Inside Baremetrics: May 2014

Josh Pigford on June 02, 2014

May was a month focused primarily on scaling. It’s the first month since launching that I haven’t launched a feature or done some big marketing push, but we still had a great month of growth.

Scaling & Hiring

After the Buffer deal, Baremetrics got a lot more exposure and, in turn, a lot of new customers. That growth translated to some gnarly scaling issues. Less issues on the frontend, but a lot of issues on the backend that required increasing capacity dramatically on Heroku, which meant a monthly bill pushing $2500…not a great place to be.

The silver lining was bringing on someone else to help mitigate the issues.

For 6 months I worked in a tunnel, handling 100% of the design, development and marketing on my own. May ushered in the first code commit by someone other than myself…which is a big milestone.

Ben, who came on board to help handle a lot of development work on Baremetrics, has helped reduce our Heroku bill by over 50% and has sped things up across the board. So: win.

Fixing some fundamental code issues and making the whole system more scalable has set the stage for what I hope will be a solid few months of product growth (in addition to business/revenue growth).

Let’s take a look at what May was like from a numbers perspective.

Revenue

We billed just over $15,200 in the month of May and our MRR come in at just over $14,300. We started pushing annual plans, so that accounts for the higher net revenue for the month.

We added just over $4000 in new MRR for a 46% over the previous month. From a growth perspective, that’s amazing.

April’s growth was a staggering 80%, which I knew wouldn’t carry through. This month’s growth rate (specifically the dollar amount…not so much the actual percentage) is something that is a bit more sustainable.

Revenue Churn dropped by 40% over the previous month, coming in just over 10%. Still too high, but the trend down is great.

Customer Value

As I’ve mentioned before, ARPU and LTV are two metrics that I put a lot of weight in, and both of those were up in May.

Average Revenue Per User: $68 (+4%)
Lifetime Value: $781 (+29%)

I expect ARPU to go up even more for June as I’ve dropped our $29/mo plan.

Customers

We crossed the 200 mark for customers and had solid growth. No complaints at all in this department.

At 8.7%, User Churn dropped by 19% over the previous month. About double what I’d like, but as long as it keeps trending down, I’m happy.

I’ve started tracking and following up with why people cancel and that’s given a good bit of insight in to what I need to do to reduce churn even more.

What’s coming in June?

After a month of system optimizations, I really hope to get back to shipping new features/improvements. Things look good in that department, so I’m excited about what’s in store.

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

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

Josh Pigford