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Our First $37,800 in Annual Recurring Revenue
- aculver 12y agoHey all, this is me. :-) Really nice to have a "new" product on the front page of HN again. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
- vladtaltos 12y agogood luck man. hope you'll have more clear skies ahead...
- saturdayplace 12y agoI just wanted to thank you for writing about the doldrums, and about continuing slowly through them anyway. THAT piece of advice seems so universally applicable, and I don't personally don't run across it so much in places like HN. I loved that you didn't just stop, just maybe slowed down, and that the little steps just kept adding up anyways. p.s. I remember originally hearing about ChurnBuster on Our Own Little Accelerator. Why'd that show die?
- silver1 12y agoHow did you find subscribers with no spending on marketing?
- aculver 12y agoI'm sure I'll write about this more later, but the earliest customers were friends and consulting clients who ran subscription services. They were onboard before it was even built.
- charlieirish 12y agoGood to see an honest journey of a SaaS product. Building a SaaS company that pays the bills normally takes much longer than you think[1]. Well done Andrew and keep going! [1] Watch the slow ramp of death: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
- andy_adams 12y ago> The product grew, but at a slower pace than I had envisioned This is the single biggest piece of advice I wish I'd known before I made my failed attempts at products. It takes a long time. When you build your product, make sure you have an income or savings plan for the next 12 - 18 months.
- jacquesm 12y agoMy own rule is 3 years so at 12 to 18 months you're amazingly fast.
- jacquesm 12y agoHey Andrew, this is a super nice product and you're doing an awesome job in the perseverance department. Unfortunately for you I'm not a stripe customer or I would have happily signed up. That $4K per month is definitely happening and after that who knows how far you can push this. Have you considered teaming up with Stripe? They're nice guys and it looks as if you contribute considerable value to their product.
- aculver 12y agoHey Jacques. Thanks for the kind words! Stripe does include us on their integrations page and have been great about reaching out to Stripe Connect service operators like myself and asking what they can do to better support us. (It's been such a great platform to build on.) Now that I'm focusing on marketing more, I'll definitely reach out to them to share some ideas I've got. ;-)
- jonathanwallace 12y agoIt sounds like you may be interested in https://www.fundinggates.com/ https://www.fundinggates.com/ then. Full disclosure: I worked on this project (as a consultant) when it was just getting off the ground.
- stanmancan 12y agoThere's no pricing information, and no link to pricing information available on the home page. I had to click "Free Trial" before there was a nav bar at the top I could click on. With that being said, I love the idea of the product as it's a pain point for me. Unfortunately, I only have a handful of customers, so even the $20/m doesn't really make sense. It would be great to see a free plan for "up to" X customers, once you pass that threshold send me an email to upgrade my account. As of right now I see it, I like it, I want it, but I can't justify it so it will be long forgotten by the time I'm ready to sign up. If I was able to sign up for a free plan today I would in a heartbeat, and would be happy to upgrade if I got an email remainder once I passed 25 customers.
- aculver 12y agoThanks for the feedback and sorry about the missing pricing link on the homepage. Definitely overdue to revamp the navigation and put a pricing link right up top there. I'll definitely chew on that free plan idea a bit.
- jd_114 12y agoSo, what is the price? I guess I could signup for the trial and see, but don't want to burden if it's not something within the budget off the bat.
- cocoflunchy 12y agoIt's all here https://manage.churnbuster.io/pricing https://manage.churnbuster.io/pricing
- lem72 12y agoI am sure this is what you are already thinking, but I wouldn't spend to much worrying about a free plan. We made this mistake on our last startup, we got a ton of feedback saying, oh it's too expensive, I'd never use it.. make something cheaper/free. The truth is... until those businesses are making more money that justifies $20 a month, you probably don't want them as customers... they will take up a TON of time, with adding little to no value and will have no problem jumping ship when you say, hey, you reached the size you said you were interested in paying $20 and we would like you to upgrade. People want the world... focus on customers that find $20/month to be a huge value to them.
- Aqueous 12y agoIt's really impressive that you built that much revenue even without even notifying people who specifically told you they wanted this product. That's a very good sign that you're headed for a lot of growth.
- aculver 12y agoThanks for your kind words. :-)
- agotterer 12y agoWell done and thanks for sharing your story! You said you did almost no marketing and haven't blasted an email to the wait list. I'm curious where and how people are finding your product?
- aculver 12y agoThanks! So, we've benefited a lot from word-of-mouth thus far. For example, we've received referrals from friends running Baremetrics (http://baremetrics.io http://baremetrics.io), HookFeed (http://hookfeed.io http://hookfeed.io), and FirstOfficer (https://www.firstofficer.io https://www.firstofficer.io) because Churn Buster is a logical progression for customers of those products who are now more aware of how much they're losing to failed payments. Our customers themselves also talk about the results they're getting in the subscription product circles they travel in.
