January 2018 Income Report
And with this post I’m finally up to date again, except I still need to do a post to round up 2017. Hopefully I’ll get that one done before 2019…
As for what happened in January, well, we’ll get to the figures in a minute, but first something more important - I did it, I finally completed and launched the custom survey questions update. You know, the one I first mentioned back in October 2016!
I then spent 3 months working on it, before scrapping it when it was probably 95% complete, due to my struggle to find a good way to keep it backwards compatible, while not introducing a shit ton of data replication, and keeping the code base sane.
I then revived this feature a year after I first started working on it, started from scratch in order to solve my previous issues, and three months later launched it!
Currently I’ve just added a couple of very simple new fields to the feedback form, but the underlying change has brought a whole framework for introducing new field types (Net Promoter Score coming next), as well as completely custom questions.
The Figures
| This Month (January 2018) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $4,309 | $4,139 | |
| Income | £2,566.69 | £3,154.19 | |
| Expenses | £2,493.03 | £2,370.37 | |
| Paying customers | 66 | 66 | |
| - Personal Plan | 22 | 23 | |
| - Startup Plan | 35 | 35 | |
| - Corporate Plan | 9 | 8 | |
| Unique users on landing page | 1,695 | 1,305 | |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 22 | 21 | |
| Free Trial sign up rate | 1.6% | ||
| New Paying customers | 3 | 6 | |
| Lost Paying Customers | 3 | 5 | |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | 28.6% | ||
| Profit |
Although it was nice to see a little revenue bump this month, over all, not a great month for BugMuncher. The main boost was regaining an on-again/off-again top level customer.
Sign ups seem to have taken a dive, but as a function of unique users on the landing page, it’s pretty normal, the root cause is the lack of traffic.
Revenue
I look at this graph and find myself wondering “What happened in June 2017?”, what did I stop doing that killed growth? Or what did I start doing that killed growth?
I’ve said a few times that through the second half of 2017 I was preoccupied and didn’t focus as much on BugMuncher, but that feels a bit wishy-washy to me. I like details, I want to know exactly what changed. Could it really just be time spent?
Well the opening sentence of July 2017’s income report is
I’ll warn you in advance, this isn’t going to be my most interesting update, simply because I had a really busy month, and wasn’t able to focus as much time as I’d have liked on BugMuncher.
Interesting that those words precede the gradual decline in BugMuncher’s success. Let’s hope that me spending more time on BugMuncher now will turn that downwards trend around.
Plans for February
I’m currently working on improving BugMuncher’s onboarding process. I’m also going to add some new field types, and maybe even do some more blogging.
I did start with some PPC advertising in December, but stopped because Christmas. I’d like to restart that soon, which will all be covered in a separate post.
Thanks for reading
- Matt