Codecks

It took over three years to go from zero to 1,000 signed-up users. It took one year to go from 1,000 to 10,000 signed-up users! This year we managed to get a monthly user growth rate of 20% on average.

Here are the top 3 things that worked for us this year:

• Content marketing: writing a mix of blog posts that target key words and also writing deep data analysis articles that get linked by reputable industry websites.
• Word for mouth: the decision process in b2b is quite slow and we need to give users enough time to fit our tool into their project schedule. We also built an awesome discord community and also use our discord bot showing off some of our cool community management features.
• Open Decks: this feature allows to share your project on the web, which gives users an incentive to link to their project page, therefore bringing new users to our website (viral growth).

https://open.codecks.io

We decided to share the complete sales history for our modest HTML5 hit game Curious Expedition on our blog. It contains year-by-year comparisons, platforms, territories, dev history, sales strategy and much more.

This is not the classic saas startup post, but maybe you'll find it interesting nonetheless.

https://www.codecks.io/blog/2020/curious-expedition-financial-history/

We crossed 10.000€ in total revenue generated. It took a couple of years to get to this point, but it's exciting to see the app slowly taking off since we've started focusing on it more seriously around one year ago. In the last 6 months we haven't dipped below a monthly account growth rate of 15%.

So far Codecks had a single plan of 5$ per user. We're now launching a free plan which makes the product completely free for up to three users. The plan includes the whole functionality of Codecks.

The reasons for this..

• We want to support smaller teams. Just six years ago I started my game development company with a tiny team of two people and being able to help these small teams is dear to our heart.
• For small teams the benefit of using a proper project management tool might be not big enough that they feel like paying for it. They might not have yet run into the collaboration pain points that you start seeing on bigger teams, so a smaller price for a smaller value proposition makes sense. As teams grow they will hopefully have learned to appreciate Codecks enough to stick with Codecks and continue their journey with us.
• The project management tool market is saturated with tools that offer free plans for small teams, so offering this kind of plan also means adapting our pricing to the current market rate to a certain degree.

We're also adding a enterprise plan with support for tailored onboarding and self-hosting. These feature sets are not fully defined yet but we're hoping to open up the discussion about these and learn more from our bigger customers.

We've reached 1000 signed up user accounts. This is a huge milestone for us! A lot of these were reached by personally reaching out into our network and directly demoing the app. In the last couple of weeks we've also been doing Google Ads with some success.

For the coming weeks our attention will shift from just acquisition to heavily improving onboarding. We just recently added KPI's for retention (around 25% for companies using the app for more than one day in the first week) at the moment, but there should be some really easy gains since our current first-use experience can be somewhat overwhelming with a quite long tutorial that feels a bit like homework. Next steps are reducing that tutorial substantially and offloading some of that info into a series of onboarding emails.

We've been interested in doing more content marketing for some time. Previously all our blog posts were very self-centered, so this time I focused on a topic that would be interesting even if you didn't care about Codecks. I wrote a list of all the tools that we used during the production of our hit game The Curious Expedition.

This worked remarkably well. I posted the blog post to Hacker News and it went to top spot within 2 hours. I made sure to reply to a lot of the comments and to update the blog post in real-time based on the additional questions that were pointed out in the comments, increasing the value of the post even more.

Analytics are now currently showing 260 users on the website at this moment which is way more than our usual amount of activity. Pretty happy with the way our first foray into content marketing worked out. Now it will be interesting to see how many of these visitors convert into actual customers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21572622