Challenge

After originally launching with its free product in September 2021, Tango realised the market was ready for it to offer a paid product faster than it was anticipating. Tango needed a billing solution that it could integrate quickly, that would scale as it grew, and that had revenue and accounting capabilities to power its product-led and sales-led go-to-market strategies.

Solution

Tango turned to Stripe Invoicing, Billing, and Revenue Recognition for their fast and easy integration, flexibility, and scalability to support the company’s growing business. In addition to providing a simple self-serve experience for Tango’s monthly and annual Pro users, Stripe also enabled Tango to move upmarket and support enterprise customers.

Increasing conversion with free trials and Invoicing

Tango used several Billing features to help increase conversion for both product-led and sales-led motions. Free trials were effective in getting customers to experience the product and its value, but collecting credit card information was costly and burdensome.

“We want customers to experience value, but then we have customers who forget to cancel before the trial ends. This creates a support ticket to cancel and refund, which gets costly with time and impacts churn metrics.” said Dan Giovacchini, co-founder of Tango.

By selectively offering free trials without requiring a payment method, Tango was able to fulfil its goal of converting prospective customers by letting them experience the product’s value, without having to deal with refunds and updating churn metrics.

For its sales-led motions, Tango was able to save time and eliminate manual tasks by sending quotes to negotiated customers and automatically converting the quotes into subscriptions, using Stripe.

"We have all types of customers ranging in size and industry, all with slightly different billing requirements. Stripe Billing allows us to manage customers with recurring subscription invoices generated automatically. Stripe Invoicing allows us to support occasional edge cases for custom service periods, so that we can work with customers seamlessly." said Giovacchini.

Managing sales-negotiated contracts, orders, and amendments

For its larger customers with sales-negotiated contracts and orders, Tango was able to easily automate contract amendments, upgrades, and downgrades as customers matured and grew their adoption of Tango over time.

“Some customers will want to make updates to their seat quantity at a later date, and with Stripe Billing, we can easily schedule that. Using amendments and subscription schedules, rather than making a reminder or a to-do note, helped automate the process, save time, and introduce consistency to a previously chaotic process.” Giovacchini said.

Tango was also able to use flexible pricing to improve cash flow, by offering pricing structures that encourage customers to commit to longer-term periods or lock in renewals for bigger contracts up front.

Automating revenue accounting and closing the books faster, with Revenue Recognition

As a growing startup, Tango was focused on building an accounting software stack designed for efficiency and accuracy. When errors occurred, such as accidentally including the wrong service period on one of its invoices, Tango was able to use Revenue Recognition to exclude certain invoices, import data, and set up rules to fix errors. This allowed Tango to close its books with records that accurately represented the business.

Results

Efficiency and automation are important for high-growth startups like Tango. Using Stripe Billing to consolidate both their product-led and sales-led customer acquisition channels allowed it to supercharge its revenue growth by implementing a single billing solution.

“Building flexible billing methods on our own would have been super costly, and engineering hours are really precious. Stripe allowed us to quickly expand our business upmarket and meet the needs of enterprise customers who have complex sales processes.” said Giovacchini.

Revenue Recognition's ability to import data from other accounting systems saved Tango thousands of dollars’ worth of accounting hours.