$4.7K MRR
by John BorakPacketriot has been growing steadily through 2020-2021 and we've hit a pretty big milestone with $4.7K MRR. I'm hoping we can hit $5k by the end of the month!
The revenue for Packetriot comes from a few different sources. The first are monthly and annual subscribers to our SaaS. We host and manage tunneling servers that allow our users to host HTTPS and TCP application servers from any network, allowing developers to host and test their software as they add new features or to test bug fixes. Others use our SaaS to simplify self-hosting software using their residential ISP.
Another source of revenue is software licensing which is where much of our revenue comes from. Spokes is the name of the network tunneling server that we built and deploy to stand up our own tunneling network for our SaaS. Spokes customers use it to implement hybrid cloud strategies for their software deployments since it can connect software components running in containers, VMs or bare-metal.
Spokes is used as an alternative to VPNs to connect software behind corporate firewalls. VPNs are difficult to configure and maintain and also modify a hosts networking substantially where-as the client to Spokes is a simple background service that create a secure reverse TLS tunnel. It doesn't impact the network of the host and just provides access to the software/services running on it.
So far our ARR is almost 7x that of 2020 up til this point in the year!! Subscriptions to our SaaS is growing slowly since we have many competitors in that space but software licensing and working with companies and enterprises has helped us develop a niche and grow this area of the business.
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Hey. Nice story. I am interested in how much time you have to spend monthly working to keep MRR at that level? Cheers!
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It varies really but overall the amount of time I spend each month goes down.
There are some months where the amount of time I invest is high because I'm implementing a complex feature. It might be like 40-50 hours. Then there are others, like this past one, where the level of effort is fairly low ~8-10 hours.
The SaaS is pretty much complete, just maintenance. Features in our Spokes product is driven by enterprise customers. As we've acquired more customers and added new features per request, we have less work to do with the next. At this point Spokes has become a very mature product.
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Congratulations! Well done:)
I see your comments above about features for Spokes. How are you capturing customer feedback and decide what features to build each month?
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Thanks Ruben!
For my enterprise customers it's easy. I have many conversations with them and the sales process can take a long time from weeks to months. But during this time I provide trials and try to help them integrate Spokes into the solution they want to build. If there are gaps, we identify them and I make decisions on whether to implement them or not.
I tend to implement features that will make the potential customers life easy and encourage them to license Spokes. The requests are usual enhancements of what is already there. Requests have consistently made the product better too so I just look in the past and see how much progress has been made so I commit to enhancements often.
I read in @arvidkahl book "Zero to Sold" that you want to become part of the customers process, indispensable. For a software business that sells annual licenses this so critical. So if I can make enhancements that allows Spokes to become more of a core component then I do it.
For my SaaS users its much different. I rarely get communications from those users. I receive support requests every once in a while but in general its rare.
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Makes sense! I think you are nailing the approach for enterprise, they need to be engaged throughout :)
For your SaaS users, let me know if you want to get more feedback from them and take a smart approach of adopting their requests - without overburden yourself or let them down. Can show you some examples of how I do that for Boei.help
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