#374 - How Chad Rubin helps Amazon brands escape the pricing race to the bottom

A story about moving from being a cost center to becoming the profit engine—by challenging assumptions no one else dared to question.

This Episode is for SaaS founders who are tired of customers seeing their solution as just another expense—and those questioning whether there's a smarter way to build something customers actually want to pay more for.

Most SaaS companies position themselves as efficiency tools. They help you do things faster, cheaper, better.

Chad Rubin, CEO of Profasee, took a different path. After selling his previous inventory management company in 2021, he had a realization: he was always building solutions that lived on the expense side of his customers' businesses. He wanted to be on the revenue side.

So he started questioning assumptions in his own struggling Amazon business. Why doesn't anyone change price dynamically? Why do sellers copy pricing from competitors who might be broke?

This led him to build Profasee—dynamic pricing software that uses AI to help Amazon brands optimize pricing and ad spend together, creating a flywheel that drives profit growth.

And this inspired me to invite Chad to my podcast. We explore how questioning fundamental assumptions creates breakthrough opportunities. Chad shares insights about turning your founder story into sales leverage, the shift from efficiency to effectiveness in SaaS, and why data-driven pricing decisions compound over time. You'll discover how he's building a lean organization while investing heavily in AI and quant teams to create competitive moats.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies: – They acknowledge they can't please everyone – They sell the idea, not the product

Chad's story proves that the biggest levers are hiding in plain sight.

Here's one of Chad's quotes that captures his contrarian philosophy:

"You have to always be a dot, a dot collector. Constantly collecting dots. Most brands are not looking at their whole system. They're not zooming out to understand the process, understand with clear thinking, how you can have some self-awareness and look at, okay, price and PPC, how do these things interconnect?"

By listening to this episode, you'll learn:

Why questioning belief systems creates challenger advantages
What happens when you connect isolated business levers
What happens when you refuse to compete on other people's terms • Why founder stories become leverage in sales conversations

For more information about the guest from this week:

Guest: Chad Rubin, CEO of Profasee

Website: profasee.com

528: Procurement 6 | October 14th, 2022