First year of a startup in numbers

One year has almost passed since I launched Sturppy on April 2021. A ton has happened and what better way to tell the story than with numbers?

Commits

Honestly, I was thinking a bit more, but you know as they say: it’s not about quantity, but about quality. These are just mine, then you need to add the ones from the rest of the team.

Total number of commits: 6,324

Website visitors

I was honestly doing better at the start. As you can see, the chart isn’t very promising, but we managed to get some good spikes here and there. Also 6.9 ... nice.

Total website traffic: 69,000

Discovery cold emails

This is a bit harder to tell since I don’t want to sift through my whole email inbox manually, but with some quick filters, I have a decent answer.

Total number of emails sent: 132

Those were mainly cold emails to connect with people that would be interested in trying the product and giving some feedback.

LTD Campaign

Well we didn't have distribution or a bunch of money to run ads so I decided the best way to get our first paying users was to launch via an LTD platform.

The result wasn’t the best in the world, part of the problem was also because SaasMantra (which is the LTD platform that we went with) is smaller than the other platforms. The thing that I really liked and of which I’ve very proud of is that our product is the least refunded product of all time on SaasMantra.

Total revenue from LTD campaign: $4,201.85

Team

This is a fun one. I launched Sturppy after coming out from a different business where my co-founder left me with an employee that was behind some paychecks, so I hired him for this idea that still had nothing going for it, paid the due paycheque, and kept him as a junior dev (his name is Riky).

After around 4 months I started working with John and Diego to make Sturppy better. Things clicked between us and we decided that they should join the team as co-founders. Unfortunately, Diego has now left the team to follow his passion, but John and I are going strong!

Total team members: 3 (2 co-founders and 1 employee)

Chat messages

Around the time John joined the team we added chat functionality to the app to help users that got stuck. It has been one of the best decisions ever, I can’t stress enough how many users would have just left if the chat wasn’t there. Also sometimes you receive some very funny messages ahahha.

Total chat conversations: 415

Subscriptions and MRR

Unfortunately, this isn’t the success story that you often read about. Launch, massive traction, massive adoption, exit. Things are much slower than I could have ever imagined and I can’t help but take responsibility for it. Should have focused so much more on marketing and distribution. Something we will be doing this year.

Total subscriptions: 19

Total MRR: $356.03

(it says it is going down just because we had a cancellation yesterday, thank you for your concern)

Slack messages

Since we are a global team we use Slack daily to communicate (which is strange since here it shows that somedays we haven’t used it).

Total Slack messages: 40,903

Expenses

This one actually kinda hurts. It’s true that here we also have included all the set-up costs of starting the business and my personal expenses, but still. Shit is expensive. The main expense has been the employee salary.

Total expenses: $50,942.99

People making promises

This is just a fun one that I wanted to add. Do you know all those people that say:

• Man, your idea is great, I’m gonna tell everyone
• Guys, can I become an affiliate? I want to sell this to everyone
• I’m [insert big company here] and I’d like to discuss a potential partnership
• This is really a great product, if I were you I would do X
• This sounds amazing and is super cheap, let me get confirmation and we can proceed with the deal

Yeah, that kind of people.

Total bullshitters: 100+

What we are going to do this year

This year we will focus more on what we knew we didn’t do right, but we will also question our basic assumptions like if the business model is the right one. To do this we will run a new LTD campaign, but this time with AppSumo.

We also have started splitting the app from the marketing website, separating the code, and using WebFlow for the landing page. This has felt so good since now each one of us can focus on his area of expertise without needing to wait for the other.

We will also double down on content: more IH posts, more YouTube videos (subs appreciated 😉), and others.

Final words

We definitely learned a lot in our first year running Sturppy. The biggest takeaway is to do more marketing/sales. It is just the name of the game, unfortunately, it has become more important than the actual product.

I’m personally very happy that the team has expanded and that we are always looking at the future and at the amazing thing that we could build, this is most likely because we are in love with the problem more than the solution: helping founders and business owners get a clear vision over their finances.

Shameless plug

As you may have guessed pulling up all that data has been painful, luckily this is exactly the type of problem we are trying to solve with LlamaFinancial 🦙, the big brother product of Sturppy.

P.S. I absolutely hate tweeting but I'm also trying to do more of it this year - if you'd like to follow my journey growing Sturppy and building LlamaFi, follow me there for more SaaSy content (pun intended)

Cheers 👋