RankedVote

The efforts made to address churn appear to be working. Plus, increased interest in ranked-choice voting due to the midterm elections is increasing traffic to the site. Steady, modest growth appears to be taking hold. MRR has come off of its $1K baseline in February of this year and has now passed $2K as of August.

Once the switch from usage-based pricing to subscription-based pricing settled out, I could see two things pretty clearly.

1. The subscription based model worked better for the business (higher ARPU) and for customers (increased satisfaction)

2. Churn was through the roof! RankedVote was adding customers at the same rate it was losing them.

The churn issue is somewhat structural to the space. Customers’ needs tend to be periodic as opposed to continual. They may do a team contest once a quarter. Or elect board members once a year. Those focused on voter education are the only ones sticking around for 6+ months.

And, then I realize that while the marketing is less focused on voter education, everything about the in-product experience is saying “this is for voter education.” If you’re running a contest or promotion, you’re not thinking of it as an “election” with “candidates” running for “office.”

So, I launch the ability for users to self-select into what they’re using RankedVote for: making decisions, running contests, educating voters, or something else. Wording and labels change based off of those selections.

New year, new approach. With a product that has proven its ability to scale and a pretty useful feature set, it’s time to take a diligent look at everything related to marketing. I’ve decided to use Demand Curve’s Growth Program to stay true to doing this thing fully as a solopreneur while upleveling my marketing skills.

Over the course of early 2022, I move from a usage-based OR subscription model to a solely subscription-based model. I also test Google Ads (can’t get the unit economics to work out). And, there’s a renewed vigor for SEO (which has been working well all along).

There's also a change in positioning from focusing on "educating voters" to "running contests."

Over the holidays, while taking things easy, my monitoring starts to show a 5-10x increase in traffic. What’s going on? It turns out that a single customer is running a contest with their community to decide what character will be in the next version of a game they’re making. The community is huge. And ultimately, over 64,000 people end up voting.

This is the type of customer I’ve been looking for. It’s outside of the political space. RankedVote is providing massive value. And it’s exposing tens of thousands of people to ranked-choice voting. How to get more of this?

The summer of 2021 was amazing. With increased interest in ranked-choice voting due to NYC’s election, RankedVote experienced increased traffic and business. And, to be a direct part of the voter education in NYC…that’s the whole point of starting this business in the first place!

But, what looked like product-led growth combined with a steady increase in overall awareness turned out to be fleeting. The NYC election was really the driving force. Once that passed, all key metrics (traffic, revenue, users) fell back to a stagnant baseline.

The NYC push led out a fully-fledged feature set for voter education. The Division of Elections in Alaska also organically found RankedVote and is a customer. As are the top electoral reform groups in the space.

BUT, even with a dominant position in that niche…it turns out to be TOO niche. There are only a handful of groups and jurisdictions that are advocating for or implementing ranked-choice voting. Baseline is hanging out at about $1K in revenue per month.

It turns out that having a decent site and SEO (thanks Webflow!) can pay unexpected dividends. The Mayor’s Office in New York City discovered RankedVote when searching for an app to help with voter education ahead of their June Mayoral Primary (the first time ranked-choice voting will be used in America’s largest city).

After a quick exploratory call, it turns out that RankedVote does what they’re looking for. Or, where there are gaps, it can be built over the next couple months. Some key feature enhancements: realistic ballot, support for multiple languages, and scalability.

Woohoo! $100 in monthly revenue (that’s 10 elections at $10 each). The customers still seem to be a bit all over the place…so it’s tough to say “here’s the segment to focus on.” But, it’s great to have a real customer every few days. Inching forward with progress. Learning a bit from each.

Just under 4 months since the site was first made available, I've had enough early users to understand where the gaps in the product are and addressed many of them.

RankedVote users can now control who can vote in their elections, allow for multiple winners, detect if anyone is trying to game the system, share on social media, and more!

The gear now shifts to building out more scalable acquisition models and penetrating verticals where RankedVote appears well-suited.

I'd been running a small drip of Google Adwords campaigns to get a handful of users per day coming to RankedVote. Great for learning, great for surprises.

A Youtube influencer happened to come across RankedVote as a way to engage her audience. She shared a link on her channel. Over the next 24 hours, 1,000 people would vote in her election.

Holy cow!

The whole idea behind RankedVote is to expose the masses to ranked-choice voting. This was the strongest validation yet that it could actually work.

At the time, the focus was on understanding how users were using RankedVote. It was extremely minimal. Many future planned paid features. But mostly a free app to ensure the velocity of learning was as high as possible.

I'd integrated Stripe Checkout the weekend before because it felt like a fun weekend project. The only "gated" feature was the number of candidates you could have an election (up to 5 until you had to "upgrade").

What a rush! Unexpectedly, a person needed 8 candidates in an election and pulled the trigger on a $10 election. First money in the door!