Epilocal - June 2021 Report: $0 Total Revenue / $43 MRR (-$48 / -$27 from May)

June might look like a disappointing month, given the $0 net revenue, but it was a key month in terms of setting up for future growth.

Back in May, I had switched my subscription management over from Gumroad to Paddle, so I wanted to get the handful of customers that I had already switched over to the new billing process. At the same time, after reviewing the competition again, I realized my Data Studio Connector was more expensive than it should be given how it stacked up feature-wise with similar products on the marketplace.

As a result, I cut prices in half: from $15 to $7.50 monthly and from $120 to $60 annually.

I then went through a bit of a messy process where I asked existing customers to sign up on Paddle to get the new reduced pricing, and then I cancelled their Gumroad membership after they had done that. I also did a couple of pro-active refunds including one of $60 for an annual plan, as I didn't want people to come back to the site and feel like they got ripped off because of the new lower prices.

When it all shook out, I ended up with net $0 revenue for the month after the refunds and with an MRR down from $70 the month before to $43.

But on the bright side, the conversion rate for the Data Studio Connector is way up from both the lower prices and the ability to offer free trials through Paddle. In May, there was 1 conversion from 67 visitors to the product page (1.5%) while in June there were 5 conversions from 52 visitors (9.6%).

After this month of adjustments, I'm confident the connector will see some more steady growth from here on out.

I also did quite a bit of new infrastructure work on the Epilocal website. I built out a new membership system using Netlify Identity in order to control access to lead magnents. Previously, I had done this entirely through my email marketing platform (Mailerlite), so someone would have to keep entering their email multiple times if they wanted to download multiple resources in order to receive the download links via email.

Not only does the membership gating of lead magnets make the user experience a bit smoother, but it also enables me to add more features for members in the future. I'm thinking of gating more content, like in-depth blog features, and also using memberships to make free-trial sign-ups even easier for my current and future products.

For example, I've noticed from my Data Studio Connector logs, that a couple people per day try to use the connector without having a trial, but they don't end up visiting the product page to sign-up. I could create some type of automatic account creation directly from the connector.

In terms of traffic, June was a good month with overall visits and organic clicks from Google way up. I did get less visits to my product page, which still depends too much on the traffic that comes from Google's connector gallery which is a bit random - in the future, I need to create more content that drives people to my product page as well as create more products that take advantage of my traffic.

Total Revenue:
June: $0
May: $48
April: $150

Monthly Run Rate (MRR):
June: $43
May: $70
April: $55

Newsletter Sign Ups:
June: 21
May: 30
April: 21

Unique Site Visits:
June: 773
May: 610
April: n/a (switched to Plausible Analytics in May)

Google Clicks:
June: 471
May: 315
April: 289