We doubled prices twice and kept 90% of our customers | J.Y. Delmotte @BuddiesHR

J.Y. has co-founded six startups, experimented across martech and sales tech, gone through venture-backed growth, and built products on top of platforms that can change the rules overnight. That mix of experience makes this story especially useful for founders thinking about product-led growth, pricing, platform risk, and the realities of building a business that may one day be sold.

BuddiesHR is best known for lightweight HR workflows inside Slack: random coffee chats, birthday celebrations, employee recognition, engagement surveys, vacation tracking, standups, and more. But the business story behind the product is what stands out most.

Here are the biggest lessons from J.Y.’s journey so far.

From engineering student to repeat SaaS founder

J.Y. started his first company in 2016, during the last year of his engineering degree. Since then, he has co-founded several startups, mostly in B2B SaaS.

After briefly trying B2C, he realized B2B customers were easier to reach and sell to. That led him through different categories, including marketing tech and sales tech, before eventually launching Pallet, a platform for automating sales commission calculations.

Pallet followed a more classic venture path: raising around $6 million, hiring a team of 15, and scaling quickly. But looking back, J.Y. realized that the part he enjoyed most was not only the product or the revenue engine. It was building the company itself: the culture, the rituals, and the internal experience for employees.

That became the spark for BuddiesHR.

Why BuddiesHR exists

Like many strong SaaS ideas, BuddiesHR came from a problem the founder had personally felt.

After building and managing a growing startup team, J.Y. became increasingly interested in the mechanics of company culture. He wanted to make that his full-time focus, but still through software rather than consulting or services.

The result was BuddiesHR: a product designed to help companies build and reinforce culture through simple, embedded workflows where employees already communicate.

Today, the suite includes features such as:

• Random coffee matching
• Birthday celebrations
• Employee recognition and kudos
• Engagement surveys
• Standups
• Vacation tracking
• Performance review functionality

A product branding lesson: cute names win attention

One small but memorable part of J.Y.’s approach is branding.

He and his team learned early that products with friendly, memorable names and playful visuals tend to stick. In a previous company, customers strongly connected with a cute character-based brand, and that insight carried forward into later products.

That is why BuddiesHR’s apps have names and visual identities that feel approachable rather than corporate. In a category like HR tech, where many tools sound interchangeable, that kind of branding can create recall.

The biggest existential risk: building on Slack

One of the most important themes in the conversation is platform dependency.

BuddiesHR is deeply tied to Slack. And unlike a product that merely integrates with Slack, many of its apps were originally built as native Slack apps from the ground up. That creates real risk.

If Slack changed its marketplace rules, product direction, pricing, or positioning in a way that hurt BuddiesHR, the consequences could be severe. In J.Y.’s words, a shift at the platform level could damage the business very quickly.

This is not a theoretical concern. He has taken platform risk before:

• An Instagram automation product that was eventually banned
• A TikTok automation attempt that met the same fate
• Work involving LinkedIn scraping and outbound automation
• An earlier company that depended heavily on HubSpot integration for lead flow

So he knows firsthand that platform-driven growth can be powerful, but fragile.

Why the Slack risk is serious, but not identical to earlier platform bets

J.Y. sees the current Slack risk as real, but not immediate panic territory.

Because Slack sits inside Salesforce, he believes the chances of reckless disruption are relatively low. A platform generating meaningful revenue is unlikely to be casually broken. More likely, Slack will continue evolving conservatively, perhaps with stronger AI capabilities and tighter Salesforce alignment.

Still, “unlikely” is not the same as “impossible.” And even if Slack remains stable, dependence on a single platform can affect how acquirers evaluate the business, especially when it comes to revenue multiples.

That is why BuddiesHR is already working on an escape path.

BuddiesHR 2.0: moving from Slack app suite to web platform

The company’s answer to platform risk is a major product evolution internally referred to as BuddiesHR 2.0.

The idea is straightforward: instead of being a set of standalone Slack apps, BuddiesHR will become a web platform with Slack as one integration layer.

