Self-Registration Flow
Helped build, then took over as lead on, a self-registration flow spanning Salesforce, Pardot, Ordway, Stripe, and SalesRabbit's app — letting the smallest customers activate themselves and cutting the cost to serve a segment the company was otherwise losing money on.
Problem
A customer paying under $100/month signed up through the normal sales process and immediately hit account access problems. Getting them working pulled in as many as seven people — an SDR, an AE, an ops team member, a support specialist, a CSM, a billing specialist, and, when it got bad enough, an engineer. At roughly 15 minutes each, the fully-loaded cost of that group's time came out to about $100 — roughly what the customer paid that month. It was routine for a whole group of people to spend more resolving one small customer's problem than the customer paid the company.
That wasn't a one-off. Customers paying under $200 MRR made up a large share of SalesRabbit's total customer base, but the company was often losing money on them — they typically didn't retain long enough to justify the cost of acquiring and servicing them through the same sales-assisted process used for every other customer, regardless of size.
Mathematically there were three ways to fix that: stop selling to the segment, raise prices on it, or lower the cost to serve it. SalesRabbit chose the third. The point was never to cut headcount — it was that if the underlying product gaps got fixed, the people in that seven-person group could redirect their time to higher-value work instead of firefighting unprofitable accounts.
Approach
The project ran in two phases. Initial research started in early 2025 and the first production workflow iterations were live by around April, with SalesRabbit's CFO driving that phase and Mickey participating as an individual contributor. Mickey took over as project lead around mid-2025.
The resulting flow let a prospective small customer go to the website, add a card, start their billing subscription, and receive their app entitlements — with no sales rep involved. Rollout was scoped narrowly at first: only customers with fewer than 5 users could self-checkout. That cap was later raised to 10 users, near the end of Mickey's time at SalesRabbit.
The sales motion for this segment shifted rather than disappeared: even incomplete signups were tracked in Salesforce, since reaching checkout signals real intent, and SDRs followed up on those as part of their normal lead pipeline.
Marketing and Engineering weren't on Mickey's team, so this was cross-functional coordination rather than top-down direction — consistent with how he operated as a player-coach Director throughout his tenure. His only direct report involved was his Salesforce admin, who built out the GTM/lead pipeline in Salesforce to track and route the self-checkout traffic correctly.
Technical depth
- Systems connected: Salesforce, Pardot, Ordway, Stripe, and SalesRabbit's own app.
- Normally, Ordway configured a customer's payment setup in Stripe as part of its standard sales-assisted integration. Self-checkout skipped that sales-driven Ordway setup step, so the team had to add direct Stripe API calls — collecting a payment method, charging the card — at specific points before and around the Ordway subscription being created.
- Mickey's own hands-on Stripe work was narrow: he made the Stripe Customer-creation API call himself, and guided SalesRabbit's Marketing developer on which additional Stripe calls were needed and where they had to fire in the sequence, rather than building that integration personally.
- Used Tray to configure and create the necessary records across Salesforce, Pardot, Ordway, Stripe, and the app as part of the automated signup flow — the same tool used for bulk record operations in the Recurly-to-Ordway migration.
- Worked with Engineering on SalesRabbit's internal API to make sure newly self-registered customers were provisioned with app entitlements matching what they'd actually paid for.
- Worked directly with Marketing to get the webhooks and triggers sequenced correctly across all five connected systems.
- The project surfaced two real product gaps, worth noting briefly: personal emails used at signup got 'tied up' when customers changed employers, complicating account ownership; and the app had no in-app self-service billing page, so customers still couldn't make changes like adding a user or pausing a subscription without contacting support.
Outcome
Even before the user cap was raised past the initial <5-user threshold, self-registration was driving roughly 50-70 new customers signing up per month — around 30-50% of all new customers during that period.
Retention of self-registered customers was similar to, or slightly worse than, sales-assisted customers — this was not an improvement on a pure retention basis. It was offset by meaningfully higher acquisition volume and the complete elimination of AE/SDR commission costs on this segment, making it net-better for the business on volume and cost structure, not because retention improved.
Rolling this out was a genuinely difficult internal sell, especially to the sales team, since commission on this segment was on the line. The pitch that worked was framing it as freeing reps to spend time on higher-value deals, not taking business away from them.
Increased signup volume and variety also exposed a data-quality gap: SalesRabbit's Salesforce account-merging rules were too loose for industries like Solar and Roofing, where similarly named businesses are common, causing some incorrect account merges.
The <10-user expansion happened close to the end of Mickey's tenure at SalesRabbit, so there's no solid before/after data on that specific change yet — noting this as a genuine open question rather than estimating it.