🔎 Visitors: 13,900 (+49%)
👋 New Users: 273 (+ 35%)
🤝 New Customers: 15 (+140%)
💔 Churn: 5 (-54%)
💰 MRR: $4937 (+22%)
💵 Revenue: $5100 (+7%)
What did we do this month?
As we mentioned in previous open reports, we are really focused on SEO.
What this means is that we want to write more quality content on different topics around web scraping / extracting data from the web.
Pierre has a strong Python background, and I have a Java background. The thing is, we wanted to write about web scraping with R, Node.js , Ruby…
So in May, we decided to hire our first freelancers to work on technical content.
We posted a listing on dev.to , asked our friends / Linkedin / Twitter, and we were surprised by the number of emails we received.
🤝 After a few Zoom interviews, we hired three different content writers, and we are really happy about the content they wrote. Time will tell if these blog posts perform well, both in terms of traffic and conversion. Here is an example of a blog post: https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-r/
The other big milestone this month was the migration of our infrastructure from Heroku to CleverCloud.
Heroku is great and saved us a lot of time in the beginning. But there are some annoying technical limitations, for example, the HTTP requests have a 30 seconds timeout on the Heroku router, and we needed to increase this timeout to at least 60 seconds.
🇫🇷 CleverCloud is a French company, and it’s like the French Heroku. Their support is great, it’s flexible, and the price is much more competitive than Heroku. The setup is very Heroku-like, Pierre did this alone in a few days 💪
In terms of metrics, we made a lot of SEO progress this month, old articles rank better, and new ones are starting to rank too so that’s great. The sign up also increased significantly, which means that the visitors we’re bringing to the blog are converting.
About the trial-to-paying conversion rate, we were really worried in April because it was really low (~2.4%), this month is more than double this number at (~5.4%).
We don’t really explain these numbers, is it Covid-19 related, did we broke something…?
In March 1st we increased our minimum monthly pricing from $9/mo to $29/mo, and we didn’t see any effect on the conversion rate. It’s possible that the effect was delayed since our average sales cycle is 18 days. 🤷♂️
There will be some exciting things coming in June, new content, new proxy offer, and maybe a new product… 🙈 Stay tuned!