That shift matters for several reasons.

• It reduces total dependence on Slack.
• It allows customers to keep using the product even if they migrate to another communication platform.
• It opens the door to support additional ecosystems such as Microsoft Teams and Pumble.
• It makes BuddiesHR usable as a standalone product, even without chat-platform integration.

This plan became possible only after the team gained enough clarity around its ideal customer profile, required features, pricing model, and acquisition channels.

That clarity did not exist at the beginning. Early on, the team thought a single Slack app might become the breakout winner. When growth did not accelerate as hoped, they launched a second app, then a third, then a fourth. Over time, they realized that the real opportunity was not one point solution, but a coordinated suite of apps that could share context and data.

That insight became the foundation of the business.

Why HR buyers pushed BuddiesHR toward product-led growth

HR buyers are careful by nature, and for good reason. Their software choices affect the whole company, not just one team.

That makes HR tech sales slower and harder to rush. Standard sales pressure tactics tend to fall flat. End-of-quarter discounts, artificial urgency, and aggressive follow-up sequences are far less effective when the buyer is operating on an internal people-process timeline that cannot simply be moved.

J.Y. gives a clear example: if performance review season happens at the end of the year, no discount in Q1 will convince an HR team to redesign that process just to save a little money.

Instead of fighting that reality, BuddiesHR leaned into product-led growth.

The company made testing easy by offering:

• A 30-day free trial
• A free tier for teams with fewer than 10 users
• The ability to test inside a small Slack workspace before rolling out to the full company

This approach lets HR teams evaluate the software safely, without forcing a risky all-company deployment on day one.

It also fits the kind of business J.Y. and his co-founder wanted to build: profitable, sustainable, and not overly dependent on a heavy sales motion.

The 40 interviews that shaped the roadmap

Before building deeply, the team conducted around 40 interviews with people leaders. Those conversations produced two strong signals.

1. HR tools should live inside the communication environment employees already use.
2. Buyers wanted modular pricing instead of expensive all-in-one bundles.

The first insight pointed directly to Slack. HR teams did not want extra logins, forgotten passwords, another admin console, or another system employees had to learn. If core HR workflows could happen inside Slack, adoption would be easier.

The second insight came from frustration with larger HR platforms. Buyers often felt trapped paying for broad suites when they only needed one or two specific features. That made modularity a product requirement, not just a pricing choice.

Those early conversations shaped both product and go-to-market.

The growth engine: Slack Marketplace drives more than 90% of inbound

The most important acquisition channel for BuddiesHR has been the Slack Marketplace. Even now, it accounts for more than 90% of inbound signups.

The timing helped.

When the team launched in 2023, competition inside the marketplace was still manageable. That made it possible to secure top positions before the category became crowded. And once an app reaches the top results, the position becomes self-reinforcing.

More visibility leads to more installs. More installs improve ranking. Better ranking leads to even more installs.

Breaking into that loop is hard. Staying in it is much easier.

How Slack Marketplace SEO worked

Slack Marketplace search was simple enough that keyword optimization had a meaningful impact.

The ranking system heavily relied on:

• The app title
• The short description
• The full description

So the team focused on understanding which terms buyers typed into the marketplace and then made sure those terms appeared in the right places.

For homepage visibility and featured placements, raw install volume mattered more. That created a two-stage game:

1. Optimize listings for keyword-based discovery.
2. Accumulate enough installs to become entrenched in top positions.

J.Y. believes this strategy would be much harder to replicate today because the category is more competitive and the top slots are now stickier.

Why a clone experiment failed

At one point, the team worried that a competitor might use the same listing tactics to siphon traffic. To test that fear, they launched another app with different branding but similar optimization logic.

It did not work.

The experiment suggested that search behavior had shifted. Instead of searching generic feature phrases like “birthday bot” or “random coffee,” more users were now searching directly for BuddiesHR product names.

That is a meaningful strategic advantage.

Competitors who named themselves after generic feature terms may have made it easier for users to compare alternatives. BuddiesHR, by building distinct brand names, may have made it easier to capture branded search demand inside the marketplace.

