August 2017 Income Report
Well shit. I mean, it was bound to happen eventually, and considering that over the last two months BugMuncher hasn’t received a great deal of attention from me, I really shouldn’t be surprised. But happen it did. BugMuncher entered recession, I finished the month with a loss in Monthly Recurring Revenue for the first time since I started working on it full time:
The Figures
| This Month (August 2017) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $4,361 | $4,521 | 3.8% |
| Income | £2,986.83 | £2,967.70 | 0.6% |
| Expenses | £2,535.64 | £2,400.87 | 5.6% |
| Paying customers | 64 | 64 | - |
| - Personal Plan | 21 | 20 | 5.0% |
| - Startup Plan | 33 | 33 | - |
| - Corporate Plan | 10 | 11 | 9.1% |
| Unique users on landing page | 4,000 | 1,717 | 133.0% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 26 | 28 | 7.1% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 0.7% | 1.6% | 56.3% |
| New Paying customers | 5 | 3 | 66.7% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 5 | 4 | 25.0% |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 19.2% | 10.7% | 79.4% |
| Profit | £451.19 | £566.83 | 20.4% |
So there you have it, for the first time in 2 years, BugMuncher’s MRR has dropped. August was actually a good month for new paying customers. Unfortunately the 5 new customers was balanced out by the 5 that churned. The biggest loss, however, was a top level $199 / month subscriber that downgraded to the bottom level $29 / month subscription.
Free trial sign up rate was poor this month, as I had a big bump in traffic from a blog post that hit the front page of Hacker News. I’ve found previously that blog traffic rarely converts to sign ups, so that wasn’t a surprise. What did surprise me was the 19.2% free trial to paying conversion, which is the second best I’ve ever had, only just behind March’s 19.4%.
The main thing for me is I still made healthy profit.
Expenses
| Supplier | Expense | Amount | USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | £2,535.64 | ||
| Me | Salary | £2,142.93 | - |
| Me | Home office allowance | £57.07 | - |
| Linode | Hosting | £38.95 | $50 |
| Digital Ocean | Hosting | £7.78 | $10.00 |
| SauceLabs | Selenium Servers | £53.96 | $69.00 |
| Pingdom | Uptime monitoring | £9.95 | - |
| Barnstaple Work Hubs | Co-working Space | £180 | - |
| Plusnet | Internet | £12.01 | - |
| O2 | Mobile Phone | £14.50 | - |
| Gengo | Translation | £18.49 | $23.88 |
The only unusual expense this month was that I had BugMuncher translated into Czech.
Revenue
I’ve decided to remove the 10% target from this graph for now, as it just makes it harder to read. And also it’s depressing to be reminded that BugMuncher should have been at over $6k MRR by now.
Plans for September
September will be another quiet month, as I’m getting married in 5 days, then there’ll be a honeymoon, and Sophie and I also need to finish the last few bits on our Wedding car that we’ve been restoring.
Which reminds me, I’ve actually had another little side project on the go since last November, but I don’t think I’ve ever written about it here, and I’m too lazy to go back through all those blog posts to check. Anyway, Sophie and I have been restoring a 1993 Toyota MR2, that much I think I’ve mentioned. Well we’ve also been documenting our process on a YouTube channel, which has made us a whopping £13.52 in ad revenue over the last 10 months.
Anyway, if you’re interested in cars and restoration, or just want to laugh at my English Received Pronunciation accent, you can check out the videos here:
October is where the real work will begin again, and hopeully I’ll be able to claw back some of that lost recurring revenue, and maybe even crack the $5k mark.
Thanks for reading
- Matt