ReviewTycoon

The documentation of our journey with ReviewTycoon on IH is not to get any new customers. It's to learn from other IndieHackers and share our knowledge with the community.

But last week we got an email from a potential customer who read about our software on IH and was interested to learn more about building his own review sites.

After a short product demonstration on Skype he was enthousiastic and today he became a customer. How cool is that!

Thanks for your trust in us and we will do everything in our power to make you a happy customer :)

First we only had the option for customers to have 5 review sites through our software. Now we have a couple of customers who need more than that so we introduced the Enterprise and Tycoon plans, with 20 and 75 review sites. Inmediately we had a first customer upgrade plans increasing our ARPU.

We decided to skip the option to pay for the whole year for your ReviewTycoon account. We noticed a high churn rate for customers who had to decide to pay for a whole new year. We now focus on monthly payments and keep all customers happy with paying a little money every month.

We decided to require credit card information on signup for ReviewTycoon. The leads that are signing up are mostly companies who know and trust us and are serious about starting building review sites. Requiring cc information will decrease time spend on non-converting customers and will increase lead to paid customer ratio.

After extensive research we decided to have a 14 day trial period for ReviewTycoon. Although our software is not easily understood and you won't have immediate earnings from building review sites, we think that extending the trial period will not solve that and will only lessen the amount of pressure to start using the product. If you haven't tried ReviewTycoon within 14 days, you won't try it within 30 or 60 days.

Instead we're sending out a message at the end of the trial period to ask if you want to extend your trial for free for another 2 weeks.

We raised the price of ReviewTycoon from 79 EUR per month to 99 EUR. This gives us more margin to offer discounts. Customers tend not to focus on the costs but more on the time it takes them.

Looking forward seeing the results of this increase in price.

By turning some leads I gathered from the AWE show in Barcelona into paying customers, we've reached our first 1000 euro MRR!

Next couple of weeks I have 2 more tradeshows coming up and managed to schedule about 25 meetings with potential customers for ReviewTycoon.

Besides the meetings with potential customers I've also setup as many meetings as possible with existing paying customers. I want to know what they like and don't like about the software and how I can get them more involved with the product.

To thank the IndieHackers community for their support since the start of ReviewTycoon, I'm offering all IH members 50% off for the first whole year of using ReviewTycoon. Just mention IndieHackers during the signup process and I will take care of the discount. You'll have a 30 day free trial as well :)