$10,000 MRR > How to scale?
We launched on AppSumo back in 2017 by offering a life-time deal for early backers. We sold over 5000 codes and made $250,000 in a week.
The AppSumo partnership helped us grow our user base and build a strong community around our product, which has helped us grow and run more successful launches on directories such as ProductHunt.
We're completely remote, bootstrapped and profitable.
But we're stuck on $10,000, and not sure what we should do to truly scale the business.
- I've set up an affiliate program and it has been going well.
- I've just completed a new user onboarding series to help nurture leads.
- We're about to hire a salesperson to reach out to everyone who has cancelled and attempt to bring them back, now we launched heaps of new features.
What would you do to scale?
P.S. Plutio is an all-in-one business management platform for freelancers and small businesses.
Previously, I was hired by a YC company to build its growth team.
Scaling is nothing but systematically investing in the right channel - one at a time.
The first question I ask founders: What is working for you right now? Inbound leads or outbound sales call.
Inbound - > More investment in marketing in the coming months.
Outbound- > More investment in Sales in the coming months. ( I'm no expert here).
To scale the number of leads(Inbounds)coming in, first analyze what is working for you right now?
Let's say, right now you have 1 landing page and it's bringing 50% leads via SEO. Now start thinking, how can I increase the number of landing pages thereby more SEO traffic. Systematically invest there.
Likewise, execute things for other channels.
Most Important: Closely look at the metric before you invest further on any channel.
if you have any doubts, feel free to DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oyeakhil.
Always happy to help IH :)
It's helpful to remember that growth = customer acquisition minus churn.
Sometimes people think they have a growth problem when they really have a churn problem because churn is usually a percentage of customer base and customer acquisition by channel is often maxed out.
Over-simplified illustration:
You have a customer acquisition channel that gets you 10 customers per month. But also 10% of customers churn per month.
Month 1: gain 10, lose 0 = 10 customers
Month 2: gain 10, lose 1 = 19 customers
Month 3: gain 10, lose 2 = 27 customers
etc...
When you reach 100 customers then every month you gain 10 and lose 10 and you will be stuck at this plateau.
To go higher, you can do 3 things:
Obviously these are not mutually exclusive, but sometimes you realize that one of these has more low-hanging fruit than the others.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
This is nicely said. Magic trick is to make acquisition a %.
I would focus on Number 4 (that should be number 1, my opinion) : provide even better, more quality product or service so churn doesn't get into double digits.
My advice from a year as a startup CEO is to not hire salespeople. The reason is that your users want to hear from you. Not some stranger.
We hired 10 salespeople and I outsold all of them. Not because I am better at sales. Because people wanted to hear from the founder. Instead, create a personal email and send it to each canceled user with a free amount of time on the platform. Explain the improvements made and offer a personal phone call to answer any questions.
Reach out to your users and give them a month free for every person they bring to the platform or something similar (maybe that is what you mean by affiliate program).
Reach out to each user via email and/or in-app and offer tips. Something like, "Bob used feature X to increase revenue by 9%.". You can also use this type of help on sales calls. It gives advice while increasing the value of the product.
What's your analytics data telling you?
I noticed you have Google Analytics, Hotjar and some other stuff in place.
I would expect, at your scale, for the aggregate data to yield some interesting correlations that stick out to the naked eye, if you know where to look.
Do you know what your best users uniquely do? If not, start segmenting users by any metric you can find that would suggest business is going well for a user. That could be LTD revenue, sessions, annual vs monthly plans, team size. Mix and match these (and any other metrics you think of) on scatter plot graphs that represent users or segments Keep going until a very obvious conclusion jumps out at you.
As @friendlyguy points out - which channels are working better than others? Should you invest in improving the weaker channels, or should you double down on the channel that works the best and scale that up? (I lean toward the latter.)
I'll contact you to discuss.
We're about to hire a salesperson to reach out to everyone who has cancelled and attempt to bring them back, now we launched heaps of new features.
==> how did you come up with hiring a sales rep to reduce churn?
==> Why a sales rep but not account manager?
I'm just curious. What did you try before? I tried to send an email when users uninstalled though the response rate is quite low
Increase your Prices
Three ideas:
Definitely content marketing and SEO. From what I can see you aren't getting a lot of traffic from Google and that's a missed opportunity.
Take a look at what Double Your Freelancing does. They target an audience very similar to yours.