the companies I've built:

Toggl (CEO): I spent over a decade helping build Toggl into the world's most beloved time-tracking tool.

Teamweek (CEO): Teamweek was the go-to planning software for creative teams. We pioneered the industry shift from rigid Gantt charts to flexible timelines, now a standard in almost every planning tool.

Viveo (Co-CEO): Viveo is an AI-driven health insurance platform that we've launched in Europe and Africa.

Scaledrone (Founder): Scaledrone is a real-time messaging API company. Fun fact: I wrote the MVP for this in the woods during a large-scale military exercise.

Aboardly (Founder): Aboardly was an early take on automated customer emailing. I sold it the same year it was launched.

How Potio actually happened

Truth be told, Potio wasn't supposed to be a consultancy. I originally launched it as a SaaS for running pricing experiments. I wanted to bring the sophisticated testing we mastered at Toggl to other SaaS teams.

When I pitched the idea, CROs were hyped. But when I actually shipped it... crickets. It turned out that while everyone liked the idea of experimentating with prices, almost no one was at that step in their journey. I was pitching step 10, but they were stuck at step 1. They didn't even know what to experiment with.

My product demos kept turning into strategy sessions. Founders didn't want a tool, they wanted someone to help them out. I was accidentally being pushed into consulting and I decided to commit.

The Toggl Lesson

Back in the early days of Toggl, we treated pricing like a guessing game. We'd throw new features into tiers (usually the most expensive) without a clear strategy, we'd hike the prices every few years hoping it'd work out—and fortunately, it did.

But eventually, once the market matured, the YOLO-approach wasn't cutting it anymore. We had to get systematic. We built a dedicated pricing team, ran scientific experiments and validated every hypothesis.

I built Potio to help companies reach that level of clarity. But I learned that you can't start with the tool. You have to start with the strategy.

Why I work differently

Most pricing consultants are career strategists. They deliver a $100k slide deck, pat you on the back and wish you luck. I'm a founder first. If you want pricing you can actually ship, built by a partner who knows exactly what it feels like to sit in your seat, I'm your guy.