.

Jason Cohen reminded me of this when he replied to my skeet (is that what we’re calling them?) with an interesting take on SaaS growth. It’s no secret here that the MRR for PriceWell is growing ever so slowly. Jason pointed out that I do not have 10 years to wait, my product really won’t be relevant in that time (most likely).

I’ve never been one to think that growth doesn’t matter but this throws a new perspective on the matter. I must increase the growth rate of PriceWell or risk it becoming irrelevant.

To do this I need to do something radical. I don’t believe that increased marketing efforts alone will increase the growth rate as we have very good marketing channels right now. Something more radical is required, either:

• Pivot the product to a different niche.

• Find something I can charge 10x the price for.

• Some marketing channel that is 1000% more effective

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PriceWell re-design

Thinking back at the previous point on growth, this feels like a waste of time. I’ve always wanted to hire a designer for PriceWell and the bank balance is finally big enough to pay for a freelancer.

There are two goals with the redesign:

1. Quality look and feel: Apps that feel quality have greater value in the minds of the users. Look at all Apple products for an example. Here the designer took heavy influence from Stripe (which PriceWell is built on top of) who themselves have very high design standards.

2. UX improvements: The book Don’t Make Me Think teaches that UI design should be intuitive simple, not overwhelming and complicated. The reality of bootstrapping a SaaS product is adding feature after feature. The redesign sorts out the chaos of settings littered all over the app.
   

I’m really happy with the way the design is going and thanks to the power of AI, I can convert designs into code changes with a high degree of accuracy. A couple of years ago I’d have had to pay the designer or someone from Upwork to do the conversion for me costing both time and money.

More next month…

I’ve focussed on my freelancing the past two months. I added Stripe consulting to PriceWell’s website earlier in the year and it’s been a hit. I’ve had a steady stream of 30 minute calls booked with companies looking for help with their Stripe account setup, issues with Stripe payments or setup of Stripe Billing.

One of those calls turned into a freelance gig generating a custom report for a client. The client is in sports. They have information in their tournament system and the payment information in Stripe. The challenge was to marry the two and work out who had paid, who still owed money for the season and when to skip a payment because there wasn’t a match that week (for their weekly customers).

It’s a tricky task and I took it on with the hope of finding something that could be turned into a product. As with all client work, it’s dragged on as new requirements come out the further down the line we go. Luckily I quoted an hourly rate! Right now the client is happy with the report (which I deployed as a dashboard with a download option). But as of yet I think the problem is too niche to build a product out of.

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Panning for gold

One theme that has come up during this freelance gig and from PriceWell support conversations is some kind of login system for their customers in Stripe. A lot of customers don’t have a database and are using Stripe as their source of truth. We have an email login system for sending them to the Customer Portal but they want to restrict access to content via a login that’s linked to the Stripe customer. Of course those customers aren’t aware there’s anything in Stripe with their email address, they just purchased a product on the Stripe checkout.

The question now is, do I build a full blown login system for Stripe customers? Like memberstack but without storing much additional info in our database, just using Stripe as the source of truth.

Another idea that came from a customer is gated content with support for organizations. Example: Allowing a company to buy a license for 10 users to access a course.

It would be self serve for the customer who would buy the license and then get access to a portal which lets them add their own users (up to the limit they paid for).


All of this is like panning for gold. I have had conversations where customers show interest in such features but never anything concrete like trying to pay me to build it faster etc. All this to say, I’m yet to come up with the Mother Lode. A younger version of me would have built these features already but wise old me is holding on for now.

Back to the patch with my pan…

It took me two years to build one of the features for PriceWell. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t actually working on it for two years. Actually, I wasn’t working on it at all. I had the idea for A/B testing for pricing pages might be useful, so I added it to the marketing site from day one. BUT, the feature never existed.

My logic was to only build the feature when customers (or potential customers) were actually demanding it. Over the course of two years, I had a few enquiries about the capabilities of the A/B testing feature. Each time I noted down what they were interested in and responded with something non-committal like “the feature doesn’t do that right now, but it’s on our roadmap“.

I finally felt like there was enough interest at the beginning of 2024 and started building the feature. I built it slowly in the few spare hours I had each week. Finally in August, it was ready to release. I’d just had another enquiry about it so I put it live, updated the landing page with screenshots and…. crickets. Not a single person used it.

