Readme - How Baremetrics helped cut revenue churn in half. - Baremetrics Japan

Tomotaka Endo 2017 9 24

Baremetrics has played an important role in strategizing and monitoring the growth of ReadMe. But more recently, Baremetrics helped to make a very risky and difficult decision: retiring their most popular plan.Enter your text here...

ReadMe is a scrappy team of five that have set out to change how we do API documentation. “No one likes writing documentation, and most people don’t like reading it either. So our goal is to make it a nice experience for both sides,” explains founder Greg Koberger. They have been a Baremetrics customer since the beginning–when they first started out, a friend of Greg sat him down and made him sign up for Baremetrics right on the spot.

Baremetrics has played an important role in strategizing and monitoring the growth of ReadMe.

Problem

The team at ReadMe has always had a self-described “love-hate relationship” with their lowest tier $14/mo Documentation plan.

The reason?** Folks on the lower tier plan had very different needs than the other plans**, creating distraction and a split in focus. But the most pressing problem: ballooning support costs that failed to payoff.

Solution

The Baremetrics Compare Plans feature drove home the need to make a change. The $14/mo. Documentation plan represented just 7% of revenue, but a whopping 31% of support requests. And because the needs of users on this plan were incompatible with those on higher plans, this loss leader wasn’t leading to significant conversions to the higher value plans.

So they axed the Documentation plan for new signups, and waited to see what would happen.

Outcome

In short, the outcome was better than anyone could have ever imagined. Revenue Churn decreased from 5.4% to 2.5%.


MRR growth remained the same, and support requests dropped from 25 per day to 15 per day.


This result meant happier, better supported customers, and a team freed up to work on more exciting opportunities. Win-win-win. ReadMe helps developers make beautiful documentation. You can read more about how they eliminated their cheapest plan on their blog. We also use ReadMe to power our slick help documentation.

Tomotaka Endo

Tomo Endo is a dynamic professional with a rare blend of achievements in technology, community leadership, and sports. As the Co-Founder of Nihonium.io since August 2023 and Community Lead at Xenon Partners since September 2019, Tomo has been pivotal in driving innovation and fostering community engagement within the tech industry in Tokyo, Japan. His role in facilitating growth and providing actionable insights at Baremetrics, coupled with his contribution to MetricFire's technical monitoring community, underscores his proficiency in leveraging technology to nurture professional communities. Beyond his tech-centric endeavors, Tomo has excelled as a professional athlete in squash, achieving the no.1 ranking in Japan and a global ranking of 79th by August 2020.