$15K MRR ✅
by Marc ThomasOver the past few months at doopoll, we focused on converting organic signups to paid accounts more efficiently.
We tried a bunch of stuff.
One particularly successful test that we ran was sending personal welcome videos to increase conversions from new signups. That was a lot of fun. I wrote about it here – we saw an increase of 2.13% to paid users.
And the other thing that we did was to fix an error in some microcopy that meant that people chose a higher value package when signing up. I have some stuff that I'll share in more detail about that soon.
Anyway.
PUMPED.
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Hey Marc, congrats on the amazing win! We're working on a tool called Tractific to automate trial to paid conversion optimizations. We currently need a beta user to integrate before launch in order to train our deep learning models. We are willing to give a free lifetime membership of our highest plan to you. Can you contact me if you are interested?
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That looks really interesting as a product. Drop me a mail at [email protected] with some details and if you have a demo video I'd love to see it.
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Congrats Marc, that's a fantastic achievement! What would you say was the most important growth strategy for your first 100 users?
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Ready for this?
We previously ran a boutique creative agency. We got our first customer when we went to pitch some creative work to a big higher education client. They’re a huge organisation and they had a budget to do a bunch of cool projects.
We thought we might sell them some communications work but when we mentioned that we’d also been working on a real time survey product, they got pumped about it. They said they weren’t really that interested in our project ideas – they just wanted to let their employees and students do surveys better.
It was totally unexpected and so when the question of ‘how much is it?’ came up, we hadn’t even got a number. So we highballed it. We asked for a £40K deal and they said yes almost right away.
As enterprise deals often go, we eventually ended up with a £15K deal for 1 year – but that still put us onto £1,250 MRR before we had a beta!
If anything, that initial deal messed us up for a while. We’d never run a SaaS before and having sold services, we thought it would be easy.
In reality, selling licences to software that is still in beta is tough. I’m wracking my brains to remember what we initially set the pricing at but it was pretty high – I think it was anywhere between £40 and £120 a month for SME and we were pitching £10K for an enterprise starter.
75% of our revenue is still enterprise and acquiring customers like that today is a lot more normal for us. Deal sizes eventually stabilised around the £5K mark for a basic enterprise licence.
On the other hand, we didn’t really see any SME (self service through the website) growth for a long time. And that’s because we didn’t have a clear understanding of the value props.
Lesson for new founders: nail your value props as quickly as possible because it helps you grow so much faster. (I actually wrote about this in more depth here)
We acquired our first 1000 users within about a year but it wasn’t until mid 2019 that we saw good SME growth. Here's a blog we did about how we built a system for growth.
The key inflection point in the business came when we realised that switching to a freemium product from a 14 day trial drastically improved new users experience.
We switched to a model where you only pay for doopoll when you get more than 10 responses to a survey – we think that’s a fairer model for everyone involed. Again, here’s a blog post that goes into the detail of how that works and why.
Once we put that update out, we started getting paid upgrades within 30 minutes. And then the trickle turned into a stream. Now that stream is becoming a river.
Ask me how we got out 10,000th paying customer next year.
P.S. For the general question of 'how do I get my first 10/100 users' I recently wrote this blog
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Really interesting regarding your decision to go freemium. Often the prevailing advice is that freemium is more trouble than it's worth, but it seems to be working great for you.
I'm actually about togo in the opposite direction and switch to a 14 day trial...
Currently my trial has no time limit, just a usage limit where you get X credits. My problem is I see a huuuuge lag between people signing up and using up their X free credits, sometimes it's months. I feel like a time limit would help accelerate this decision making process... but perhaps I'm wrong. Any thoughts on this logic?
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To give some context to that: we decided to do this after reviewing an absolute heap of usage data that we had gathered as usage increased on the product. We supplemented it with user feedback about how and why usage was blooming.
We took that information and decided to make a small bet on the freemium model. We're just about to raise our prices too and one of the reasons is because we've seen enough momentum on conversions that we're testing higher pricing.
Your business is different and really exciting (I've been following as you've been developing it).
I'd look at three data points to start with, if I were you:
- How quickly after signing up to try out the product do your users integrate the API? You say it's often huge – if you haven't already done so, it's worth checking that out on a chart of some kind.
- How technical are the people who (and take these as individuals if they're not the same person): i) wants to use the product ii) has the budget to buy the product and iii) needs to integrate the product
- What is the key conversion event? Is it the integration? Is it the generation of x images? And how quickly can you get them to hit that.
I would definitely test your assumptions on the free trial especially if you have only 14 days and people sometimes take much longer to see success.
One thing you could do is focus on decreasing the length of time that it takes to get people to the key conversion event instead of changing the business model.
I'd be happy to chat this through some more if you want? Ping me a zoom link and we can hop on a call (I'm @iammarcthomas on Twitter – my DMs are open)
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thanks for this. yes I suppose I'm being a bit lazy and applying a brute force tactic that may or may not work! I already know that my key conversion event is when a user generates more than 25 images out of their free credits - my focus should definitely be more on moving them towards that target, rather than putting a time limit in. But this is of course much more difficult :)
You've definitely given me some food for thought.
I appreciate the offer for the call - might take you up on it but also it's good to ask / respond publicly in case others might find this useful!
Just one more thing if you don't mind, along with switching to a no-trial model did you also at the same time implement a lot of UX changes to help users down your conversion event path? Like encouraging them to make their first survey, telling them how to distribute it etc. I read the blog post but couldn't see any detail on this.
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Make small bets and stack them when you see the payoff 🙌
Re: UX changes — we do this iteratively. The one thing we did add was a banner on the report screen that says ‘you’re missing out on x responses. Click here to choose a paid plan. ’ once they get more than 10.
We tested three (?) variations of that in series.
Alongside that we made changes to the lifecycle marketing. Users get an email once they hit 10 responses and that differs depending on a bunch of different factors.
Now that I’m explaining this, I think I might do a post on it soon :)
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please do! and thanks for the response :)
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That was a great breakdown. I have that value prop post bookmarked for later as well. Thanks Marc.
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Wow, thanks for the information. Great work Marc - clearly well deserved.
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Cheers Pip!
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Congrats Marc! Your story is inspiring.
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Thanks! Welcome to IH!
BTW – I checked out your site and had an idea. I know you didn't ask for this but thought it might be helpful. If it's not, sorry! Here's a loom I shot for you.
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Thanks very much Marc! Your idea is great! I've been asked also by other makers to change the hero image into something more useful. This demo video/gif will be a cool insight. Thanks a lot.
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Awesome milestone! Congrats – keep it up :)
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Thanks Tom! Is Site Command still going? Looks good. I just had a nightmare with construction contractors!
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Yes it is!
I'm actually in the process of pivoting the positioning a little bit right now, then will follow up with another round of leads. It turns out the folks who are getting the most value out of Site Command are only using 50% of the functionality: The side that manages the contractors <> customer tasks, like change orders and material selections. So I'm going all in on that.
I'm sorry about your contracting experience –– what happened there?
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A terrible communicator as a project manager (not me, lol) who couldn't accept responsibility when things went wrong. Unfortunately, by the time major stuff was going wrong, the job was far progressed and our money was locked in to finishing the job with their company.
I would say there's definitely room for a tool that helps customers protect their budgets better in the face of unequally distributed information.
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