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Bread maker features

There are some features that everyone wants, but no one uses. At a company I worked for there was a an addon that was asked about on every sales call. When we looked at the numbers, literally no one was using it.

A reddit user hits the nail on the head

It’s our job as founders to detect these features (books like The Mom Test help here) and put off building them or put minimal effort into the MVP. This depends on which category they fall into from the Reddit post above.

• Feature checklists = Don’t build it

• Comply with legal requirements = Build it

• Impress stakeholders = Don’t build it

• Win/keep a client = Build it with minimal effort

The problem is it’s very tempting to build features especially if customers are telling you they need them. It’s easy to get into that builders momentum where you feel like you are making progress by building features.

Building features ≠ Progress to Product Market Fit

Lost Signups

We get decent monthly traffic from Google and other sources at PriceWell now. I see new users signing up every day but very few use the account or schedule a call (we have a prominent calendly link during onboarding). Some of them are obvious spam (gmail accounts) but others are legit companies.

I often wonder what they are expecting from signing up. I’d love to get insight into what they were trying to do. They were invested enough to give their name and email address but then nothing…

To be continued

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Who knew free tools marketing would be such a hit. The free pdf invoice generator from last month worked pretty much instantly. Which was surprising because I’m used to my SEO efforts taking months to come to fruition. The invoice generator was the 4th most viewed page on our site in the last month and it’s definitely driving signups.

I’m not the only one who thinks free tools are a great marketing tactic.

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Slowly slowly, catchy monkey

This month has been a bit slow in terms of dev and marketing activity. I’ve kept up with support and we’ve had a couple of new customers. Interestingly we’ve had some Pory.io users come onboard since I added a detailed guide to the help centre (reminder to myself to add guides for more website builders).

I’ve also picked up a bit of Stripe freelancing which is working quite well along side the SaaS business. I added a Stripe consulting link to the website in February more out of hope than any expectation that people would be interested. But I’ve had 6-7 calls already and this freelancing has also come out of it.

Ironically the freelancing is earning much more for the business than the software (thank you generous freelancing rate).

I noticed the potential for freelancing when I kept getting such varied feature requests for the product. After turning people down or trying to shoehorn features in I eventually decided that freelancing might be better for these bespoke requests while the software can handle the standard use-cases. I never expected it to take off.

While freelancing isn’t something I want to do full time, it keeps me in contact with potential customers and increases my network. I think of it like paid customer interviews, but they pay me.

Moving forward

I’m still sure that I need to pivot the product for it to really take off but I’ve made zero progress on that so far. I’ve also been working on a couple of unrelated microsaas ideas. I’m not in the multiple small bets camp by any means but these ideas help me scratch my itch to build and AI product without trying to force it into PriceWell. The first idea is a step one business (using the stair step approach by Rob Walling). This means it’s built on an existing marketplace which should take care of user acquisition.

My second microsaas is one to scratch my own itch (in fact both I’ll use even if no one else does) in the SEO space.

Let me know if you want to know more about my microsaas ideas.

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I keep a Trello board of marketing ideas, some of them are pretty wild…

Anyway, I’ve had “Free Tools Marketing“ on my list of a while. Though I’ve built some free tools (coupon generator, invoice generator, usage-billing tool), I’ve never actually used them as a pure marketing play.

This month I decided to change that. I constantly see a bunch of tweets (yes, still call them tweets) complaining about Stripe invoices.

The main complaints are:

• Stripe charge you up to $2 per pdf invoice.

• You can’t change the customer details (if you’ve ever had a German 🇩🇪 customer you’ll know how frustrating this can be).

• You can’t generate invoices for Payment Links (as they have no invoice in Stripe).

I had already built a tool that solves these problems by pulling the data from your Stripe account and creating the invoice pdf in code.

The problem was it was hidden inside the PriceWell app. A potential user would have to find it on the website, register an account, connect their Stripe account and finally use the tool to generate their PDF invoice.

The plan to turn it into a marketing lead generator was simple:

1. Make the tool accessible directly on the website. No login, no credit card yardy yar.

2. Promote it (Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, your mums best friend Jane who’s good a keeping secrets).

3. Email leads who used the tool to promote PriceWell (the main product).

To do that, I built out a simple landing page on the website

The landing page links directly to the tool. The only hurdle is that prospective users have to connect their Stripe account (we need the Stripe account in order to access the invoice details). Apart from that there’s no login required. We create a PriceWell account in the background so that it’s easy to use the full product later on without having to connect Stripe again.