Other channels they tested, and why most did not match Slack

Outside the Slack Marketplace, the team tested several acquisition channels:

• SEO
• Google Ads
• Reddit marketing
• Reddit ads
• Quora ads

None performed anywhere near as well as Slack Marketplace distribution.

SEO received meaningful investment, around $2K–$3K per month for more than a year. It improved signup volume, but not enough to clearly justify the spend. Growth moved from roughly 10 to 20 signups per month, yet it remained unclear how much of that came from actual SEO gains versus growing branded search.

Reddit showed more promise. Even with minimal effort, it generated around 10 signups per month. That still looked small compared with roughly 400 monthly signups overall, but the efficiency was interesting enough for the team to hire an agency to push further.

Google Ads has become a recurring experiment. The team revisits it as the product evolves, hoping that a broader platform and stronger feature set will finally make paid search economics work. So far, it has not become a breakthrough channel, but J.Y. remains optimistic because he has seen other B2B SaaS companies scale rapidly on ads alone.

Why building in public has not backfired

J.Y. is unusually open about what is working and what is not. He shares experiments, failures, and channel learnings publicly.

That level of transparency has not hurt the business in any obvious way.

His reasoning is practical: tactics are rarely portable without context. Even if another founder copied the visible parts of the playbook, they would still lack the specific customer conversations, product decisions, and positioning choices that shaped BuddiesHR.

He points to early customer definition as the real differentiator. The first few customers influence the roadmap far more than most people expect. Change those early customers, and the product often changes with them.

For example, BuddiesHR intentionally targeted SMB and lighter mid-market buyers who could adopt software without a high-touch sales cycle. A founder coming from enterprise sales might have built for 500+ employee companies from day one and ended up with a completely different product.

What building in public has done, however, is attract other founders. Those conversations have turned into a useful exchange of learnings, especially around growth channels. For two technical founders, that shared business knowledge is often more valuable than any direct lead generation.

Revenue predictability with a modular product

Even though BuddiesHR sells a suite of apps and allows customers to buy only what they need, J.Y. describes revenue growth as relatively predictable.

The company has been adding around $1.5K MRR per month, giving the team a clear baseline. The challenge is less about uncertainty and more about finding experiments that increase that number.

The modular pricing model is not accidental. It came directly from customer interviews. Buyers disliked paying for bloated bundles, so BuddiesHR designed its offer to let companies pay only for the modules they actually use.

That said, the team still wants expansion.

The pricing strategy: use one app as the entry point, then expand

Most customers arrive through the Slack Marketplace looking for one very specific solution. Maybe they want birthday celebrations. Maybe random coffee chats. Maybe kudos.

BuddiesHR makes that first install extremely easy. If someone is comfortable with Slack, setup should take only a couple of minutes.

Once the first app is installed, the expansion motion begins.

The product then introduces related apps based on the likely problem the buyer is trying to solve. Over time, that drives adoption across multiple modules.

Pricing is designed to support this behavior:

• One app costs $1 per employee per month.
• The full suite costs $2 per employee per month.

With seven apps in the suite, the economics are clear. The moment a customer needs two apps, the all-in plan becomes the obvious choice.

That package now drives about 25% of revenue. J.Y. sees substantial room to grow that share.

More importantly, multi-app customers retain better. Once a company has three, four, or five workflows embedded, churn becomes much less likely.

The biggest win: pricing changes can unlock growth fast

J.Y. calls pricing the biggest lever in the company’s history.

BuddiesHR started at $0.25 per employee per month. The logic was simple enough: compare feature depth with competitors and price at a lower level while the product is still maturing.

As the company added more features and became more competitive, that price no longer made sense. So they raised it to $0.50.

Later, after adding even more functionality and concluding they were delivering at least as much value as competing tools, they raised it again to $1.

Both increases applied to existing customers after proper notice.

The surprising part was not just that the business survived. It was how little resistance appeared.

Out of hundreds of customers, only a small handful objected seriously. Most accepted the explanation once the company clearly showed what had improved and why the updated price was justified.

