April 2017 Income Report
Usually, I hate the phrase ‘emotional roller coaster’, but fuck me, was April an emotional roller coaster. It started well, really well, I was up $260 monthly recurring revenue in the first week! Then in the middle of the month things started to go down hill.
What ensued was a cavalcade of cancellations the likes of which BugMuncher had never seen. I lost 5 subscribers in a week, leaving me $47 down on March’s MRR. It didn’t stop there either, I remember joking to Sophie in the afternoon of Tuesday the 18th that it had been a good day as no one had cancelled, and no subscriptions had expired - by that evening I’d lost another one.
Eventually the haemorrhage of customers stopped, but I was left feeling disheartened and fearing the worst. It wasn’t until the 26th that things started to turn back around again, when I got a new $199 Corporate subscriber, and then on the 28th two new Startup subscriptions were started. Somehow, I managed to finish the month up on March.
The Figures
| This Month (April 2017) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $3,866 | $3,655 | 5.8% |
| Actual Revenue | $3,667.00 | $4,171.00 | 12.1% |
| Fastspring fees | $272.40 | $307.84 | 11.5% |
| Expenses | £2,300.87 | £1,680.84 | 36.9% |
| Income | £3,009.57 | £2,118.54 | 42.1% |
| Average Month on Month Growth | 9.6% | 9.8% | 2.0% |
| Paying customers | 60 | 61 | 1.6% |
| - Personal Plan | 23 | 27 | 14.8% |
| - Startup Plan | 28 | 26 | 7.7% |
| - Corporate Plan | 9 | 8 | 12.5% |
| Unique users on landing page | 1,733 | 2,255 | 23.1% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 34 | 31 | 9.7% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 2.0% | 1.4% | 42.9% |
| New Paying customers | 6 | 6 | - |
| Lost Paying Customers | 7 | 2 | 250.0% |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 17.6% | 19.4% | 9.3% |
| Profit | £708.70 | £437.70 | 61.9% |
So there we have it, 7 cancellations in one month. I spent days looking for patterns or reasons for the cancellations, but there weren’t any. Some hadn’t used BugMuncher for ages, and I’m guessing just forgot to cancel earlier, some told me they loved BugMuncher but it wasn’t getting enough use (a common problem on smaller sites), some told me they only wanted BugMuncher for a pre-defined development period, and one had their payment fail, and I was unable to get in touch with them.
I can only conclude it was a crazy coincidence, and of course the more customers I have, the more I have to lose. It was also a kind of blessing in disguise, as while I was trying to figure out why I was losing customers, I found BugMuncher was broken in IE 8 and 9, and while I doubt that caused the cancellations, as those browsers are rarely used, it was good to be able to find and fix that bug.
April’s Exodus has also given me a much needed kick up the ass, as I’ve been spending a lot of my time on a new project, and BugMuncher had been a bit neglected, so I’ve started dedicating more time to BugMuncher again.
In other news, I’ve finally been able to add the “most popular” label on the middle plan again! The last time this was the case was January 2016. I have no doubt that the new pricing structure is the reason for the Startup plan’s sudden gain in popularity.
Hits to the website were down on March, probably because I didn’t publish any blog posts in April, and I didn’t really do any marketing. However, signups and conversions were actually up, maybe this whole marketing thing is a waste of effort… Of course I don’t actually believe that, but clearly my marketing efforts have not been particularly effective.
Expenses
| Supplier | Expense | Amount | USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | £2,300.87 | ||
| Me | Salary | £1,445.29 | - |
| Me | Home office allowance | £54.71 | - |
| Linode | Hosting | £41.32 | $45 |
| Digital Ocean | Hosting | £8.26 | $10.00 |
| SauceLabs | Selenium Servers | £57.02 | $69.00 |
| Pingdom | Uptime monitoring | £9.95 | - |
| Barnstaple Work Hubs | Co-working Space | £380 | - |
| Tree Tops Chartered Accountants | End of year & quarterly submission | £225.60 | - |
| Talktalk | Internet | £37.95 | - |
| O2 | Mobile Phone | £21.81 | - |
| Gengo | Translation Service | £18.96 | $23.64 |
April was an unusually expensive month, as now the weather is warming up I’m back to renting a desk at the co-working space, and this month I paid for both April, May, and one day in March. I also had some accounting expenses. The good news is I still made a healthy profit this month.
Revenue
Oh dear, that 10% MoM growth target is slipping further and further out of reach, the funny/annoying thing is I actually had $634 of new monthly revenue in April, which would have been more than enough to bring me back up to over 10% MoM growth, but all those cancellations ruined it for me.
Plans for May
As I said, I’ve been focusing a lot more time on BugMuncher through the latter part of April, and it seemed to make a difference, so I’ll be keeping up with that. I’d like to post more to this neglected blog as well. I also plan on turning 32 in May, well, I suppose I don’t really have a choice in the matter, but I’ll be taking a few days off around my birthday :)
Thanks for reading
- Matt