June's Juncture
Another month, another blog post. I really hoped that by this point I’d have the new version of BugMuncher live and I’d be back to marketing and more frequent blogging. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. Internet Explorer 8 happened instead.
Once the new version is finally live, I’m going to write a big post-mortem on why it took so long and what I could, and should, have done differently. Anyway, onto June’s figures:
The Figures
| This Month (June 2016) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savings (end of month) | £8,778.04 | £9,082.08 | 3.4% |
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $2,058 | $1,940 | 6.1% |
| Income | £1,151.12 | £1,096.09 | 5.0% |
| Average Month on Month Growth | 12.75% | 13.51% | 5.6% |
| Paying customers | 38 | 36 | 5.6% |
| - Personal Plan | 21 | 20 | 5.0% |
| - Startup Plan | 11 | 10 | 10.0% |
| - Corporate Plan | 6 | 6 | - |
| Unique users on landing page | 1,751 | 2,071 | 15.5% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 45 | 34 | 32.4% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 2.57% | 1.62% | 58.6% |
| New Paying customers | 6 | 4 | 25.0% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 4 | 4 | - |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 6.7% | 11.8% | 43.2% |
| Monthly Burn Rate | £688.24 | £743.27 | 7.4% |
| Runway | 12.8 Months | 12.2 Months | 4.9% |
Last month I said my hopes for June were to get the new version of BugMuncher live, and to crack $2,000 in MRR - well at least one of those happened. It’s really cool to see recurring revenue pass $2,000 considering it was just 6 months ago that I reached the $1,000 MRR milestone!
Overall June was another slow growth month, which isn’t surprising, as once I again I dedicated zero hours to marketing. At least there’s a lot more green than last month, which is pretty cool.
The figure that surprised me the most was free trial signup conversion rate - 2.57%, that’s one of the highest BugMuncher’s ever seen. Unfortunately the free trail to paid conversion rate was not so hot, just 6.7%. If I had more time I’d dig into the analytics to see where the signups were coming from, maybe try to understand why they didn’t convert so well.
Runway is still over a year, and still growing, so I can’t complain there. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I find it really reassuring to know that even with zero marketing effort BugMuncher still grows, and remains default alive.
Featured In or Trusted By?
For a long time, BugMuncher’s home page has had a prominent ‘Featured In’ section, listing some of the publications that have reviewed BugMuncher. I’ve always wanted to change that to the ubiquitous ‘Trusted By’, where I’d list some high profile customers, but although BugMuncher has some pretty sizeable customers, none of them are what you might call ‘household names’.
My instinct told me that to have a ‘Trusted By’ section, I’d need at least one customer that every single visitor would recognise, ie: Microsoft, Google, Apple, that kind of thing. Without one of those whales on board I feared listing some of BugMuncher’s customers could actually hurt my conversion rate.
Three months ago I decided to run an A/B test to see if this was true, and the results were… inconclusive. This is why I tend not to bother with A/B tests - they always reach the 3 month time limit with out reaching a conclusion, as I simply don’t get enough traffic.
However, the final score was that Trusted By converts 32.7% better with a confidence of 90.1%, which is good enough for me, so BugMuncher is now proudly rocking a ‘Trusted By’ section.
The Future
I can finally say that at time of writing the new version of BugMuncher is actually finished, working in Internet Explorer 8 and ready to go. Over the next week I shall be preparing for the switch over, triple checking everything, and then making it live on Monday 18th July, only three months behind schedule…
This means the second half of this month will see me finally getting back on the marketing efforts, and hopefully some more interesting blog posts for your eyeballs.
Thanks for reading.
- Matt