October 2017 Income Report

It’s doing that thing again. The universe. It’s doing that creepy karma thing.

Having had a bad September in which I didn’t really work much, I’ve spent most of October really focusing on BugMuncher. The thing is, I’ve been working on a big new feature that isn’t live yet, so to the outside observer it looks as if I’ve not been working on BugMuncher at all.

And yet, I finished October up on September. This exact thing previously happened in May this year, and once again I can only conclude that the universe knows if I’m putting the time in on BugMuncher and rewards me accordingly:

The Figures

  This Month (October 2017) Last Month Change
Monthly Recurring Revenue $4,183 $4,014 4.2%
Income £2,625.65 £2,687.39 2.3%
Expenses £2,606.22 £2,617.31 0.4%
Paying customers 62 61 1.6%
- Personal Plan 23 22 4.5%
- Startup Plan 29 30 3.3%
- Corporate Plan 10 9 11.1%
Unique users on landing page 2,299 2,702 14.9%
New Free Trial sign ups 35 23 52.2%
Free Trial sign up rate 1.5% 0.9% 66.7%
New Paying customers 2 6 66.7%
Lost Paying Customers 1 9 88.9%
Free Trial to Paying conversion 5.7% 26.1% 78.2%
Profit £19.43 £70.08 72.3%

Despite bringing a decent increase to MRR, October was a very quiet month, with only 2 new paying customers, one churned, and one upgrade. Interestingly, it was a great month for free trial signups, and a shitty month for trial to paying conversions. This is especially surprising considering I’ve not changed anything in either the landing page or the on-boarding process.

I like to joke about the universe conspiring to make me work hard, but I think the real truth is the numbers involved are too low to ever draw a meaningful conclusion. This month is a perfect example of that, as without that single Startup plan to Corporate plan upgrade, MRR would have actually been down on September.

Expenses

Supplier Expense Amount USD
Total £2,606.22
Me Salary £2,142.93 -
Me Home office allowance £57.07 -
Linode Hosting £38.49 $50
Digital Ocean Hosting £8.17 $10.00
SauceLabs Selenium Servers £53.49 $69.00
Pingdom Uptime monitoring £9.95 -
Barnstaple Work Hubs Co-working Space £180 -
Plusnet Internet £12.01 -
O2 Mobile Phone £13.51 -
Xero Accounting Software £33.00 -
TTCA Accountants £57.60 -

Revenue

It’s nice to see the revenue graph heading in the good direction again, I was starting to worry that my hockey stick was upside down. Now if I can just break the $5k MRR milestone.

Plans for November

I spent October working on the custom survey questions update, unfortunately I had to re-write a lot of what I’d done previously in order to overcome the issues that caused me to abandon the update last time. I’m hoping to have it live by the end of November.

Thanks for reading

- Matt