Is there such a thing as "slow traction?"
It's been a couple months since I launched my side project (https://betabooks.co) and things have been going fairly well. I had about 50 authors sign up ($600 MRR) right at launch, and have been slowly climbing since then to a bit past 90 customers and $1,200 MRR. I only have ~5 hours a week to work on it, so I'm pretty happy with that.
I'm getting more connected into the author ecosystem and organic traffic is slowly increasing. I'm getting lots of positive feedback from authors and some feature requests, so I've got a good pipeline to work on.
If this continues to double every 6 mo., I think it looks like a pretty good small business, but if it's linear or flattens out then it's probably forever a small side project.
What do you guys think? Is there such a thing as "slow traction" and this is what it looks like? Or is this idea kind of a bust, and maybe I should figure out how to put it into "passive" mode and work on something else?
First off, congrats on traction. You should absolutely not give up, because you're getting paying customers. Getting someone to pay you is arguably the hardest and most important aspect of building a product or business.
You should be asking yourself "if I was putting 20 hours a week into this, what could it result into?"
Edit: Patio11 just put out a great stripe SaaS pricing guide - you should look into that and maybe double your pricing. Also try asking for referrals from your customers with some kind of reward.
This.
And also be aware that Input != Output so it might very well be the case that any additional hour has a less significant upside than the last one.
5hr/week -> 1,200 MRR and growing is a good result. Sometimes a flying kite is much more healthy and easy to guide than a rocket ship...
Actually based on the patio11 podcast we raised our prices from a planned $50/year to $150/yr or $15/ mo right before launch. I think that was a good call as it didn’t scare off too many people, but we do get some complaints that its too expensive, so I think we may have the prices around the right spot for now.
Yes there is, that's how business usually works, and the idea that you have to win big right away or fail is a myth!
I wrote about the history of our now-10-year-old SaaS here (these articles are older, but just as relevant today as ever):
https://stackingthebricks.com/5-years-of-saas-growth-every-month-exact-numbers/
https://stackingthebricks.com/lessons-learned-from-5-years-of-saas-and-1-million-in-revenue/
EDIT: I also would NOT say your results are slow. So there's that, too.
Maybe I'm not answering your question directly, but if you marketed this to bloggers, do you think you could gain new customers? I feel like they may need a product like this.
By the way, it looks like a lot of thought and work went into building this product. Very well put together!
Thanks, Craig! I hadn’t really thought about expanding to bloggers, but I can see how that might make sense. I’ll percolate on that, and if you know any bloggers who you think would like to give this a try let me know and I’ll hook them up with a few months as beta testers :)
Unfortunately I don't know any but if I do, I'll pass along your tool.
It may not be the route you want to take (expanding to another group of writers) but you could do some simple reaching out to blogger groups just to see what the response is like.
I think that $1,200 MMR in a couple months is really good. Not all projects are overnight hits. I think that it would really depend on what the nature of your paying customers is, are you advertising your application, or are people slowly finding your site and hearing about it from friends? If the site is organically gaining more traffic and subscriptions then I would 100% NOT give up and would say its doing great.
Congrats on the launch!
I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this but honestly we’re not doing any advertising or marketing to speak of. I work on this with one friend / co-founder, he and I both just reached out to our personal networks to tell them about it and sign them up for the private beta last year, and everything has been word of mouth from there. The biggest thing has been when people discover us we try to be really reachable and friendly with customer support, and sometimes it turns out that someone has a big blog or podcast and when they plug us we get signups.
Sad reality, though, I’m just clueless about marketing and don’t currently have time to learn it, so it’s not something we do much of at all.
I wouldn't be embarrassed at all if I were you! The info you just said only puts more weight behind the idea that your application is succeeding. If you are gradually increasing your MMR without advertising, you are doing something right. The next step would probably be to see if you can afford to advertise your application to help accelerate the rate of increase. If its good enough for word of mouth users to sign up and pay, I would assume that getting it in front of more people would help increase your subscriber base. I am no marketing expert though, that is just my opinion.
From the sounds of it, you are off to a great start, I would not give up on it!
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Your numbers illustrate some fantastic early traction. Even exponential growth by definition starts off with a long tail. Keep going, your doing great!
You may want to revisit your pricing. One example - I felt your $14/mo plan gives away too much. Particularly the "unlimited books" part. If you've got more than a couple books in progress, you probably have a lot more to spend (i.e. even a small firm could use this cheap plan). The right pricing is fundamental to capturing value, so would be worth your limited time!
