Most SaaS teams know their MRR. Geoff Roberts wants a different number on the dashboard: how profitable the company is for the lives of the people building it. In this episode of SaaS That App - Building Tech-Enabled Businesses, Geoff, Co-founder of Outseta, joins Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards to unpack two very different startup exits (Buildium’s $580M win vs. Roambee’s softer landing with SAP) and how those experiences shaped the way he builds today.
Two Exits, Two Realities
Geoff didn’t set out to be a SaaS operator. He studied writing, graduated into the 2008 crash, pivoted into business school, and still had trouble landing a role. A SaaS startup finally gave him his shot: Buildium, where he joined early, after product-market fit but before a serious marketing push. That meant he got handed the messy question: ‘Go figure out how to grow this.’
Buildium eventually sold to RealPage for $580 million. Geoff describes that kind of exit as the one founders dream about: employees, founders, and investors all win.
Then came Roambee, and the lesson flipped. The company had real revenue, but it struggled to lock in the right customer and burned cash on an enterprise-heavy motion that didn’t fit. Geoff stepped into a more chaotic environment with less runway. SAP later acquired the IP and much of the team, which Geoff calls a good outcome, but not the ‘everybody cashes out’ kind.
Outseta: A Shopify for SaaS
Outseta started with a familiar frustration: every SaaS business ends up integrating the same foundational tools. You need payments, authentication, transactional email, CRM, support, and docs. In Buildium’s early days, Geoff was the business-side person asking engineering to wire up Stripe, HubSpot, Zendesk, and everything else. Dimitri, his future co-founder, finally hit a breaking point: “Why am I spending more time integrating software than building our product?”
Outseta’s answer is an integrated business layer: payments plus auth at the core, wrapped with the tools most subscription businesses inevitably add later. Many developers prefer best-of-breed stacks. Outseta is for founders who want speed to market and for non-technical builders who don’t want integrations to become the hidden tax on launching.
Serving Two Customers Without Confusion
Outseta serves both developers building SaaS and less technical creators building membership sites, roughly down the middle. That split creates messaging risk: membership software can sound too lightweight for technical founders, while SaaS infrastructure can sound too complex for creators.
Geoff’s fix is a clear fork early in the journey. Users self-identify, then get pointed to the right setup and documentation. It matters because expectations differ, especially around security and architecture. Blur the line too much, and you end up with a product that feels vague to both audiences.
Life Profitability as a Build Constraint
The phrase ‘life profitability’ comes from SaaS founder Adii Pienaar. Geoff uses it to describe what many founders want: a company that makes life better, not just richer. Financial profitability is measurable. Life profitability is felt: flexibility, autonomy, and enough stability to breathe.
At Outseta, that philosophy shows up in self-management. You can operate without a classic hierarchy if you replace bossing with transparency and lightweight decision processes. Everyone has broad access to company information. And when decisions get big, they vote, using a two-thirds majority for major moves.
The Three-Pillar Framework Geoff Keeps Repeating
When Geoff consults startups, he leans on Mark Roberge’s sequence: customer success first, unit economics second, growth third. Most early teams invert it. They launch an MVP, hit the marketing button, and try to grow before customers are consistently successful. That shows up as churn, ugly CAC, and the temptation to market your way out of a product problem.
Geoff’s point isn’t anti-growth. It’s pro-order. Make customers win. Then make it profitable. Then scale.
Final Thoughts
Life profitability won’t show up in your Stripe dashboard, but it will show up in your calendar and your retention. Geoff’s challenge is simple: treat organization design like product design, and iterate until the company works for humans.
Geoff’s Background
Geoff Roberts is the Co-founder of Outseta, a comprehensive business management platform designed for SaaS founders and digital product creators. With a background in marketing and nearly two decades of startup experience, Roberts has driven growth and strategic pivots across multiple high-impact exits, including Buildium's $580 million acquisition by RealPage and Roambee's acquisition by SAP.
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