Paddle Billing
ProfitWell MetricsIconosquare were looking for a tool that allowed them to get paid quickly, easily and take invoicing and VAT off of their hands so they could focus on growth. Enter Paddle.
Iconosquare is a social media analytics SaaS business. Today, more than 6,000 clients in around 150 countries use Iconosquare to grow their presence and reach on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Headquartered in Limoges, France, with additional offices in Paris and Berlin, Iconosquare provides social media managers with insights that help them to create content that resonates with their audience.
“Ultimately, we help them grow their community and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn,” says Jonas Couffignal, the company’s Head of Growth.
Iconosquare’s clients include major brands such as Patagonia, Ikea, and L'Oreal, as well as a number of global media agencies. “Every company and every brand that wants to engage with its community on social media is a potential client of ours,” Jonas says.
Paddle saves us a huge amount of time. We don’t have to worry about anything – not even the fact that we have clients in many different countries who all want to pay in different currencies.”
Jonas Couffignal, Iconosquare’s Head of Growth
The hunt for a best-of-breed tool
With such a big target audience, it’s easy to see why the company has grown incredibly quickly since its establishment in 2011. It was, by nature, a tool built for a global audience.
“Today we have more than 6,000 clients in 150 countries,” Jonas says. “As we are a subscription service, this means we have to manage thousands of invoices every month in various currencies. We realised quite quickly that this was a job that we were not very well equipped to do. We are software developers specializing in social media analytics, not accounting and VAT.”
With a global audience comes global complexities and Jonas realised that he needed a tool that could take the intricate, time-consuming job of dealing with invoicing and VAT off of his teams’ hands so he could focus on growth.
“Our previous solution only processed payments – and even then it made it incredibly difficult to enable clients to pay in their local currency,” Jonas says. “We were also spending far too much time on VAT management.”
The solution needed to facilitate seamless customer onboarding, but without requiring any manual intervention from his team. “Ultimately, we wanted a platform that would allow us to get paid quickly and easily – but without defocusing us from what is actually our core job – developing a great platform for our clients and providing the best possible experience for them.”
The power of Paddle
Enter Paddle. “Paddle promised to deliver everything we were looking for and more,” he says.
Paddle’s merchant of record (MoR) model is built for product-led growth (PLG) SaaS businesses like Iconosquare because it allows them to offload billing and invoicing, as well as sales tax operations and liability to Paddle’s team. At the same time, Paddle delivers a wide range of capabilities and services including true localisation, operating multiple payment methods, pricing model options and actionable analytics.
“What I love about Paddle is that it saves us a huge amount of time,” Jonas says. “We don’t have to worry about anything – not even the fact that we have clients in many different countries who all want to pay in different currencies. At the end of the month, we have only two lines that we need to spot and check for our accountant. Prior to that, there were more than a thousand.”
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Paddle for any PLG SaaS vendor looking to save time and achieve more customer success."
Jonas Couffignal, Iconosquare’s Head of Growth
Saving time, gaining business insight
With Paddle working behind the scenes, Jonas and his team have more time to focus on their product and their customers. “We’ve saved the equivalent of a full-time job,” Jonas says. “We’re also building better customer relationships. In the past, we had a lot of back and forth with clients asking for details about VAT. We no longer have to deal with those queries – we can focus on answering questions about our products instead of the administrative things around them, which is vital for a PLG model.”
Easy onboarding makes for a better customer experience
Paddle also eases the onboarding process for new clients adopting Iconosquare. “More than 95% of our customers can start using Iconosquare and pay for it without any contact with our team. It’s Paddle that makes the onboarding and payment flow easy – there’s no friction for clients when they have finished their free trial and start to pay for their subscription.”
Adapting to the market with greater agility
Jonas and his team are also finding it really easy to adapt their pricing plans as the market changes. “A company like ours that offers a self-service model has to adjust pricing options regularly. This is what we call product-led growth. Paddle makes it really straightforward to update our prices and plans – everything is done in a few clicks.”
Real-time insights inform every business decision
Meanwhile, the use of ProfitWell Metrics by Paddle enables Iconosquare to scrutinize its monthly recurring revenue (MRR). “We can see how our MRR is composed, how it's evolved, and the impact of acquisitions, retention or sales,” Jonas says. “It means we have a real-time view of the status of our business. We can understand if our campaigns are successful and if our clients are actually happy with our offering.”
Price Intelligently delivers further benefits. “Price Intelligently helps us optimize our pricing – something that, to do manually, would take a huge amount of work,” Jonas says.
Ultimately, Jonas believes Paddle will equip Iconosquare for its future growth plans. “Paddle is more than just a payments provider,” he says. “Instead of having multiple different pieces of software to manage accounting, tax, analytics and more, we have everything we need all in one place. In this way, Paddle has found its blue ocean – and that’s invaluable for us. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Paddle for any PLG SaaS vendor looking to save time and achieve more customer success.”