February 2017 Income Report
Ah February, always seems to be a bit a shit month for me. In fact I could pretty much just copy and paste last February’s blog post - not much income growth, and only a small net increase in paying customers. Still, growth is growth, and grow I did.
The Figures
| This Month (February 2017) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savings (end of month) | £4,881.50 | £3,918.45 | 24.6% |
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $3,419 | $3,360 | 1.76% |
| Actual Revenue | $2,917.25 | $3,816.25 | 23.6% |
| Fastspring fees | $243.17 | $303.20 | 19.8% |
| Expenses | £1,724.71 | £2,732.71 | 36.9% |
| Income | £2,737.33 | £2,303.62 | 18.8% |
| Average Month on Month Growth | 9.9% | 10.5% | 5.7% |
| Paying customers | 57 | 56 | 1.8% |
| - Personal Plan | 27 | 27 | - |
| - Startup Plan | 22 | 21 | 4.8% |
| - Corporate Plan | 8 | 8 | - |
| Free plan subscribers | 114 | 97 | 17.5% |
| Unique users on landing page | 2,368 | 6,182 | 61.7% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 48 | 81 | 40.7% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 2.0% | 1.3% | 53.8% |
| New Paying customers | 4 | 6 | 33.3% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 3 | 1 | 200.0% |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 8.3% | 7.4% | 9.5% |
| New Free plan customers | 17 | 26 | 34.6% |
| Free Trial to Free plan conversion | 7.2% | 32.1% | 77.6% |
| Paying to Free plan downgrades | 1 | 1 | - |
| Profit | £1,012.62 | £-448.28 | 325.9% |
At a glance the figures look pretty bad, but with the exception of revenue growth, the important figures (profit, sign up rate, conversion rate) are all really healthy, so maybe it’s not quite as bad as last February.
There’s a few odd looking discrepancies this month: First is the big difference between MRR and actual revenue. This is simply because February has less days, so any subscriptions that were due to be charged on the 29th - 31st of the month will instead be charged in the beginning of March. The flip side is that March’s revenue should be higher than MRR.
Then there’s the bump in income (and subsequently profit) - this goes back to last year when one of my customers had some confusion within their finance department, that resulted in $400 dollars of BugMuncher subscription payments being refunded. It was an honest mistake, and it was all resolved amicably. The $400 was repaid in January, and because FastSpring works on a 4 week delay, the money hit my account this month. Even without this extra money profit would have been around £650, which is awesome!
In February I had another paying customer downgrade to the free plan, but I’ve now killed the free plan so that won’t happen again (more on that later).
This will be the last month I include the money in the bank entry in these income reports. The reason for this is because I have a new side project on which to spend money, so my bank balance could (and probably will) fall even though BugMuncher is making money. I only include BugMuncher related expenses below, so keeping the bank balance column could cause confusion. I also feel it’s not very relevant now that BugMuncher is profitable, as there’s no ‘runway’ to consider.
Expenses
| Supplier | Expense | Amount | USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | £1,724.71 | ||
| Me | Salary | £1,445.29 | - |
| Me | Home office allowance | £54.71 | - |
| Linode | Hosting | £40.77 | $45 |
| Digital Ocean | Hosting | £8.18 | $10.00 |
| SauceLabs | Selenium Servers | £56.64 | $69.00 |
| Pingdom | Uptime monitoring | £9.95 | - |
| Adverts | £30.45 | - | |
| Adverts | £20.47 | - | |
| Talktalk | Internet | £37.95 | - |
| O2 | Mobile Phone | £20.30 | - |
This was a fairly normal month for expenses. The only odd ones are the adverts on Reddit and Facebook, as I was trying a small budget on each to see how they performed for me, the answer was not well, not well at all.
Revenue
Balls! I always feared this day would come, and now it has. The 10% growth target has finally caught up with (and very slightly overtaken) me. I’m determined to get back ahead of it, which means I need at least $373 in revenue growth next month. I do love a challenge!
Freeloaders
As I mentioned above, I’ve killed the freeloader plan, this is part of a larger pricing restructure I’m trialling. All existing free accounts are being kept active, I’m just not allowing any new ones. I’m going to write a separate post about the performance and effect of the freeloader accounts in detail.
Plans for March
In march I want to get back on the blogging wagon, as I didn’t write anything between this and the last income report post. Other than that I’ll be keeping an eye on the new pricing structure, and carrying on with the little fixes.
Thanks for reading
- Matt