I’m in the process of promoting it via the usual channels so watch out for a Product Hunt launch in the near future.

The Obstacle is… bloody annoying

I’m in the process of reading The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. The gist is that obstacles in our path are inevitable. We can see them as disasters or we can see them as challenges and learning opportunities.

Ryan gives the example of John D. Rockefeller (oil baron, my third favourite type of baron) who started as an accountant in 1855. Two years later the 1857 panic hit but our John didn’t panic with the rest of them and abandon his fledgling career in finance. Instead he saw the opportunities while prices plummeted to make some shrewd investments. And the rest as they say, is history.

The trick, as the book puts it is three-fold:

1. Control your emotions: I find this the hardest part. Turning off the front brain and not immediately panicking when something bad comes up is tricky.

2. Change your perspective: Try and flip the perspective from “this is a disaster“ to “how can I turn this to my advantage?“.

3. Discover the opportunity: Like Rockefeller, who was a crashing market as an opportunity to pick up cheap investments.

So it’s my challenge to you this month to see obstacles as opportunities.

As always, let me know your thoughts.

I can tell my customers are the wrong audience when they use virtual credit cards to get around paying for a trial account. I’d love to have customers who can’t wait to pay for my product and are happy (even glad) to hand over their card details to get the juicy goodness my product provides. There are a few reasons customers try and game the system:

They don’t know if the product can actually solve their problem.

PriceWell is marketed very broadly (Stripe your your no-code website) so we get lots of people with specific Stripe problems. We work on a freemium model (PLG if you like) where a basic pricing table is free (except a transaction percentage) and the rest of the app is paid. Customers create a free account and then are asked to pay when they click on any feature except the pricing table.

This is a frustrating experience and one I can definitely improve with better marketing and communication. The ideal customer would know from the website that we can solve their exact problem and be happy to enter their credit card to try out our solution to their very painful problem.

The closest we’ve come to this is with our Bubble integration. It’s well documented on the site and our help centre includes a full walkthrough on how to use it.

So, we really need to nail a few core use-cases and document them extensively on the website and help centre. Those are:

• Bubble integration ✅

• Gated content (paywall for no-code sites build in any tool)

• Pricing changes for non-technical founders (make pricing changes without bothering the dev team)

They can’t afford the service.

Another reason customers try to game the system is price sensitivity. This comes from being a solo-founder who has a business idea and no idea if it’s going to make any money. Unfortunately the target market (non-technical founders) is full of these people and as previously discussed in this newsletter going up-market leads us to businesses who can already afford a developer to do it for them. I actually removed the free trial from our paid plans recently in an attempt to focus on those people who have the budget (and feel the pain hard enough) to pay for the product. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m leaving money on the table here because potential customers can’t try before they buy (despite us having a money-back guarantee).

They want something for nothing.

This is the bracket a lot of software developers fall into. We’re so used to using things for free (open source code, VC funded products with generous free tiers) that paying for a tool that saves a bunch of time doesn’t seem worthwhile. Developers (myself included before PriceWell made money) will do anything to use a product for free. So the logic goes, sign up for the free trial with a virtual credit card, hope the developer didn’t put in code to lock you out when your payment fails. Use the product free forever, get all the benefit with none of the cost. This is just the reality of building a SaaS (and the reason all serious bootstrapped SaaS doesn’t have a free tier). If you can’t play nice, you can’t play at all.

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Tools as marketing

I’ve been thinking of using free tools as marketing for a while. They’re a great way for developers to promote their products because they:

• Don’t require you to write a ton of content

• Don’t require actually talking to people

• You get to do some more coding and call it marketing

• Potential users actually get value from the tool

There are a bunch of tools I’ve created for PriceWell but currently they’re a bit hidden within the app itself.

• Free Stripe invoice generator

• Bulk Stripe coupon generator

• Metered billing reporter

My plan is to split these out into tools that can be used directly from the website (by connecting your Stripe account) and launch them on Product Hunt and promote them on Reddit, Twitter (X), Linkedin etc.

I was finishing up Rob Fitzpatrick’s excellent book The Mom Test and I came to a section on customer segmentation. By now we’re familiar with talking to customers and asking questions that pass the mom test. But what if you’ve been talking to too many types of customer?

I’ve fallen into this trap with PriceWell. It’s very easy to target so many customer profiles with a billing product. I thought I was being so clever when I decided not to target e-commerce (or anything that needs shopping cart behaviour). But I’ve realised there are still too many customer segments.

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PriceWell targets Stripe users who are:

• Non-technical founders building with Bubble (or other no-code tools like Softr etc).

• Founders who hired devs but don't want to pay them to integrate Stripe.

• Founders who have a dev team but want control over billing (being able to switch pricing without dev making a change).

  It’s time to pick one.
  
  Rob suggested a few questions to help narrow down your segment, starting with a broader segment.. ask yourself

• Within this group which type of person would want it the most.

• Would everyone in this group buy/use it or only some?

• What does that sub-set want (their specific problem)?

• Does everyone in the group have that motivation or only some?

I’d add another question here. Is everyone in the group willing to pay for your solution (price sensitivity)?

There are some groups (bubble users, I’m looking at you) that feel the pain that PriceWell solves strongly, BUT those people (I’ve found) are less willing to pay for the solution because they have very strict budget constraints. They are often solopreneurs, using their own money and they are just starting their business.

Other segments (e.g. founders who have a dev team) are much more willing to pay. They already hired developers and PriceWell costs a fraction of that which also doing the developers work for them.

Was increasing pricing a good idea?

That’s a question I ask myself a lot (we increased our prices back in March). Going back to the previous topic, increasing pricing helps us cut out those users who have a low willingness to pay. Looking back at it $19/mo was just bordering on B2C pricing (customers will start a subscription and just try it out for a month) and we want to be firmly in the B2B category.

So yes, increasing pricing was a good move. Plus, we still get new accounts created every day, the website conversion rate still sits at 3% despite the changes.

We’re heading for a B2B future. More on this next month…

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Pricing updates

At the beginning of March, we increased the price of our monthly plan and introduced a yearly plan in an attempt to increase the average revenue per customer. Our customers tend to be solopreneurs, just starting a business. Often times they duck out after a few months if it doesn’t work out. You could say we’ve picked the wrong kind of customer (and you might be right) but I’m still trying to make this segment work for us.

There’s a small group of customers who do seem to be a good fit, existing small businesses who have hired a developer to help them build a SaaS product. For these customers, paying a few bucks a month to have their billing system work well (and not have to pay their dev to maintain it) is a no brainer.

Your mum would say it’s a good idea

That’s the principal behind The Mom Test, the book I’ve been reading recently. The conversation goes:

Me: Hey mum, I’ve got this business idea to help non-technical people collect subscription payments without hiring a developer. Do you think people will pay for it?

Mum: Hey honey, that sounds like a great idea. Anything that can help people make money is a surefire winner.

This of course fails the Mom Test. Mums are duty bound to tell you you everything you say is great. The trick is to talk to potential customers without mentioning your product. Ask about what they do currently and what they’ve done in the past (rather than what they might do in the future). The idea is to have a conversation where even your mum couldn’t lie to you because you only ask factual questions. Some questions I’ve asked in the past

• How do you solve this currently?

• What other options did you consider before you chose this one?

• How did you look for that solution and where did you find it?

• What frustrates you about the current solution?

If you are talking to your target customer, you’ll find out what you are competing against and where to market the solution to more people like that. If you don’t get strong answers to these questions (maybe they are really happy with the solution they have) then your idea (or target customer) may need some work.

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The eternal Mom Test…

I reckon I’ve had over 100 customer conversations over the years. In fact I encourage all new customers to schedule a call with me (I’ve found those people I talk to stick around longer). I’ve definitely got better at talking to customers too.

I start with the following question:

Can you tell me what you are trying to achieve?

I’ve found this to be extremely useful for a few reasons

1. I get a bit of “Mom Test” context, the person already thinks my product is the solution to their problem but this question lets them tell me what they think it’s going to do for them. A good source of insights.

2. I can cut off non-fit customer early in the call. PriceWell is not an ecommerce tool and I’ve had a few people mentioning adding products to a basket. Instead of me giving them a pointless sales pitch, I can simply explain that they’re better off using Shopify.

3. When a good fit customer starts talking I find myself nodding, hardly able to wait to tell them we can

With this one question, I’m constantly reevaluating the business, our positioning, marketing and even the product itself. If enough people on a call mention something they expect the product to do, it goes on the backlog (and often prioritised because I can’t wait to work on it). Now, I’m not saying this is the ideal way to work but it’s working for me and until I feel like PriceWell has the mythical Product-market fit I’ll keep chipping away at potential customers until I unearth a gem.

