Savannah CRM

Released a new feature to let community managers track prospective future contributions in addition to the past contributions they already could.

This new feature is the first in a new effort to make community management a pro-active, deliberate practice.

https://www.savannahhq.com/2022/08/09/driving-community-contribution-opportunities/

For over a year Savannah has used a flat monthly fee subscription model. This meant that revenue didn't increase with usage or the value customers were getting out of it. Having such a low (far below competitors) flat price prevented expansion of existing business by continuing to drive value to customers.

With the new pricing model, you pay based on how many people use it, so as you get more value out of it, Savannah gets more income. Hopefully this will result in more growth from existing customers in addition to new ones.

https://www.savannahhq.com/2022/07/02/new-pricing-model/

Today we announced our 2-way integration with Salesforce.com allowing community managers to provide sales and support staff with valuable insights gathered from the community.

https://www.savannahhq.com/2021/10/11/savannah-crm-integration-with-salesforce-com/

This also brings in a new "Enterprise" price tier that unlocks this new feature.

One of the things Savannah has struggled with is getting in front of potential new users. While our current customers are happy using it, they didn't really have an opportunity to share it with their colleagues or industry peers because all of the relevant screens were behind a login. I wanted them to show off their community dashboards, but hadn't given them a way to do so.

At the same time, I and other users were taking screenshots of dashboards to share metrics internally, and several people had requested the ability to make that information directly viewable by people without an account.

We took that feedback and need and developed an exciting new feature in Savannah CRM: Shared Dashboards.

A shared dashboard is a publicly visible version of an internal dashboard, without private or sensitive information, that can be shared and viewed by anybody in the world. They receive constant updates, and use the same filter settings as the internal dashboards do, allowing community builders to customize them to show exactly the kind of data they want.

And to help spread awareness, they all have a "Powered by Savannah CRM" placed visibly but not intrusively at the bottom of each dashboard, with a link where viewers can find out more about us. It's my hope that this boosts our word of mouth growth, and I'll be tracking traffic coming from these dashboards as more people use and publish them.

Bootstrapping a company can be costly, and not everybody has significant cash reserves to burn through getting a new product off the ground.

When launching Savannah CRM this weighed heavily on my mind. It was supposed to eventually give me financial independence, eventually, so going into debt or draining my savings was the opposite of what I wanted to do. I was willing to put my money into getting it off the ground, but I wasn't willing to gamble my financial future on it.

So from the start I had an eye on the break-even point, where the cost of running the business was lower than the revenue it was bringing in. This included all the AWS hosting fees, as well as administrative costs for Google Apps and other expenses related to operating a business in general. The best decision I made early on was to build for efficiency and scale.

They say that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but in my case it's paid off. By keeping resource usage low, and ensuring that the operating costs will stay below revenue as the business scales, Savannah was able to achieve that critical break-even point just 4 months after gaining its first customer. This also means that it can increase resource usage whenever customer demand requires it, and still be able to grow net revenue month over month.

If you're bootstrapping a SaaS, find out what your break-even point is early on, and build for that. Calculate how your resource needs will increase as you add customers, and make sure it's not going to cost you more to operate than it will bring in! Optimizing for break-even will give you free cash sooner rather than later, which you can turn around and invest into acquiring new customers knowing that you can scale profitably.

We've doubled monthly revenue every month since our first customer signup in March!

With no marketing, relying solely on word of mouth and delivering the best solution to community builders, we're proving our value each and every day.

To help customers better understand the advantages they can get from Savannah CRM, we've introduced pages for three key personas:

1. Community Managers

Shows the tools that Savannah CRM provides for tracking members, improving those relationships, and showing the value they bring to the organization

https://www.savannahhq.com/community-managers/

2. Sales Professionals

Highlights the insights available to sales teams about the interactions their prospects are already having with their community.

https://www.savannahhq.com/sales-professionals/

3. Customer Success & Support

How Savannah CRM allows them to expand the reach of their support efforts, and augment their efforts with the knowledge snd contributions from members of the community

https://www.savannahhq.com/customer-success/

After soft-launching our new lower-priced Individual plan last week, we've already had our first subscriber!

By serving community managers who are trying to manage and grow a community by themselves, we're giving a larger audience the option of using Savannah CRM to help them do their jobs better.

Next week we will have an official announcement on our Blog and send out an email to users who have signed up but not yet subscribed.

After a lot of feedback from user and cost determinations, we're introducing tiered pricing to accommodate communities of different sizes and needs.

The new pricing will make Savannah CRM more affordable for solo community managers, trying to run everything themselves, scaling up to larger teams as they need the extra capabilities.

The new prices are:

$9/month for Individual accounts

$49/month for Team accounts

And, coming soon, $99/month for Enterprise accounts, which will support connecting to sales and support CRMs

One common piece of feedback we've received from current and potential users is that they wanted to know more about how Savannah CRM could and should be used to help them manager their community. So we've added a series of pages highlighting Savannah's top features.

Take the tour today!

https://www.savannahhq.com/tour/