8 years in the red ocean: surviving without funding | Jane Portman, Userlist
No Bullsh!t, November 26, 2025, 65 min, 2,963 views. The guest is Jane Portman, co-founder and CEO of Userlist, a platform for advanced email marketing and behavioural automation for software companies, which she has been building with her technical co-founder for eight years.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 65 min |
| Views on YouTube | 2,963 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
Jane describes her path from interface designer and freelancer to the author of four books, host of a product podcast and one of the few players to survive in the crowded red ocean of email platforms. She goes honestly through her main mistakes: unrealistic timelines for the first launch, a failed first product with no positioning, pricing set far too low at the start, and a naive bet on her personal audience as the source of first software customers. They also discuss building a personal brand through books, a newsletter and a podcast, how positioning differs between software and e-commerce, and why partner programmes pay off slowly.
Key ideas
- Expectations about software launch timelines are almost always unrealistic: it took about two years to leave beta and a couple more to reach 5000 dollars of monthly recurring revenue, against an original plan of six months.
- A personal audience converts poorly into software customers: of the first pre-orders sold to her own subscribers, only two people out of ten actually started using the product.
- Pricing too low at the start is a common mistake: the product began at 29 dollars a month and grew to a base plan of 149, once it was clear that a cheap product does not motivate the team to invest in it.
- Building a personal brand is faster and cheaper than building a company brand: books, a newsletter and a podcast show results sooner, and an email list stays a platform-independent asset.
- Email positioning works differently for software and for e-commerce: in e-commerce the effect is easy to measure in conversion, while software companies live for years on a couple of hard-coded emails.
- Alignment between co-founders on equity, vesting and salaries is critical for speed: until the split is settled, the team subconsciously holds back full effort.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript