Open Startup Report - February '23

Explosive Product Hunt Launch

We’re trending back up in terms of MRR this month. Thanks in part to a successful Product Hunt launch and becoming an official Bubble plugin (more on that later). Churn has also levelled off leaving us with a few questions about how to grow the business.

---

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?