April's Accounts
Well, April was another good month, not quite March good, but growth has continued a very healthy upward trend, while revenue, income and runway are still looking good.
The Figures
| This Month (April 2016) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savings (end of month) | £10,324.03 | £10,917.99 | 5.4% |
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $1,852 | $1,577 | 17.44% |
| Income | £957.36 | £913.49 | 4.8% |
| Average Month on Month Growth | 14.7% | 14.3% | 2.7% |
| Paying customers | 33 | 30 | 10.0% |
| - Personal Plan | 17 | 14 | 21.4% |
| - Startup Plan | 10 | 11 | 9.1% |
| - Corporate Plan | 6 | 5 | 20.0% |
| Unique users on landing page | 3,140 | 2,277 | 37.9% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 64 | 64 | - |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 2.04% | 2.81% | 24.4% |
| New Paying customers | 5 | 6 | 16.7% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 3 | 3 | - |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 7.8% | 12.5% | 37.6% |
| Monthly Burn Rate | £882 | £886.26 | 0.5% |
| Runway | 11.7 Months | 12.3 Months | 4.9% |
So a few more rows in the red this month, but I’m not concerned, as March was a bit of an outlier, and when compared to more average months, April was another cracking success!
Interestingly, April had the third highest homepage traffic, behind October and November 2015. However, unlike those months, April’s traffic was entirely organic - I’d been focussing my marketing efforts in areas other than traffic generation, which is probably why April’s sign up conversion rate is so much higher.
Organic traffic had been showing a steady upward trend, but I can attribute some of the extra traffic this month to BugMuncher being installed on Haber7, a Turkish news site which, according to Alexa, is the 464th most popular website globally, and the 12th most popular in Turkey. So I’m very happy to have them on board :)
It’s awesome to see that this month I spent less than £600. Much like my elbow, profitability is so close I can almost lick it.
Revenue Growth
This graph blows me away, it’s really hard to believe that when I started this mission 8 months ago, revenue was just $620 and dropping. I know I’ve said it before, it astounds me how much I’ve been able to achieve by taking the plunge and going all in on BugMuncher.
I’m still on target to reach profitability by the end of September, and assuming I do achieve that I’ll still have around £8,000 left in the bank.
Raising Prices
For the first time in over 4 years, I raised the price of the bottom plan, from $19 to $29 / month. I have one rule when raising prices, always grandfather existing customers. This is why I have one customer who is still paying $10 / month - they got in early, and stuck with me since the very beginning. I believe they should be rewarded for that.
With the help of my marketing advisor, I was able the turn this into an opportunity. I sent an email out to all the free trial users, informing them that the price would be going up in one week, and if they signed up before then they would get the old, lower price.
I sent this email out on Monday 11th, and…
…nothing happened, no new paying customers, no questions or complaints. Not one to be discouraged so easily, I sent it again on Thursday 14th, the day before the price was due to increase, hoping the added urgency would have an effect. Within an hour of sending the email I had 2 new bootstrap subscriptions. Success!
Of course that was only part one of this experiment, the more important question was would people still buy BugMuncher at $29 / month?
Yes, yes they would, although it was touch and go for a bit, as it wasn’t until nearly 2 weeks after I raised the price that I got my first paying customer at the $29 price. Since then there’s been 2 more, so I feel pretty confident that $29 / month is still good value.
Blogging (or lack there of)
I wrote a while back about my failure to keep up with posting one new blog post / week. Well since then I’ve failed again, repeatedly. The reasons excuses for this are three-fold:
- I’ve been focussing almost all of my time on the new version of the control panel. As is always the case, it’s taken me a lot longer than anticipated, and I really want to get it launched.
- I found that my blogging efforts have not had much effect on sign ups or revenue, so it’s dropped down my priority list a bit.
- I haven’t had much of interest to write about (probably related to point 1).
So I’ve basically abandoned the goal I set in February, and all I really promise is at least one post like this each month. However, once I’ve got the new version live, I’d like to start putting some more time into blogging, hopefully finding some interesting things to write about, that will also bring in more potential customers.
That’s it from me today, thanks for reading!
- Matt