Someone who’s also going through something similar is Val Sopi of blogstatic. He recorded a great inner monologue of what he’s going through in his mind. To pivot the business or persevere. For PriceWell I constantly have this struggle. There are adjacent businesses that are doing very well (Memberstack for gated content, Launchpass for paid communities) but what keeps me coming back is that I have a niche that is under served, unique and I love the product.

Get them to talk

“I love it!“, these are the words that keep me coming back for more. I’m constantly talking to users about their needs and every week there are new insights, eureka moments and frantic coding to test an idea out. One book that’s been really helpful in guiding my discussions with users is Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen (you might know her from Twitter or the Software Social podcast). This book taught me how to discuss problems with broader context, never to promote my solution and to let the other person speak for 90% of the call. These calls are different from sales calls of course, but at this stage in the business I’m not going for a hard sell until I know I’ve got a product that delivers $1,000’s of value for the meagre $29 price.

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We’ve got something…

Pieter Levels (the broccoli 🥦 haired god of indie hacking) recently posted about a basic issue with Stripe Pricing Tables (the product I thought would kill PriceWell when it came out in 2022). They aren’t even offering a feature that PriceWell has had from the beginning.

It seems like Stripe aren’t really putting effort into their No-Code offerings. Pricing Tables seems neglected. This is an opportunity to update the marketing website and highlight why PriceWell is more customisable and build with SaaS in mind from the beginning.

PriceWell gets 1k visits from Google per month and the conversion to registered user is 4% (not bad in my opinion).

But… churn is massive so there’s something missing in between. A lot of our users tend to be just starting out with their business and I’d love to attract more established businesses.

One idea is to promote our A/B testing feature much more heavily. It should attract established businesses who aren’t sure they’ve got optimal pricing (who is really?).

More on this next time.

End stream of consciousness…

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There’s a few reasons we stopped sharing:

Fuel for copycats. Publishing a growing MRR chart is like an invitations for all and sundry to come and clone your work. Competition is great but mindless copycatting just to grab a few dollars is a distraction at best.

Our revenue is no longer that simple. I’ll go into this later, but looking at MRR is no longer a good way to see the health of the business.

I didn’t get much out of it. The original idea of this newsletter was for me to write an “investor update“ even though we don’t have investors. Partly as practice and partly to help clarify things to myself.

So, what’s been going on at PriceWell….

Flying solo

My business partner has fallen off the radar. So currently I’m on my own. I’m handling support, marketing and feature development. This isn’t a problem for the business as I was doing the lion’s share of all this anyway. I’d actually love to have a business partner on the marketing side of things but I’m not actively looking right now and PriceWell is getting my full focus.

The ‘C’ word

I’ve had a feeling for a while that PriceWell probably should have started as a consulting business. I’ve become the “payments guy“ at every company I’ve worked for so in that sense I’ve become a bit of an expert. I’m reading the bible on pricing which really focusses on value based pricing. This got me thinking what the main value of PriceWell is to our customers. One things that’s not captured in our pricing model currently is the onboarding call I offer every customer. I take up to an hour with some customers to help them get set up. If we take the $19/mo price and the fact that some customer churn after a few months when their business isn’t working out, my hourly rate comes out lower than minimum wage.

So, this lead to offering Stripe consulting at 30mins for $99 via the PriceWell website. The main goal is actually to expose the value customers of the software get. But to my surprise, people started booking calls with me!

The price is right

Continuing the pricing discussions. It was clear that $19/mo doesn’t capture all the value we provide. Especially if we have customers churning after 2-3 months when their business doesn’t work out. One thing I wanted to try was asking customers to pay for a year upfront. That lets them keep the same price point but gives us 1 year of guaranteed revenue rather than an uncertain amount (our customers are often solo founders just starting a business using Bubble.io).

As part of this I’ve experimented with adding a 7 day (cc required) free trial to take the pressure off paying for a year upfront. The results so far are not in favour of the free trial… So we need to work something else out.

Another part of this pricing change was to make it clear how much value a customer gets. Instead of saying “free onboarding call“ we now say “free consultation (worth $200)“. It’s the same call, but we now articulate how much value is actually provided on that call, and how much you save by paying $19.

