January 2019 Income Report

Happy New Year! OK, so maybe I’m a month late, but this is the first income report of 2019.

January was an interesting month, I worked harder on Saber than I have for a long time, probably since I launched the re-brand. Unfortunately, I currently I don’t have much to show for all this work, as I’ve been working on a big update, which I’m planning to launch in February.

I’ve decided to go back on what I said last month, and keep profit in the table (I’ve retroactively added it to last month’s as well). It’s not the actual Saber profit though, instead it’s just the difference between earning and expenses on my business account, which also includes some small non-Saber items. It should still give a good idea of how things are looking.

The Figures

  January 2019 December 2018 Change
Monthly Recurring Revenue $4,303 $4,256
Paying customers 57 60
- Personal Plan 17 18
- Startup Plan 29 32
- Corporate Plan 11 10
Unique users on landing page 1,065 916
New Free Trial sign ups 25 13
Free Trial sign up rate
New Paying customers 2 2
New Freemium Customers 6 1
Lost Paying Customers 5 1
Free Trial to Paying conversion
Free Trial to Freemium conversion
Profit £211.63 £320.46

January was pretty good over all, I had one customer upgrade from the middle plan to the top plan, I should really add rows in the table for upgrades at some point. I lost quite a few customers, two of which were very old customers who I actually discovered hadn’t been using Saber anyway.

I really felt like I was back on my blogging game, managing to write one new post each week. It doesn’t seem to have drawn in any more traffic though.

Revenue & Profit

I’ve decided to plot profit along with the revenue graph, as you can see, profit often tends to fluctuate wildly. There’s also a few months where unfortunately I don’t have the profit information, but I’m going to try to go back and calculate those when I get the time.

I’ve also added a new graph, which tracks revenue change throughout the month, which I hope will help you get a feel for how the month progressed:

Last month I set myself the frankly ridiculous goal of $5,000 MRR by April, but halfway through the month I was well on track, peaking at $4,450 on the 17th! Unfortuantely that was all undone with a slew of cancellations in the latter half of the month.

I’m still feeling good though, growth is growth, even if it is just small. In fact, revenue is the best it’s been for a year, as January 2018 was the last time MRR was over $4,300. I’m also still aiming for $5,000 by April, even though it’s even more unlikely now.

Goals for 2019

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m sticking to the revenue goals I’ve already set, unrealistic though they are. I’m pretty happy with my blogging process, so I’m planning to stick to that.

The main thing for me now is get this big update launched, and then go HAM on marketting, I’m even planning to throw some money at PPC adverts.

Thanks for reading

- Matt