June Retrospective

June is traditionally one of our slowest months. Why am I mentioning this? Because I think it really important for people to be aware of their sales numbers.

Certainly, during your first year, you may not have the historical data to have such visibility. I get that. But if you’re into your second year or longer, you should be aware of the waxes and wanes of your business and not caught off guard by a “bad month”.

Even with bad months, once you’re into the second year, you get the opportunity to do year over year growth metrics instead of just month over month.

That all said, this month actually started out extremely slow, to the point that we were tracking at the same rate as June 2019 at the midpoint of the month. Given the exceptional growth we’ve experienced this year, that was quite a bit of a downer.

As I suspect many Indie Hackers experience, a bad month, even when you’re expecting it, can be a kick to your morale. Every week I track my morale and that was definitely evident this month.

Fortunately, the slow start turned around in the last few weeks and we ended the month strong as the SECOND worst month of 2020 for us. As “bad” as the month was, that’s still a substantial ~200% year over year gain.

I’ve mentioned this before, but you need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture sometimes.

So I know everybody is wondering what changed that would have turned the month around. I suspect that the major contributing factor is that we’re at the end of the quarter.

Being a development tool, we tend to have a lot of corporate and enterprise customers that live and die by the budget. We tend to see spikes around the end of the quarter, but as mentioned, usually not June (end of Q2).

The other thing that happened this month, is that we launched a brand new endpoint to our service, that makes it easier to calculate the number of business days into the future.

While it’s hard to say if it’s definitely had a positive impact on revenue, it’s definitely helped position us as more of a calendar resource and less as a data as a service provider.

We have the data, but the data as a whole is a hard commodity to sell. People don’t necessarily grok that the data changes regularly and that doing things like grabbing 1-5 years of data up front is just a horrible way to go about things.

By positioning more as a calendar resource, with functionality that utilizes the data we’re aggregating, but providing value without actually serving up holidays directly, we’re able to differentiate ourselves even further from our competitors.

Until next month… stay safe and happy holidays!