Lofty goals

What would you do if you had to charge 10x your current price? I love this thought experiment by Jason Cohen. Actually, I would like to charge 10x my current price. I’ve decided $19/mo is a terrible price point for B2B SaaS, it attracts price sensitive customers who are demanding both in terms of time and resources.

So the goal for PriceWell is to charge $199/mo and we need to provide value worth that. My current thinking is that our A/B price testing tool can be the thing to do that. It would be used by companies who already have traction and revenue (and thus don’t worry about spending $199). I have some indication from conversations with potential customers that this could work out.

Watch this space…

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KPIs

Revenue Growth

-10.32% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

17.05%

Burn Rate

Cash: £1217.76

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £0 (Due to Google Cloud credits

Bubble: £24.34

SendGrid: £15

Burn Rate: 31 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

We purchased pricewell.com at auction and solidified our brand by getting twitter.com/pricewell (we’re now @pricewell everywhere).

We’re starting to think about repositioning what we do. There’s clearly a market for what we do (especially among Bubble developers) but we’re either not positioning it correctly (going after the wrong customers) or the product is not quite what people are after.

We’ve got plenty of ideas and it’s unlikely we’ll completely ditch what we have now. Instead we’ll try some experiments and measure what sticks.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

-4.85% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

23.3% (February)

Burn Rate

Cash: £1085.56

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £54.75 (got $2k credits from Google Cloud Startup Program so we’ll have $0 hosting costs for 14 months)

Twitter Blue: £9.60

Bubble: £24.34 (paid for a Bubble subscription again as we’re actively working on the plugin)

Burn Rate: 12 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

Our churn is >20% at the moment which indicates we still don’t have product-market fit. We’re getting closer as many of our new customers are coming from bubble and staying much longer.

I recently found an insight on offering yearly plans which involves finding the point at which customer churn rate levels off (if yours doesn’t then you’ve a different problem). At this point customers are onboarded and happy with the product. This is the optimal time to offer them an upgrade to the yearly plan. For us it’s around 6 months which means after customers have been with us for 6 months they’re unlikely to churn and offering them a yearly plan (with a discount baked in) will be valuable for both the customer and us. We plan to put this into action this month.

Other things we’re working on are more YouTube content, specifically tutorial videos on integrating Stripe with tools such as Bubble and Webflow.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

-41.87% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

22.81% (December)

Burn Rate

Cash: £897.95

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £61.21

Twitter Blue: £9.60

Newsletter sponsorships: £180.17

Burn Rate: 12 months (without newsletter sponsorships) 2.5 months (with newsletters)

How we're going to improve the numbers

We’ve been testing out sponsoring newsletters (specifically Bubble.io related newsletters). As we’ve niched down into the Bubble community, we’ve found these to be a great source of traffic with good conversion.

Although the Product Hunt launch gave us great exposure (thanks to the community for over 250 votes 🥹) we didn’t get any conversions specifically from the launch. However it did give us a platform to reach out to a few people in the Bubble community. We’ve had a ver good bump in traffic since the launch and a steady stream of new subscriptions. All in all, the launch was well worth it!

Another growth lever we’ve neglected for a while is pricing (and that’s our business too, shameful really). I made a little pricing tool and shared it on Twitter. According to my own tool, we need 4,386 customers to reach $1M ARR. So we simply need to reduce that number in order to create a sustainable business. The first step will be switching to default yearly pricing.

If we removed the $19/mo plan (no plans to do that right now) we’d only need 1701 customers to reach $1M ARR…

When was the last time you increased your pricing?

KPIs

Revenue Growth

-15.98% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

25.51% (December)

Burn Rate

Cash: £1,029.75

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £62.89

Twitter Blue: £9.60

Burn Rate: 14 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

We’re becoming an official Bubble.io Plugin! I’ve had several calls with the team at Bubble and I have to say they are doing brilliant work. We showed them PriceWell at the end of last year and they were so impressed they wanted to make us an official plugin. We’ve been working with them since then to get everything in place. It’s a truly exciting time.

Product Hunt Launch 🚀
This is scheduled for Monday 30th January and will coincide with the Bubble launch. Hopefully the launch will give us a boost in terms of traffic and exposure which we hope will translate to new customers down the line.

PayPal support
We’ve been working on a simple addition to the Pricing Tables to allow checkout with PayPal. It’s a much requested feature and will really set us apart from the standard Stripe offering. Coming Soon.

