May 2017 Income Report
The universe is watching me. It knows. That’s the only explanation. The universe knows how much time and effort I’m putting in to BugMuncher and rewards me accordingly.
It started last month, I’d been slacking on BugMuncher, and I lost a bunch of subscribers. I started working on BugMuncher again, I somehow gained enough customers to finish April up on March. In May I focused a lot of time and energy on BugMuncher, and I had my best month ever!
The thing is, my work on BugMuncher these last 2 months has been what I’d call internal, ie: not the kind of thing that would bring in new customers. I’ve not done any marketing, no blog posts, no advertising. I’ve just been working on BugMuncher itself.
I’ve spoken to other small business owners and they’ve all had similar observations. It’s like karma, put the work in and the universe rewards you.
Ok, I know that really by working on and improving BugMuncher, trials are more likely to convert, and the same could be said for me being on hand to answer support requests quicker. And then those happy customers could be recommending BugMuncher to others, which could explain the increase in free trials. But either way, putting the time in has worked, and better still I’ve really enjoyed these last 6 weeks of working more on BugMuncher.
That’s enough bullshit about karma and an all-knowing universe, time to look at some numbers, but first a couple of changes. I’ve decided to remove the USD revenue and FastSpring fees entries. This partly because I don’t think they really add anything, MRR and the actual GBP income that lands in my Bank account are what matters. This month also saw my first customer paying by direct bank transfer, bypassing FastSpring, so this would have caused some potentially confusing discrepancies with those entries.
The Figures
| This Month (May 2017) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $4,360 | $3,866 | 12.8% |
| Income | £2,565.33 | £3,009.57 | 14.8% |
| Expenses | £4,578.20 | £2,300.87 | 99.0% |
| Average Month on Month Growth | 9.7% | 9.6% | 10.4% |
| Paying customers | 65 | 60 | 8.3% |
| - Personal Plan | 23 | 23 | - |
| - Startup Plan | 32 | 28 | 14.3% |
| - Corporate Plan | 10 | 9 | 11.1% |
| Unique users on landing page | 1,952 | 1,733 | 12.6% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 38 | 34 | 11.8% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 1.9% | 2.0% | 5.0% |
| New Paying customers | 7 | 6 | 16.7% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 1 | 7 | 85.7% |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 18.4% | 17.6% | 4.5% |
| Profit | -£2,012.87 | £708.70 | 384.0% |
All in all, a very healthy looking month with lots of green figures. But of course, we need to talk about the elephants in the room - expenses and profit (or lack there of). May was an incredibly expensive month, for one reason, I finally bought a new MacBook Pro. I’d had my last one for 6 years, it had served me well, and I’d written every line of BugMuncher’s codebase on it, but it was finally time for an upgrade.
In terms of revenue growth, May was BugMuncher’s best month ever, beating November 2016 by one single dollar! May also saw me smash through the $4,000 MRR threshold, and more importantly, grow by over 10% for the first time in six months.
Expenses
| Supplier | Expense | Amount | USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | £4,578 | ||
| Me | Salary | £1,550.29 | - |
| Me | Home office allowance | £54.71 | - |
| Linode | Hosting | £39.88 | $45 |
| Digital Ocean | Hosting | £7.97 | $10.00 |
| SauceLabs | Selenium Servers | £55.03 | $69.00 |
| Pingdom | Uptime monitoring | £9.95 | - |
| Barnstaple Work Hubs | Co-working Space | £180 | - |
| Apple | MacBook Pro | £2,597 | - |
| Talktalk | Internet | £37.95 | - |
| O2 | Mobile Phone | £20.31 | - |
| Gengo | Translation Service | £25.11 | $31.52 |
As I said above, May was an exceptionally expensive month, simply because I finally upgraded my aging MacBook. Other than that one off large expense, May was pretty standard in terms of expenses.
Revenue
While I may still be behind the 10% growth target line, this month has definitely seen me close the gap a bit.
Plans for June
I certainly spent a lot more time on BugMuncher this month, and it definitely helped, but I still failed to write any new blog posts (with the exception of this one), so that’s my main goal for June. I’d also love to break $5k MRR, but realistically I think that’s more of a goal for July.
I’ve also been working on BugMuncher’s public API, which I hope to launch in beta by the end of June.
Thanks for reading
- Matt