We're going to need a bigger server 📈 🚀
About
I've been working on my side project inboxesapp.com for a while now. It's a disposable email chrome extension and I've tried to keep the stack as simple as possible as the userbase grows:
- 1 mail server
- 1 database server
- 1 hosted wordpress blog (home page, marketing, blog etc..)
but recently I've been getting resource alerts on my database server which I consider a good problem to have, as it shows the service is growing. Previously the server was a 1gb server with digital ocean, but I've since moved it to contabo who offer significantly more resources for the same price.
Is this project making any money though?
Currently no 🙃, I'm finishing up the paid features and I've had to divert lately to build anti-automation abuse tools so thats been another distraction. However the paid features exist and they work - just remains tagging on stripe, some webhooks and it's good to go.
Growth
Despite having started a new job ~two months ago and not really done any SEO or promo, user growth has continued to go up!
The red line shows total accounts, while the brown shows MAU, something I've recently started tracking.
SEO is also still low, but it's definitely going in the right direction. This tells me what I'm currently doing is working, and I should do much more of it. This I plan on doing a lot more of once paid features are out.
Conversion
Growth is good, but also important is conversion. I've a few funnels I track, but the ones which excite me most are how the home page is performing and how CTR to buy button is performing.
I'm tracking how people land, go to the pricing page and then click the buy now button. If the numbers are to be believed, that could mean 7 paid users, bringing in ~£251, which pays for ~2x the total costs. This project could be profitable!
Those numbers are low but that's as a result of me having put a grand total of 0 effort in to optimising the conversions on the payments page. That's a whole other area I've (perhapse stupidly) kicked down the road for now.
The final graph which excites me is the home page conversion:
25% conversion! That seems high, but it's at 26.3% if we include people who visit the blog, click home, then click through to download the extension. This excludes the other CTA buttons around the website which also bring in additional downloads.
In short, I'm really optimistic about this project. I don't expect it to be life changing or anything, but it's giving me a lot in terms of understanding SEO, funnels, conversion and growth. Let's see if we can make this profitable :)