From a business standpoint, the effect was dramatic. Doubling price while keeping most of the customer base can transform what the company is able to fund overnight: product development, acquisition experiments, and broader strategic flexibility.

J.Y.’s broader lesson is not that every company should aggressively raise prices without caution. It is that founders often underprice for too long, even when their product already creates more value than their current price reflects.

There are different ways to approach this:

• Raise prices for all customers with clear notice
• Introduce new plans tied to new functionality
• Test higher pricing only on new signups first
• Roll changes out to a subset of existing customers before a full migration

The key is to treat pricing as an ongoing strategic system, not a one-time setup decision.

Selling side projects: KarmaLinks and TalkFluence

J.Y. has also sold smaller software businesses along the way, including KarmaLinks and TalkFluence.

KarmaLinks was a B2B SaaS backlink exchange platform designed to make link exchanges fairer through a points-based system. It also solved a practical problem for J.Y.’s team: reducing the constant stream of backlink outreach emails while supporting their own SEO efforts.

The product delivered useful backlinks, but it did not show enough monetization potential to compete for focus against BuddiesHR. So the team prepared to shut it down and posted a note on the site saying the product would close soon, while inviting acquisition interest.

That message brought in three interested buyers. One turned out to be serious and moved quickly.

Because the buyer came through the YC network, trust formed fast. That made the deal smoother. The handoff itself was intentionally simple:

• A shared Notion document
• Two checklists, one for buyer and one for seller
• Regular syncs
• Documentation covering operations and technical details

The whole process took around three months from initial agreement to full completion.

He used a very similar approach for another business sale as well, and the core lesson remained the same: do not overengineer the transfer process. Be transparent, define tasks clearly, and keep communication tight.

Why trust matters so much in acquisitions

A major thread in J.Y.’s acquisition experience is trust.

In one example, a former mentee eventually acquired one of his businesses after conversations that began in a completely different context. That personal connection changed the tone of the deal. J.Y. felt comfortable being unusually candid about the business’s limitations, including technical maintenance burdens and fragility tied to scraping infrastructure.

That level of openness may be harder in a fully anonymous marketplace process. But in founder-to-founder deals, especially where some relationship already exists, transparency can prevent regret later and make the transition far healthier for both sides.

The biggest failure: choosing co-founders without enough validation

When asked about failure, J.Y. does not point to a product mistake or a channel that flopped. He points to co-founder fit.

Twice, he and his co-founder entered into companies with a third co-founder without spending enough time validating the human dynamic. In both cases, the mismatch became costly. In one case, the split was manageable. In another, it became emotionally difficult and lawyers got involved much earlier than they should have.

The legal process made things more tactical and adversarial. In hindsight, he believes it is almost always better to keep communication direct and open for as long as possible before escalating through legal intermediaries.

There were co-founder agreements in place, but paperwork was not the real issue. The issue was ignoring early warning signs.

Looking back, what they labeled as orange flags were really red flags. They wanted the company badly enough that they softened their own judgment.

That experience changed how J.Y. thinks about starting companies. If he were to bring in another co-founder in the future, the process would be much more deliberate, and instinct would carry more weight.

A founder habit worth copying: monthly self-reflection

The personal habit J.Y. shares is simple and useful.

Once a month, on the first day of the month, he runs a self-reflection session. The framework is built around his personal definition of success: finding the right balance between health, family, and wealth.

During that review, he asks:

• What did I do last month for my health?
• What did I do last month for my family?
• What did I do last month for building wealth and the business?
• What should I keep doing?
• What should I stop doing?
• What specific actions matter most in the month ahead?

The power of the habit is not in complexity. It is in intentionality.

Startup life makes it easy to drift into guilt: not working enough, not exercising enough, not spending enough time with family. Writing these things down and reviewing them consciously helps turn vague pressure into deliberate choices.

And those choices can shift over time. In one season, business-building may deserve more weight. In another, family may take precedence. The point is to decide consciously rather than reactively.