Crossed 10 subscribed users! Not too fast, not to slow. Sharing lessons learned.

Growing slowly, but steadily, stackdraft.io crossed 10 subscribed users last week. Currently at 12 subscribed early adopters, $120 MRR.

Lessons learned:

1. 💡Know your target

Have to admit I did expect a bit faster growth, but I've shot myself in the foot by initially targeting B2C customers only. Business clients are holding back, because I don't have a "Team plan" just yet (will have it soon). Had a few questions about sharing accounts with co-workers. I did expect more freelancers, but I feel it makes much more sense to target B2B customers than B2C, at least with this specific product, which is a tool.

2. 🐢It's okay to grow slowly

As mentioned, I was worried Stackdraft is growing too slow. But as days passed, I learned this allowed me to polish the product, fill in the missing bits or fix minor issues, that I very much preferred to have fixed early on the way. That way, much less work was involved in getting things fixed and sorted out for a few users, than it would if I had more users. Pretty obvious, but in the end, I appreciate I didn't suddenly have 100 users.

3. 🏃User feedback is invaluable

I work hard to get my users opinions. Whenever I interact with them, including my Early Adopter e-mail updates, I ask for their opinion. While only a few come back with suggestions and ideas - when they do, it's pure gold. In those few cases, quite often the feedback is very detailed and focused. I can see they also care about where I take Stackdraft further, which is very uplifting :).

4. ⚡️Watch out for 3rd party library failures

Only for tax purposes, I convert USD to EUR of all invoices based on European Central Bank rates. They redirected their daily EUR rates site from http to https and a currency conversion package, pointing at http://, started throwing exceptions. All previous month invoices failed to generate, because the conversion was right before invoice generation and I failed to cover that with a test. Dropped the package, now talking to ECB from my custom code and lesson learned - more tests covering 3rd party package failures.

5. 👀Monitor

This relates to the previous point. I failed to notice for over 3 weeks the invoices didn't generate. I guess it also means at this small $10/mo rate most customers may have not care about those invoices, BUT I should have noticed that earlier. I intend to hook up exception monitoring (which I simply didn't have time to do yet - hey, MVP!) and pay much more closer attention what's actually going on on my servers.

6. 📈Know your value metric (last, but not least!)

I'm considering changing the value metric from per seat (was just easier to start like that) to per diagram (you get up to X diagrams for $Y), because that's where the value of my product is. If you're a business with 500 people in your cloud department, you neither want a 5 or 10 user plan (too few users) nor 500 user plan (too expensive!). Or you don't want to pay for a manager's seat, who's only there to watch the privately shared diagrams. Plus, it makes sense to allow in ALL of the company users, because the more diagrams they create, the more value Stackdraft provides (and therefore makes sense to charge more).

I hope you find this post helpful! Would love to hear your feedback on the proposed value metric, thanks!