May's Monotony
May was a strange month, it felt like every time someone started a paid subscription, someone else cancelled theirs. One step forward, one step back. I finished the month up on April, albeit only slightly, so I’m still happy. More importantly, I’m still hovering around the 12 months runway mark.
May also marked my turning 31 years old, not that it really makes a difference to anything else, just wanted to mention it :)
The Figures
| This Month (May 2016) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savings (end of month) | £9,082.08 | £10,324.03 | 12.03% |
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $1,940 | $1,852 | 4.75% |
| Income | £1,096.09 | £957.36 | 14.5% |
| Average Month on Month Growth | 13.51% | 14.7% | 8.1% |
| Paying customers | 36 | 33 | 9.1% |
| - Personal Plan | 20 | 17 | 17.7% |
| - Startup Plan | 10 | 10 | - |
| - Corporate Plan | 6 | 6 | - |
| Unique users on landing page | 2,071 | 3,140 | 34.1% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 34 | 64 | 46.9% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 1.62% | 2.04% | 20.6% |
| New Paying customers | 4 | 5 | 20% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 4 | 3 | 33.3% |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 11.8% | 7.8% | 33.9% |
| Monthly Burn Rate | £743.27 | £882 | 15.7% |
| Runway | 12.2 Months | 11.7 Months | 4.3% |
The first figure from the table to which I’d like to bring attention is the Revenue, as May saw me cross the £1,000 / month milestone! It blows my mindhole to think when I started this less than a year ago, I was getting around £300 / month, and now I’m over £1,000. That’s roughly equal to the UK’s minimum wage for a full-time job, which is something I suppose.
There’s a fair few red figures this month, most of those relate to my continued neglect of marketing, eg: hits, trial sign ups and conversions. It’s nice to see that BugMuncher can still grow (slowly) without any marketing, but I’ve really gotta get back on that. Unfortunately I’m only one incredibly handsome man, but the new version I’ve been slaving over is very nearly done now, so I’ll be able to start focusing on marketing again soon.
Revenue Growth
Not much to say about this, still growing, still miles ahead of my targets, still happy :) At the current average growth rate I’ll reach profitability in just 4 months, and it will only take £2,000 more out of my savings.
Of course the way things are currently going that unlikely to happen, especially if I can’t get my marketing game back on point, so instead I’m going to assume a much worse case scenario of growing at only 5% from now on, in which case it would take 6 months to reach profitability, only taking £2,300 out of my savings. And the very worst case scenario, only just reaching profitability before the savings run out, would allow me to grow at less than 0.5% for the next year and nine months. It seems no matter which way I slice it, things look good.
That’s it for me this month, another short one as I need to get back to programming. Hopefully next month will see me crossing the $2,000 MRR mark, as well as getting back on the marketing.
- Matt