We grew our MRR by 800% over the past 6 months
At the start of last year, my cofounder and I sat down to work out where to take the business. We had achieved a pretty good ARR from a direct sales to enterprise customer model.
But we also knew that we were trying to serve the SME/SMB market – but that our growth model for this segment was not scaleable.
So in 2019, we set to work on creating a model for growth that was scaleable and didn't rely on direct sales at all. To do that, we tried a number of things but the key element in the strategy was taking close care of the funnel.
Through optimising and managing that, we were able to increase the MRR of this segment of our business by 800% across a six month period.
Here's a chart where the SME segment we grew with this strategy is shown by the green bars vs. the existing SME revenue shown by purple bars.
I also wrote up a post that outlines the strategy (https://doopoll.co/blog/how-we-grew-mrr-800-percent-six-months), the steps and results in super deep detail. I hope it's helpful for you.
I'm looking forward to taking part in the IndieHackers community way more – I've been listening to the podcast for about a year now but didn't feel I had anything too useful for contribute until now.
Awesome - looks like you put a lot of work into it and saw some good results! Thanks for sharing your article, there is a bunch of good nuggets in there. The Google Ads strategy was pretty interesting. And, thanks for the reminder that other successful hacks aren't likely going to be your successful hacks. 😃
Yeh. That’s working really well for us. I know a lot of people promote new content with Facebook promoted posts to see whether their content converts. We’re applying that in a slightly different way and I’m really happy with the results.
Thank you for posting so much detail! Congrats on the success of the process, and good luck with this new growth vector.
Holy moly. That is a massive post with a ton of content. I imagine it must have taken you a week to write that.
What is the stack you use to optimize the funnel. Mixpanel ?
I’m glad you thought it was beneficial. It actually took me a day. I just love writing about this stuff. 😂
We track conversions on Google Analytics and then update a spreadsheet manually to see where the drop offs are.
It’s definitely not foolproof and we might look at something else in future but it works for the time being.
This is a really terrific post. Thanks a lot of writing it. It's clear you put a lot of thought into it.
A few things that jumped out at me:
The difference in your landing page tag line tagline pre and post is massive. I have no idea what your product is reading the pre version and feel like I completely get it reading the post version.
Your sections on Ads was interesting. If I'm honest I'm a bit scared of ads given how easy it is to blow money but the thought of having that channel working even if it's just at break even feels super powerful as it has the potential to amp up velocity and therefor learning substantially. My intuition is that having one free channel working before ads is the way to go but maybe that intuition is wrong. It's also funny that the idea of turning ads on, gathering the data and then turning them off also never occurred to me. Simple but not obvious :).
The pricing model change was genius.
Cycling ads as a learning loop. That is REALLY smart. Again simple but not obvious. The post is worth reading just for that insight.
Also shout out to the Demand Curve guys. They are super smart. I'm surprised I don't see them referenced a lot more given the quality of the content they put out especially given that most folks struggle more with acquiring customers than building product.
What are you using to track your funnel? Do you like it?
You mentioned content briefly but it doesn't appear it was a big part of the work you did as part of this. That surprises me a bit given that Demand Curve is big on content (pain point SEO). Was there a reason for that? We're about to put a bunch of effort into pain point SEO for Savio so I'm curious as to why you didn't focus there.
Hey Ryan,
That’s a great comment. Thank you. The pricing model change had the biggest impact but by the time we did it, the data pointed to it being the sensible choice. I still felt nervous pushing it to live though!
Re: content — it’s totally valuable and is something I’m really working hard on now that we’re done with the program. I realised it would probably take us a while to rank and so I thought that using the time on the course to do that would probably be a waste. There is a module on content/seo in the demand curve course though.
Btw — I think you’re smart to go for the pain point route. Benji at Grow and Convert has written loads about this. Have you read it? We have content on our site which uses this approach too.
Re: ads as a risky channel — yup. Totally. We burned through the budget that DC recommended we spend within 2 weeks. That was because I was a bit too hooked on seeing the traffic come in but also because of the cost/conversion on many of our ad groups being so high. We managed to get this down by 80% towards the end of the course.
To your point on having a free channel working already: I’m not 100% but my input here would be hypocritical. As I mentioned, we already have a healthy channel of direct sales to enterprise level customers. So most of the cash we used on the course came from that.
Finally: we plug conversion data from Google Analytics into a funnel spreadsheet and look for big drop offs. It’s not pretty but it works!
Thanks for commenting. Really appreciate it.
Awesome! Thanks for the additional info.
RE: the Grow and Convert stuff, we have read some of it actually. That's actually what motived us to give pain point SEO a shot specifically this article: https://growandconvert.com/content-marketing/seo-content-conversions/.
We've had some limited success with comparison pages. One challenge we've had is that for a lot of terms that fit for us show so little search volume that it hardly seems worth it. Yet it doesn't seem to be. I find Google's search planning tools pretty frustrating. Ahrefs is helpful. Still a challenge for low volume stuff though.