What do you think? I’d love your feedback on anything I’ve talked about today.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

-10.06% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

16.39%

Burn Rate

Cash: £1,029.75

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £62.89

Twitter Blue: £9.60

Substack (one off): £40.93

Companies House (yearly filing): £13.00

Burn Rate: 14 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

Focus on Bubble.io users is key. They are our ideal customer. We’ll be launching a Twitter DM campaign as we seem to have exhausted the list of Bubble Agencies via email.

Improve website content for those who land on our SEO pages, giving them more of a reason to give us a try.

Launch on Product Hunt 🚀
We’ve been planning a PH launch for a while but are unsure whether to launch the full product or specifically aim at Bubble devs.

What do you think? Let me know.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

+7.93% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

0% (October) 💪

Burn Rate

Cash: £298.16 (+ $454 waiting in Stripe from October)

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £93.84

No Code Exits newsletter sponsorship (3 issues): £141.23

Wise account opening fee (so we can get that Stripe payout in USD): £45

10words newsletter sponsorship refund: +£133.27

Burn Rate: 4.1 months (including 1 monthly blog post)

How we're going to improve the numbers

Outreach to Bubble.io agencies started in ernest this month with a lot of success. We had 4 new affiliate partnerships (if you know a Bubble agency who would like 40% of our revenue as an affiliate, reach out to me matt@pricewell.io).

We'll continue Bubble.io agency outreach, via twitter this time. We'll get more YouTube content out (+1 video this month).

I have a live stream scheduled with one of our customers to walk through the Bubble.io plugin.

More SEO efforts also this month using SurferSEO (which has been great so far).

KPIs

Revenue Growth

+20.49% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

28.39% (September)

Burn Rate

Cash: £653.33

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting: £81.34

Blog Writer (potential for regular work): £44.68

10words newsletter sponsorship (one-off November '22): £133.27

Burn Rate: 4.1 months (including 1 monthly blog post)

How we're going to improve the numbers

SEO is our top source of traffic. We hired a writer this month with a plan to have them write BOF (bottom of funnel) content at a rate of 1 post per month. We'll monitor the impact and make sure we are getting a ROI.

NoCode is a big movement and it's only growing. We're finishing off our Bubble plugin at the moment and are active in many NoCode forums.

Podcasts: I recorded a podcast with one of our customers and have another one scheduled for next week.

YouTube: We're in the process of recording screencasts for integrating PriceWell with various tools.

Product: Focus on features that set us apart from Stripe.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

-18.93% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

23.3% (August)

Burn Rate

Cash: £776.49

Monthly Expenses: £84.42

Burn Rate: 9.1 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

Focus on the product. We need to build features that Stripe don't offer and can't copy. Luckily we get requests from customers for such features and here they are:

• Proper gated content (a lightweight memberstack)

• PayPal subscriptions (support paypal checkout from pricing tables)

• PayPal subscription management (single place to manage subscriptions whether they were from paypal or stripe)

• Paddle support

Right now we're going to focus on the top 3 and get them out as soon as possible before focussing on marketing them again. This means marketing activity is paused for the moment until the new features are live.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

34.84% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

6.98% (July)

Burn Rate

Cash: £535.58

Monthly Expenses: £81.88

Burn Rate: 6.5 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

We're back to focussing on marketing (SEO in particular) so hope to see some payback for that over the coming months. Focus will be on

• Bubble plugin

• Youtube content

• SEO articles

One worry is that Stripe launched their own pricing page feature. The majority of our customers actually come for the customer portal so we aren't reliant on it totally.

However, there are features that Stripe don't have that we can implement quickly. We'll try and get some of those out this month and market them.

KPIs

Revenue Growth

15.29% (last 30 days)

Churn Rate

6.98% (July)

Burn Rate

Cash: £399.98

Monthly Expenses: £75.44

Burn Rate: 5.3 months

How we're going to improve the numbers

Growth is the goal at the moment. Churn is not too bad and the feature set is solid.

We are finally setting up an affiliate program (initially paying 40% of the first 12 months' revenue to affiliates). We'll reach out to bubble agencies and no-code YouTubers to offer them the affiliate program.

We're also working on a Bubble.io plugin which will be listed on their marketplace.

SEO has been a great source of leads in the last month so we'll continue writing more relevant content to our niche.

Finally, a conversation with the founders of NoCodeFounders was promising. Their community could be a valuable growth partner if we can work out a deal.