Stripe released this guide recently:
https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-pricing
This book is great for a deep dive into value pricing (dense but very practical!):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Thomas-Nagle/dp/0136106811
Hi @GigEm06 , congrats on the launch and success so far.
Slower traction is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of or worried about. Especially at five hours/week.
Here are a few things I'd be thinking about/keeping an eye on:
Retention (low churn) will be really important. Keep an eye on this moving forward and be aggressive in finding out why churned customers have left. It's nearly always more expensive to find a new customer than it is to retain a current one.
Be razor focussed on providing value for your customers and keeping them satisfied. The happier your customers, the more likely they are to recommend to friends. Organic growth can be very powerful, given enough time. A dollar/hour invested in improving this will be much more effective long-term than a dollar/hour invested in advertising.
Make sure you enjoy what you do. It's hard to do something well when it feels like a drag or chore.
I would say traction is a continuum. It can't be all or nothing, so it could be slow or fast or medium. If it's slow tho maybe watch out for churn very closely. Depends on many factors tho. Size of the market, product/market fit and how much attention you are getting from you target market.
I think slow traction is certainly a thing. Honestly, I personally think that this kind of business building is one of the more healthy and sustainable routes. There are definite pluses to growing a company slowly and organically... like being able to provide intentional and exceptional care for each new user you gain, being more able to step back to manage and regulate your time so that it is spent effectively, and really tailoring your company's identity with thought and consideration.
That said, I think that it is smart to only spend the time on it that its worth. 5 hours a week is really quite good to be seeing those numbers, great work!
Thanks, Marcus, I appreciate the feedback!
I like read books very much and I'm happy that somebody creates services for writers. I think this project has very big monetizing potential including sales of completed books, payment plans for grammar online checking, attract bloggers and etc.
So, I think you should continue and wish you good luck!
Woah this is way cool! Thanks for sharing. If you've got 90 customers who are shelling out $$ for your service, I think you're on the right track.
Also, supposing you build a network of 300 authors who regularly put out new works...There's plenty of power there beyond just the $15 you're collecting from them. Would they pay for other services from you? I bet they would.
Bottom line is that I don't know what book authors will want, but I know there's something, and if you have 90 customers at this moment, I would try to get on the phone with each one of them to build relationships and eventually discover their pains.
I find the Sandler Pain funnel helpful as a guide: http://www.i10.sandler.com/blog/pain
You're crushing it. :)
What's your monthly growth rate in paying authors?
Well, you can kind of back into this from the numbers I posted above, but basically 6-9 a month, minus about 1 a month churn.
The good thing so far is I’ve reached out to everyone who has churned and all but one of them have indicated they were happy and would be back when they had another book ready, so they’re just paying for the months they are using it. I’m really grateful for that :)
That's a good and a bad thing. I have quite the same issue, but on a totally different market and not about books.
The good thing is that they like your product and might get back and refer others.
The bad thing is that, like my tool, most of the churn is out of your control. Maybe with some effort you can target customers that have the potential to stay longer, but it's not like that improving the product and support will decrease churn.
Elegant Themes (437,821 customers at $89/year) also had slow traction. I listened to a podcast with their founder, who said they never experienced hockey stick growth – it was just slow and steady for many years.
If only 5 hours a week can grow your business, then you're probably hitting on a sizable pain point. I think this can make a lot more than $1200/month.
I recommend watching this video by Jason Cohen, the founder of WPEngine, on bootstrapping profitable startups. Pay attention to what he says about the pricing models, because I think your prices might be a little low for what you're offering: https://vimeo.com/74338272
Slow traction is probably the rule for most products and startups. Not the exception.
I like your idea, even though I'm no author. More and more people are writing books this way, and it looks like a rising trend.
How did you decide to start working on this idea?
I’m a hobbyist writer and found managing my beta readers to be a huge pain, so it was just the classic “solving your own problem” situation. :)
I think its a great start. I'd use the connections you're making with author ecosystem to learn more about their pain points and offer more value through your service. This would give you pricing power.
For all my past and current projects I prefer and had slow growth. It will make I can talk to my customers more, listen better, and implement features they really need. You can slowly add extra resources, optimise code, be more precise in your marketing, etc.
I'd say your current growth is perfect and ideal for the amount of time you (can) spent on it.
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