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$1 Million in ARR

Yesterday we crossed over the mythical $83,333 MRR threshold that we'd long dreamed about.

When we set the goal of hitting $1M ARR, it seemed incredibly audacious. There was a very low chance we'd actually hit it. I had a few different financial projections, and none of those figures would get us there. At the time, our churn and growth numbers had us plateauing at a much lower threshold.

Some things that helped get us here:
(1) Running a broader range of growth experiments
(2) Revisiting pricing plans regularly
(3) Reducing churn by letting users pause their plans
(4) Some luck - podcasting has continued to grow as an industry and we've been very fortunate to have a growing TAM

  1. 1

    Wow, congrats! Can you tell me more about #3? For example, how long can they pause it for? And do you have any numbers around how much this decreased Wavve's churn?

    1. 1

      Thanks @IndieJames!

      Customers can pause for 1 or 2 months at a time. Pausing is particularly important to our market, because a lot of podcasts are seasonal shows.

      As far as the impact on Wavve's churn rate, the pause feature had an immediate impact on our Customer Churn (decreased by 2-3%).

      It took a bit longer for Revenue Churn to decrease by the same amount, because while a paused customer is still a customer, you are temporarily missing out on that monthly revenue. Since paused customers reactivate faster and with greater frequency than canceled users, Revenue Churn should roughly mirror the decrease in Customer Churn rate.

      1. 1

        Awesome, thanks Nick! One more question: Are users automatically unpaused after 1-2 months or do they do they have to opt back in?

        1. 2

          That's correct. The subscription resumes on their renewal date once the pause period finishes.

  2. 1

    Congratulations, Nick.

    Besides the reasons you mentioned helped you get there. Have your ads on Facebook & Instagram helped too?

    I've been shown some of them and noticed you've been running them since February. So have they?

    1. 1

      Thanks!

      We've been lucky to have a product that shares well on social media so organic growth has always been strong. We wanted to run more growth experiments in 2020 and kicked off some paid ad campaigns in January (including Facebook). So far the results have been pretty good, but paid acquisition still only accounts for 10% or less of our overall growth. Right now I'm viewing these paid strategies as more of a supplement to growth than something we need to rely on.

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