April 2018 Income Report
April was a strange one - it felt to me like a good month, but in terms of revenue growth, it was actually rather mediocre. Especially when compared to April last year. I suspect the reason is that I gained two new middle plan customers near the beginning of the month, which set the optimistic tone. So losing one bottom plan subscriber later in the month didn’t come as such a blow.
The Figures
| This Month (April 2018) | Last Month | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Recurring Revenue | $4,192 | $4,103 | |
| Income | £2,675.76 | £2,534.92 | |
| Expenses | £2,442.91 | £2,651.86 | |
| Paying customers | 63 | 62 | |
| - Personal Plan | 20 | 21 | |
| - Startup Plan | 34 | 32 | |
| - Corporate Plan | 9 | 9 | |
| Unique users on landing page | 1,175 | 1,743 | |
| New Free Trial sign ups | 35 | 26 | |
| Free Trial sign up rate | |||
| New Paying customers | 2 | 1 | |
| New Freemium Customers | 13 | 6 | |
| Lost Paying Customers | 1 | 1 | |
| Free Trial to Paying conversion | |||
| Free Trial to Freemium conversion | |||
| Profit |
Damn, that’s a good looking table, so much green. I’ve not sure I’ve ever seen that many green rows! There were no unusual expenses this month, bringing BugMuncher back into profit. I’ve also decided to drop my salary by £200 / month, so from next month profit should be looking even more healthy. Unless I decide to invest that money in PPC ads (more on that later).
Hits on the BugMuncher website was back down to much more normal amount, as I had no popular blog posts to draw people in. Interestingly, I actually had more free trial sign ups this month, giving me a huge spike in sign up conversion rate. Of course, nearly half of those free trials went on to subscribe to the free plan, but I’m still really happy with how April turned out.
Revenue
Hey look! It’s going up hill again, albeit very slightly, but I’m calling that a win!
Plans for May
I’ve got so much planned, I don’t know where to begin, which is kind of the problem. I’ve been blogging a bit more, and I’m aiming to keep that up. I might start up the PPC ads again, I need to first evaluate the performance last time, to better get an idea of how much I should be bidding, and if it’s worth doing at all.
I’ve got some much bigger plans on the horizon though, including changing the name. I know I’ve talked about doing this before, but now I’m sure that BugMuncher is no longer the right name. I’ve also got a whole new idea for pricing that I’d like to try, and I’m going to have this very website redesigned. Of course the name change needs to happen before the redesign, and I doubt I’ll get all that done in May.
I’m also going to be uninstalling the live chat widget. Since I added it in March, I’ve had two people actually use it, and one of those was asking a question about this blog. Maybe live chat is a good idea for sites with more traffic, but for little old BugMuncher it’s just sitting there using up screen space and bandwidth.
I’ve also literally just realised as I write this that I still haven’t done a 2017 in review post! So that’s another job for May.
Thanks for reading
- Matt