Is it time to throw in the towel?
I've been working on my SaaS business for a year now.
It's currently at $1500 per month.
Honestly, I'm really stressed and tired of running this business now.
It has always had a high churn rate. Since the beginning the churn rate is around 50%+, and I've only ever really grown from a couple breakouts in marketing (external factors).
New revenue comes it at or slower than the churn. I get about 1-5 new sign ups for a free trial a day. But I usually lose around 1 - 5 old paying customers a day too, so I'm never really growing.
I've been stagnant in revenue since April. Actually, June was a little higher ($300 increase) but July is stagnant again. Before that, I was stagnant in revenue since November ($800 per month).
I've been pumping a ton of my time and energy towards this. Like, 8-12 hour days nearly everyday since last June. In that time I've seen some competitors in my market launch their products and grow way faster than I have. It's really discouraging to see months and months of stagnation, and just so much churn.
Maybe it's salvageable, I honestly don't know. I just feel like I've spent the last year fixing problems, adding enhancements and features, and seeing hardly any results. There's always new "problems" with the app that my users complain about, or new "missing features" that make it not good enough to pay for, and no matter how many of them I fix and / or add into the app, they keep coming.
So why should I expect to see anything different down the road?
You are ahead of everyone else and you have validated your idea.
Have you contacted the customers who were on churning on why they were churning?
Was it pricing?
Maybe take a vacation and reevaluate with a cooler head. You sound like you have severe burnout
Why not focus on the paying customers?
Thank you for that. I have gotten feedback from 10-20% of the churned users. Mostly, it seems like they churn because they had a problem with the app (being honest there's some bugs), or they don't like the features of the app once they tried it out.
I think you need to make a roadmap of what features that are needed (pain points) by churned users and not what they think they want.
Hunker down on the remaining paying users.
Don't give up
You got this, mate
Thats futher than most ideas get to be honest. Try startupschool or apply to Ycombinator. The resources or connections you make there can definitely get you over than stagnation hump!
Thank you for this. I have joined Start up school. It would be great to get into an incubator.
I think you need to really focus on the customers you already have and how you can keep them. You obviously seem to have no problems acquiring new customers but you really need to find out from your customers you have now or the ones who have left what's going on. It sounds like you do some of that since you keep implementing features and fixing bugs that people are asking for. If you are interested I know a sales and marketing guy who I've partnered with before and would be able to grow your business and help you retain customers if you are interested in a partner and if he is interested in your product. I don't know what your product is like, but you can shoot me a message if you want.
Sure that would be great! My problem is just I feel like I keep making improvements that they ask for, but every week there's new requests, but still lose customers.
He said he needs to see what your product is to see if it can be salvaged. Do you have a website or something?
Whats you contact info?
Message me and I’ll send it there
let me talk to him. What kind of product do you offer?
Hey @markedeaon,
Hope you're taking care of yourself in the process. Stuff's tough for sure.
Happy to give you some growth advice if you're down to chat: tom@tomzaragoza.com. I'm also curious about potentially buying it off your hands, if that's something that's crossed your mind!
Thanks Tom! I sent you an email.
Hey @markedeaon like others said, congrats on the progress so far - whether in this business or the next, the lessons you've learned will help immensely. Take it from someone who had a failed $0 revenue business and still learned a ton.
I'd actually love to learn more about what the platform is / does. I'm not a developer but I come from a customer success background so churn reduction is something I might be able to offer some tips on?
I know you probably don't want to talk about it publicly - can we DM here or on Twitter?
Hi @markedeaon
First of all, congratulations on your $1500 / month, it by itself a good milestone.
From what you have written down, you are putting 8-12 hours per day, i would guess most of that time is developing new things, and making client support.
My question is simple: if you have 1,500 / month in paying customers, why don't you focus on them other then building new stuff on top of what you have, guessing that if they are paying you already means you are taking some pain out of their business.
I wouldn't let myself get into the trap of "i would like feature X to keep paying you", build your roadmap based on every user feedback, and make wise decisions
Once again, congratulations on the 1,500 / months, that's real product validation..
For what it's worth. I've seen other startups who started out around the same time as us, raise huge amounts of money, grow their team, spend a lot on everything you can imagine, get praised in the news etc.
Many of them gave up by now. These days it's mostly blamed on Covid :P
This here is true for everyone and everything: There's always new "problems" with the app that my users complain about, or new "missing features" that make it not good enough to pay for, and no matter how many of them I fix and / or add into the app, they keep coming.
Try finding 'better' customers ;)
Something else you could consider is to partner up with a compatible product. Someone who has the exact same customer base as you but offers different features, ideally a product that 'ends' where your solutions 'begins' (or vice versa). This works out quite well for us, plus it's nice to have some allies in general.
Your churn is too high. You aren't getting enough new customers each month. You realize only need to solve one of those problems to start your business growing rapidly, right? Don't give up now, you are so close to succeeding!