2 months ago in March (which seems like 10 years ago now) I launched a major new product positioning, turning my product into an API.
In universal product language, my original product served one particular use-case. By turning it into an API it could not only serve that one particular use-case, but also serve a bunch of other use-cases... arguably turning it into a more valuable product.
In March I saw quite a bit of churn. I attribute this to the double-whammy of the COVID19 media peak putting lots of people into disaster-prevention mode, plus the effect of the API repositioning alienating some of my existing customers. (btw, the entire original product is still available to all previous customers, I haven't sunset it, it just lives under its own section of my app now)
The good news is, I made back the loss in MRR shortly after, and have been growing since. Bannerbear now has 25 monthly subscribers and has taken in 17 "one time payments" which is an option I introduced shortly after launching the API.
So I'm pretty happy. I think repositioning into an API has been a really positive move and it's also given me as the product owner a really clear path of where to take things going forward to provide the most value to customers.
What's been the most interesting in the last 2 months has been the response from the #nocode community. I launched a Zapier integration about a month ago and that has been quite successful, as not only are customers signing up and using that integration to automate parts of their business, but people are also out there writing tutorials and giving me a bit of free marketing, which I did not expect at all.
So that's definitely an area I'm going to explore going forwards.
Although 25 subscribers might seem small I've definitely noticed a positive mental boost from reaching this milestone. Honestly getting here was harder than I thought, but now I feel it's easier for me to rationalise the journey ahead - if I can get to 25 subscribers, I can get to 50. If I can get to 50, I can get to 100. And so on.