Disclaimer: we forgot to publish the March open report. The variation you are seeing below a computed from March.
🎉 Seed Round: 1
🔎 Visitors: 9,302 (- 25%)
👋 New Users: 202 (+ 5%)
🤝 New Customers: 5 (-75%)
💔 Churn: 11 (-45%)
💰 MRR: $4038 (-10%)
💵 Revenue: $4759 (-6%)
First, let's talk about TinySeed 🌾.
We are thrilled to join TinySeed batch 2 and to spend the year with such good company. With ScrapingBee the goal has always been to build a strong, sustainable (understand profitable) mid-size company. This vision does not align very well with traditional VC but it does with those new kinds of funds such as TinySeed.
(If you want to learn more about this new way of doing venture capitalism, you can read this nice article: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/345866)
I'll probably go deeper about the how, why, and what of that fundraising in a future blog post but basically it all comes down to two things.
💰 First, this fundraising multiplied by 4 our runway. Meaning that we are now managing the company with much more serenity and less stress than 3 months ago. For example this month, we did -10% MRR, I know a few months ago this fact would have taken a big toll on my sleep quality.
Now we can take our time and think mid-term/long-term. The peace of mind that comes with this fundraising is invaluable to us.
😮 Then there is loneliness. Since we've began our Indie Hacking journey 18 months ago it's been hard to find external help. Sure you can always ask for some advice about very particular topic here and there, IH being a cool place to do that, but with TinySeed this is different as you are now part of a group of people strongly incentivized in your success (investors). Basically we:
That's is about the TinySeed 🌾, let's now talk about the 🐝.
Basically everything looks good beside trial to paid conversion rate. This one as completely plummeted in April. The simplest explanation is COVID19 and we know for sure that at least 3 "would be" big customers have not paid because of this.
We'll see in May how things go.
Product-wise March was a "tidy-up" month. The initial version of ScrapingBee has been built in less than 6 weeks and of course, some parts of the product were far from being perfect.
Before going further in the development of the API we felt it was a good time to clean things up a bit, and so we did:
We've also decided about our next 4-6 months marketing strategy and it feels good to have a precise vision of what we want to do. This I can't share right now for obvious reasons, but soon enough I will 😉.
Next month we will go back improving and adding features to our products.
And that's it,
Happy Scraping