September 2017 Income Report
Fucking hell! September was a crazy month for BugMuncher, and not in a good way. Based on August, and how I knew I wouldn’t be dedicating much time to BugMuncher in September, I didn’t expect to have a very good month, but what I wasn’t expecting was my most active month in terms of subscribers.
The Figures
| This Month (September 2017) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $4,014 | $4,361 | 8.0% |
| Income | £2,687.39 | £2,986.83 | 10.0% |
| Expenses | £2,617.31 | £2,535.64 | 3.2% |
| Paying customers | 61 | 64 | 4.7% |
| - Personal Plan | 22 | 21 | 4.8% |
| - Startup Plan | 30 | 33 | 9.1% |
| - Corporate Plan | 9 | 10 | 10.0% |
| Unique users on landing page | 2,702 | 4,000 | 32.5% |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 23 | 26 | 11.5% |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 0.9% | 0.7% | 28.6% |
| New Paying customers | 6 | 5 | 20.0% |
| Lost Paying Customers | 9 | 5 | 80.0% |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 26.1% | 19.2% | 36.0% |
| Profit | £70.08 | £451.19 | 84.5% |
So there you have it, BugMuncher’s worst month since I started working on it full time 2 years ago. Look at all those red rows! I seem to be hemorrhaging subscribers again, and once again, most of them are simply because they only intended to use BugMuncher for a predefined period of time.
Ignoring the ridiculous churn for a second, 6 new paying subscribers is actually pretty good for me, especially as I wasn’t really focusing on BugMuncher this month. I managed to stay in profit, but barely.
Expenses
| Supplier | Expense | Amount | USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | £2,617.31 | ||
| Me | Salary | £2,142.93 | - |
| Me | Home office allowance | £57.07 | - |
| Linode | Hosting | £39.36 | $50 |
| Digital Ocean | Hosting | £7.97 | $10.00 |
| SauceLabs | Selenium Servers | £55.02 | $69.00 |
| Pingdom | Uptime monitoring | £9.95 | - |
| Barnstaple Work Hubs | Co-working Space | £180 | - |
| Plusnet | Internet | £12.01 | - |
| O2 | Mobile Phone | £14.00 | - |
| Xero | Accounting Software | £33.00 | - |
| TTCA | Accountants | £66.00 | - |
Expenses were pretty standard again, I’ve started using Xero to manage my accounts, instead of the mammoth spreadsheet I had been using previously. It’s fairly expensive at £33 / month, as I need the top level plan due to BugMuncher operating in multiple currencies, but considering the time it saves me, Xero is definitely worth it.
Revenue
Oh dear, that graph has taken a pretty sad turn for the worse.
Plans for October
So as I said last time, September was always going to be a bad month for BugMuncher, as I had other things to focus on, including my marriage! That’s right, I’m now a happily married man, and Sophie and I were able to finish the car restoration in time for it to be our wedding car.
So now the real work begins, having spent a couple of months off from BugMuncher I’m actually really excited to be working on BugMuncher again. I’m going to be attacking BugMuncher from two angles: The first is to try and address the lack of revenue growth by improving onboarding and usability.
I’m also going to revive the previously cancelled custom survey questions feature, which I hope will help the churn issue by making BugMuncher into a tool more suited to indefinite use on live sites, rather than just short term use while a site is in development of beta testing.
Thanks for reading
- Matt