Respond Flow
Just text. It's easier.
It's a big day for the team! We just converted the customer that pushed us over the $2k monthly recurring revenue limit!! It's crazy to think that just 7 months ago we got our first paying customer.
None of this would be possible without an aligned and talented team, couldn't be more grateful to get the chance to build this with some of my best friends and roommates.
Some stats so far:
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $2,017.50
- Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): $24,210.00
- Cumulative Monthly Growth Rate (CMGR): 59.61%
- Average Revenue Per User: $63.50/m
- Subscription Churn: 7.4%
- SaaS Quick Ratio: 9.89
We stay numbers-driven through using Profitwell (free tool) to set goals and track progress. What do you all use to track your growth rate?
For the last 10 weeks, our team has been participating in Y Combinator's Startup School. It was incredible being paired up with other founders to discuss problems and practice our pitch.
Our key takeaways:
- Visual cues is important to get true feedback. Someone's facial expression tells more than their politeness.
- Cross-startup participation is invaluable to your mental health. (i.e. why we love being apart of IH)
- Take yourself out of your startup for a few minutes each week and measure yourself.
- You can always learn more.
We just launched on BetaList last night, and now we are featured as a "Trending Startup"!!! We are incredibly humbled by the amount of support we have received and would like to thank everyone who helped us be selected!
We are preparing to record our stats over the next 30 days so that we can share the results with you all.
But here's a shortlist of results we got from receiving 22 hearts and 14 comments on BetaList within the first day:
- More than 3X our web traffic, from 42 to 131!
- 9 new Facebook followers
- 8 new Twitter followers
- 10 new Instagram followers
- 5 new LinkedIn followers
- No new signups as of yet, but have received 4 emails and several questions through Intercom.
It was Friday night at 10pm CST while the team was out at a bar we received a notification from Twitter. It was from BetaList, saying “you have been featured on BetaList”.
We dropped everything, Ubered home right away and sat in complete silence the entire ride home frantically sharing the link to our BetaList page.
If you would like to check it out, click the link below. We would love to hear your feedback!
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Congratulations @MartinLien !
How is it going overall? I'm also planning to launch there :)-
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Thank you @jpsarmiento!
It's going great! To date(less than a week in), we've already gotten 741 website visitors directly from BetaList as a result. Probably even more direct searches as well. Definitely worth the effort!
I'd recommend being aggressive on social media and reaching out to your contacts the day of. We did that and managed to be the highest upvoted company of the day, which made us featured as a "Trending Startup". That resulted in getting re-tweeted by BetaList, featured in their email, and ultimately listed at the top of their website for three full days. This maintained our web traffic as if it was launch day for three consecutive days while we were listed at the top of the site.
Good luck on your launch!
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Congratulations!
Would love to know how much traffic it brings to your site :) Keep us updated.
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Appreciate the support @volkandkaya!
We plan on making a medium blog about the results of the launch after we have been featured for 7 days, so we have some exact traceable numbers for signups and traffic!
Ill make sure to share it as soon as we have some numbers!
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We launched our first referral program for Respond Flow with the help of @peterdaggett! We decided to add a referral program with hopes of finding another growth avenue, and have already gotten our first partner.
However, as this is our first referral program we would love to get some feedback on what you all think about the terms. Offering too much, too little, or just right?
- $15 recurring commission for the entire lifetime of the customer
- $100 bonus if customer upgrades to 5 seats
- $250 bonus if customer upgrades to 10 seats (not enterprise)
- 10% of the value of the contract bonus for enterprise customers
- $25 recruitment bonus
Would love to hear what you all think since it's still early in the program!
I woke up to an email from BetaList saying: "We are happy to inform you that your startup Respond Flow qualifies to get featured on BetaList."!
Now to start preparations. We will plan our social posts, optimize our landing page, and also intend to post a blog post about our end results from the launch!
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Congrats! That's always fun.
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Good luck !
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Thank you, Michael!
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Congrats! Post your link so we can all check it out?
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Thank you, Troy! We are officially approved but we still need to wait for up to 30 days before they actually share us.
I'll definitely make sure to send the link when they post us though!
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I'm not familiar with BetaList, is there a reason why it takes 30 days?
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BetaList is similar to ProductHunt in that they get so many applicants that they cannot just post every new company that is approved right away. If they did that they would have some days with 25 companies and some with 2 companies.
So they basically put companies on their scheduled posting calendar once approved to ensure that the startups get a fair chance of exposure. They also offer premium paid plans where you can skip the line, but I opted for the free plan.
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For the last few months, Austin has been handling all of the development. This has naturally limited the growth and development of the platform.
However, that is no more... Since Austin's specialty is back-end, we decided to hire on a front-end developer to assist in our increased feature requests.
Our entire team is ecstatic about the added efficiency and enthusiasm this brings!
We have experimented with various growth experiments over the last few weeks, one of which was applying to be featured on a few of the Startup Directories out there. In total, we applied to 13.
The first to accept us was Betabound. Betabound is a website that lets companies who are looking for beta users get connected with early adopters.
And we had some success! We have gotten over 25 website visitors per week from being listed there, and ultimately converted 5 of them to users.
Would recommend applying to be listed there!
Today one of our first trial customers for Respond Flow converted to paid! I noticed when I got the email from Stripe that said "Payment of $45". It felt amazing!
It took longer than I wanted, but the extended closed beta time helped us get to a place where we are now confident we can scale.
Now we just need 9 more of these to reach break-even!
From January until roughly March, it was mostly just me doing market research, building out the idea, and building a simple landing page to help see if there would be anyone other than me that thought this idea might become something.
In March I brought on Austin to help build the initial prototype, which has been godsent! And now we just grew again!!
After finishing our MVP and starting our closed beta this month, we decided we needed to talk to more customers and hear back directly from them. We also needed to do more work on growth, so we invited Matt onboard!
We also invited Caleb on board to help out with our content creation and finally get our website up to standard.
We're all excited to see where this could go!
1 Comment
congrats!