Penance
Self-Flagellation As A Service
After months away, we finally have another episode of our podcast out (and more in the hopper).
Broadly, each episode is me and my wife discussing starting a business as a married couple although we don't always get around to talking business. (This time, for example, we got caught up discussing golf.)
October was Penance’s first month of triple-digit revenue! The app grossed $125 for the month before donations, nearly doubling the previous high of $65 in September.
The breakdown
- Total revenue: $125
- Goals created: 8
- Fines paid: 16
- Accounts registered: 10
I attribute the growth, such as it is, to me becoming way more vocal about Penance. Until late September I was head down on feature work and hardly said anything about Penance on the internet. In October I published multiple articles about Penance (mostly on Indiehackers and the blog) and now the homepage gets consistent traffic, although not tons.
Since the app is now firmly in MVP territory, I expect I’ll keep focusing on promotion and allow customer feedback to drive any new features I add in the next quarter or so.
Donations by cause
- National Rifle Association: $37.50
- Black Lives Matter: $15
- Trump Campaign $10
- Direct Relief: $62.50
For those unfamiliar with how Penance works, 50 percent of every fine our customers pay goes to a charity of their choice. While Penance is small, I’m donating the other half to a different charity each month. This month it was Direct Relief.
New features
- “Concierge” onboarding (my wife and are I handling this). My hypothesis is that customers’ success with Penance has a lot to do with how good they are at setting goals. Walking them through the onboarding—even though the app itself is pretty simple—lets me ensure they choose realistic, achievable goals, at least to start.
- Freemium access. Customers can now start tracking their goals and fines without a credit card.
- A billing UI where customers can see their payments over time and which charities they supported.
Originally I didn’t see a path to making Penance freemium. The point of the product is that you pay for your mistakes. If you haven’t provided a credit card, there’s no way to pay, so why bother?
Premium problems
The problem with that approach is that it makes converting visitors almost impossible. The conventional wisdom with online products is that putting a paywall in front of anything will reduce conversion to a small fraction of what it would be otherwise, and that squares with my experience here. I spent the last month posting about Penance around internet, which drove hundreds of visitors to the homepage, and borderline nobody signed up. A couple people did and I am grateful to those folks. But on aggregate the rate of signups was unacceptable.
Penance also faces the problem of being a weird product. Nobody visiting our homepage has used anything like Penance in the past. So it’s unlikely they are taking out their credit cards without first seeing the app and getting an idea for what it does. Freemium lets them do that.
So how does freemium work on Penance?
Although you can still provide a credit at the time you sign up, you can also skip that step and starting tracking your goals and fines without it. If you record a fine, when the bill comes due, instead of charging you for it, Penance sends an email asking if you want to add a card. When you add a card, you have the option to go back and pay old bills, but that’s not required.
Those with cards on file still get charged automatically.
Watch this space for news on whether this approach works out any better.
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Timely question. I’m working on a blog post about this now.
The gist of the answer is: To my mind, Penance succeeds if people find it useful for making and breaking habits. When someone using Penance screws up and pays a fine a couple times en route to ultimately forming a valuable new habit, to me that’s a success, not a failure.
(I’m sure some disagree on that point, but that’s how my target customer would view it.)
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This week we paid our first-ever hate gift donation: $49.89 to Black Lives Matter, via the Black Lives Matter Support Fund at Tides Foundation.
Why The Tides Foundation?
Black Lives Matter is a very pervasive hashtag but—as I now know—not any single organization, which makes donating to the cause damn hard. There are endless charities claiming to support BLM, and cases of people setting up charities using the BLM branding, then siphoning donations off to other random causes.
I have heard the push back that it doesn’t matter where the hate gift money ends up—all that matters is that my users are losing money, and experiencing the motivation that loss inspires. I disagree with that but, even supposing it were true, I want to hold myself to a higher standard. I want my users to pay their hate gifts secure in the knowledge that their money is going to the highest-leverage organization I could find.
Hence, the Tides Foundation, which is currently rated 4/4 on Charity Navigator and has a history of scoring >90/100 for financial responsibility and transparency. Admittedly their board’s salaries are higher than what I consider justifiable for a charity. Even accounting for that, their administrative costs are 12% of revenue which is fair.
If anyone has a better suggestion for a beneficiary of BLM hate gifts, I’m all ears: jordan@penance.app.
Was It Really A Hate Gift?
In fairness to the user(s) who paid this money in the first place, I’ve got no idea whether they meant this as a hate gift. They could be fervent BLM radicals. We accept all types at Penance.
My original concept was that people would feel greater motivation to achieve their goals if they thought their money would go to an organization they “hate.” That’s how my brain works. And I know a few others using the app are using it in the same way.
However my guess is that the average person seeing the option to specify a beneficiary of their fines will choose an organization they agree with. In that case calling this a hate gift is misleading.
Regardless I’m running with the “hate gift” moniker for this feature. It is 100x better branding than calling them charitable donations—or anything in that vein—which you’d forget the moment you heard about it.
What’s Next?
This week I’m rolling out a couple new hate gift beneficiaries, both of them causes that should be particularly inspiring during this election season.
And for the gun nuts in the audience, I’ve checked the numbers, and this week we will pay our first donation to the NRA Foundation.
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They could be fervent BLM radicals
You consider someone who supports the BLM movement as radical?
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Far from it, I'd say support is pretty mainstream, at least among people I know.
But, my point is that people using the feature could run the spectrum from supportive to opposed.
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Timely and clever idea! Also pretty funny. Maybe this can help our country laugh a bit more leading up to the election.
Aside from harassing friends and colleagues to use the app, this is the most public I've been about Penance to date.
Although there are a few key features missing, the core functionality—charging my users money when they record their screw ups—is ready, working, and throwing off monthly revenue in the high two-figures. So, I figure it's time to tell the world about Penance.
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