Switched to Stripe Checkout; $12K MRR
by Matt BastaThis is a great milestone for me, because it's another two-for-one! This past week, Pinecast crossed $12k MRR. Growth has accelerated dramatically in the past two months, which is awesome to see, and I'm deeply grateful to the community for their support.
Today, I rewrote Pinecast's upgrade flow to remove our bespoke Stripe Elements integration and switch to Stripe's new hosted Checkout flow. When Pinecast first launched, it ran on Stripe's legacy checkout product, but I switched to Elements a few years back. Switching to the new Checkout offering has been on my list of things I'd like to do, but until recently it hasn't been possible because it didn't support coupons.
This changed recently: new Checkout now supports coupons on subscriptions (albeit, before a Checkout Session is created). Removing Elements and all of the weird error handling from the front-end code has allowed me to cut out hundreds of lines of code and a ton of complexity. The Checkout UI also satisfies a number of customer requests about coupons, which allows me to clean up my backlog a bit! I'm really pleased with the results.
The switch to Checkout also now lays the groundwork for enabling Stripe's chargeback protection, which will put my mind at ease for the future!
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This is a great milestone - congratulations, Matt! Would you mind sharing how you market Pinecast? Seeing you're in a very competitive market, getting to $12k MRR is truly an astounding feat to achieve. Thanks so much in advance!
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I do exactly zero marketing! It's entirely word of mouth. I have a fairly generous referral program that gives customers account credit for sign-ups, but otherwise there's zero in the way of marketing spend.
The biggest things that have driven this organic growth have been responsive customer support and keeping really tight on product quality.
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Wow, that's even more amazing! And thank you very much for sharing this.
So, a generous referral program + responsive customer support + high product quality — I'll keep that in mind!
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Hey Matt, would be curious to hear if you noticed any impact on sales or any other pros/cons to the switch. Going to be adding Stripe integration to templates on divjoy.com and want to make sure I’m giving people the best possible setup. And congrats on hitting $12k/month!
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Thanks! It'll be very unscientific, since I'm not doing an A/B test, but I will try to report back if I see any meaningful change in conversion. I do expect to see some improvement since I get additional payment methods for free.
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Awesome! Yeah, I'd be really interested to hear if you see anything significant. Checkout showing local payment methods seems like a pretty killer feature.
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Awesome milestone and great to see some notes about more Checkout adoption. I’m a big fan of Pinecast ;-) too fwiw.
I have been scoping a transition to Checkout for Plink (plinkhq.com) as well. Have liked issuing licenses keys from Gumroad subscriptions (then used for account management), but may figure out something better for auth instead. Recent improvements to Checkout look great!
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Congrats on the 5 figure club! We actually just migrated away from Stripe Checkout. We replaced it with Service Bot, and have noticed an Uptick in revenue as now people don't have to leave our page to pay.
Keep on hustling, and good luck!
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Thanks! I use Checkout for a few reasons:
- I'm a Stripe employee by day :P
- Taking advantage of Chargeback Protection is prudent for me during the pandemic. The time savings alone when responding to disputes—not that there are many now—is well worth the effort.
- I use Stripe Connect to pay out my users, and use Checkout already for those folks' transactions. Being able to have a single unified stack (e.g., webhooks, FE code) keeps things clean.
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