Inside Baremetrics: June 2014

Josh Pigford on July 01, 2014

June was equal parts exciting and a let down. It was a splash in the face with a bucket of cold water compared to months-on-end of insane growth. Let’s take a look at both the good and the not-quite-as-good.

Hiring

I brought on a designer and a front-end dev in the past few weeks who have already knocked out a number of projects. Hiring anyone has a temporary slow down on the machine while you get them on board and familiar with how everyone works. But we’re quickly moving past that and just knocking stuff out.

We started using Slack for internal communication and it’s amazing to have everyone in there hashing things out.

Feels good.

While hiring new folks was great, our actual numbers were rough…at least in relation to the past few months.

Revenue

MRR for June was $16,040 and Net Revenue was $20,310. We continued to push annual plans more and that paid off quite well for Net Revenue (a 31% increase).

What I’m not terribly excited about is our MRR. We added just shy of $2,000 for 13% growth. I know, I know. Shut up, Josh. It’s double-digit growth.

But if you recall, the previous few months have seen anywhere from 40–80% growth, and while those growth numbers obviously weren’t sustainable, I wasn’t prepared for it to drop off so quickly.

So why the drop off in growth? In hindsight, it really seems April and May were anomalies. Which makes sense. A lot of the surge in growth happened around the exposure from the Buffer deal and the addition of a lot of content marketing. That initial surge has basically worn (or is wearing) off.

Additionally, at the beginning of June I tested dropping our $29/mo Hobby plan completely (making $79/mo the starting point). While the $29/mo plan didn’t make up a huge percentage of our month-to-month revenue, I do think it helped with price anchoring to help tone down the pricing plans from feeling so expensive.

My hypothesis is that removing the plan scared some people off when they saw $79/mo was the starting amount. I re-introduced the Hobby plan at $39/mo and I saw an uptick in revenue after that, so for now we’ll keep that Hobby plan around.

Customers & User Churn

Our total customer count actually stayed just about the same over last month. We added a lot of new customers but we had a huge amount of user churn (a whopping 12%).

This actually doesn’t bother me all that much as most of that churn came from people on our $29/mo plan. People on that plan just don’t stand to get much value out of Baremetrics because they’re usually very early and have very little revenue.

A lot of the people who churned came in during the initial exposure from Buffer. Part of me questions the lead-quality I’m getting from that, but it’s hard to really quantify it.

Are we plateauing?

I’ve been throwing the possibility around in my head that we’re basically starting to hit the limit on the market size of being 100% exclusive to Stripe. One month of down growth is, realistically, too early to tell and I probably just need to chill the heck out.

We have some really great features coming this month that lots of people have been asking for and the roadmap for the next few months has me downright giddy.

I need to just stay the course, focus on building a great product, and not worry so much.

Thanks for reading this month’s update. If you have any questions about any of this, please ask! Happy to answer anything.

(You can take a look at previous month’s posts here…)

Josh Pigford