- baudehlo 12y agoSmall suggestion - people who have done payments before know this process is called dunning, which you don't mention at all on your site - that's going to affect your SEO potential when I'm looking for a solution to this (which almost always takes me straight to your competitor: bestunning).
- aculver 12y agoThanks for this feedback. I'll make a point to do something about it. :-)
- nicksergeant 12y agoJust a heads up. I went to https://manage.churnbuster.io/pricing https://manage.churnbuster.io/pricing to check out pricing. I hacked the URL to hit https://churnbuster.io/ https://churnbuster.io/ to go to the homepage, and I get an SSL error: http://i.imgur.com/Dwoa2Hn.png http://i.imgur.com/Dwoa2Hn.png
- dangrossman 12y agoA bit tangential: If you have a problem with losing customers to expired credit cards and already have a good dunning process, talk to the guys at Spreedly about their "Card on File Updater". They're a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault, but one of the services they're trialing (you have to ask to join the beta right now) is automatic updating of expired credit card numbers. They have access to the bank systems that do this automatically, so your charges continue going through without your customers having to update their numbers themselves. https://spreedly.com/ https://spreedly.com/ Spreedly works with Stripe and 70+ other payment providers.
- jacquesm 12y agoThis has been in the works for a number of years now, but keep in mind that you are breaking an 'unwritten contract' with your customer that assumes that they get the option to renew the agreement when their card expires. People in general do not like to be charged for a service after the card expires and they have not explicitly authorized further payment. So better make sure this is written into your terms and conditions and that your merchant agreement actually allows you to do this. Most businesses don't know about this possibility and very very few end users do. Technically you can basically fantasize any expiry date as long as it is in the future the charge will (likely) go through but to do this unauthorized is not smart. (Adding 3 or 5 years to the previous expiry is likely going to be on the money.) In dispute situations you will possibly also have less recourse.
- icelancer 12y agoI wholeheartedly agree. I would never expect this unless it was explicitly disclosed up front, and I got an email around expiry time.
- jusben1369 12y agoI think this is a really interesting topic where merchants and card users see it quite differently. For example, you usually sign up for an agreement to use a service. No where in there does it say that "you can cancel at anytime by just letting your card expire or having it stolen and replaced" The merchants really don't see any correlation between your need to pay and the current state of your card. And often they want you to actively cancel a service so as to remove any confusion around responsibilities owed. Then you have some services where you can go either month to month or commit to a year long agreement and get a different price. Lastly, who enjoys losing a card and having to restart auto billing at their 10 favorite/required services? I agree a lot of people by default think that if their card expires they're off to hook for paying for services and would be surprised that their service provider got an updated card from networks vs you. I'm just not sure it holds up though under closer thought/examination.
- danbruc 12y agoWell, if the customer with the expired payment information is still using and valuing the service, he will soon realize that he needs to update his payment information without any outside intervention or he will lose access to the service. If the user no longer cares about the service and just forgot to cancel or was to lazy to do so, why not just let him go instead of continuing to sell him something he does no longer need? UPDATE: I probably got the wrong first impression - I thought the service was kind of last resort if the user did not respond to the normal notifications that he will lose his service; I missed that you can completely outsource this.
- citadelgrad 12y agoWe have no less that 60 different web services that we use in our business. The last thing I need to have happen is for one of my apps to stop working. Send me an email and tell me somethings wrong.
- itengelhardt 12y agoBecause that is not how people work. We forget things. Today I got a reminder that one of my hosting accounts expired. I happily put down the $90 for the account and even sent an email to my contact there, because loosing that account would be a major headache for me. I need that account, I just didn't remember to update my CC
- rgbrenner 12y agoSame here.. Once let our DNS provider subscription lapse (yearly renewal). Luckily discovered it about a week before the grace period ended.
- trcull 12y agoCouldn't disagree more. I've forgotten these things all the time and actually appreciate a reminder from the service that I need to do something about it. It's so much easier than keeping track of what's stored where and updating it
- zrail 12y ago
- icelancer 12y agoThis is great and the pricing seems reasonable (and not too low, like tarsnap). I will be signing up once we launch our full online training courses. Our monthly revenues are around ~$150/month per user, so definitely worth it for us. As someone else said, though, a free plan that is limited to a very small number of people might be helpful. I'd sign up for that with our small group of clients right now just to test and trust the service. 10-20 users or something would be enough for testing purposes but obviously not nearly enough that you are cannibalizing your product. Something to think about - since now I have to bookmark your site, remember that I need it in six months, and come back and sign up. Even though I KNOW it's something that will save me thousands of dollars per year.
- physcab 12y agoA bit OT: Why is the churn graph so wave-like?