Welcome back to our monthly update for SiteBuddy, where we show you the ups, downs, and how-tos of building a software business from scratch.
In case you’re new: SiteBuddy is an open startup. That means almost everything about our company is accessible to the public. If you’d like to learn more about us, hear why we’re open, and get our juicy numbers, check the About page.
Let’s jump right in. You can read the blog version below or watch the video version here:
Big Fat Update
If SaaS businesses are cars, we have beaten the Joneses. We now have a software so sexy that it’s fit to be in a Tai Lopez video.
Haven’t seen the update yet? Go to your login page and feast your eyes.
Here’s a quick peak of the new screen:
This is the new dashboard screen.
The old dashboard looked fine, but dated:
The change came with some nice goodies for you. You now get better reporting on your pages, on the links you are using, on your tags, and on the products you’re linking to.
Go play around in the new dashboard a bit. We’re especially proud of the tables.
We’ll be releasing some tutorials and how-tos over the next few weeks. Keep an eye out for those. Let us know if a specific guide would be helpful for you.
Now let’s chat about the juicy stuff. We’ll get started with our key metrics.
Key Metrics
Revenue
December was a month with a lot of good things happening.
Our MRR shot up big time. And it just so happened to go right along with our UI update.
Our MRR is the main metric we track, so we’re super excited to see this type of growth.
We haven’t done a product-market fit survey yet, but we think we’re pretty close to a good place.
Using SiteBuddy as a tool for due diligence has also had a positive impact on our MRR.
We’ve started using SiteBuddy in Facebook groups when people are looking to buy or sell sites.
There’s a huge need for a tool to do due diligence for buyers. SiteBuddy is the perfect tool for buyers to find low hanging fruit and for helping sellers see that they can increase their revenue and sale price with a few fixes.
Overall, a great month for our MRR at SiteBuddy.
Users
At the end of December we had 684 total users. This is up 10% from 620 that we had in November. Not bad growth for most businesses, but we’re looking for more than 10% MoM…
100x that would be good :D
Churn, Revenue Per User, ARR, & Other Metrics
We’ve talked about churn in past updates. Just last month our churn got me as riled up as a Baptist at a gay convention.
The data was on my side: people were cancelling in droves. Our churn sucked:
We were losing 26% of customers per month?
Aw naww
Naaaawwww.
December changed my tune:
A 68% drop in churn is a big jump in the right direction. It just speaks to the fact what we don’t have enough data for good numbers here.
I’ll start caring about churn again in September. That will be 1 year from when we got our first customer.
It’s a similar story for other metrics like ARR, average revenue per user, quick ratio, and the other things you see on our open metrics dashboard.
We’ll have more data soon.
Expenses
Our expenses aren’t too high, but we’re a long way from profitable.
Features & Development
New User Inferface
It’s official: SiteBuddy 1.0 is live and kickin’.
Everything looks different. Your home page shows you the data that matters. Your Links, Products, and Disclaimers pages show you the relevant data and help you fix it.
Go sign in and take a look. Here’s a quick sneak peek at what you’ll see:
And with this update has come plenty of bugs…
Part-Time Exterminator
Conor has taken up residence as our part-time exterminator. He’s still killing bugs wherever they might hide (and they are hiding in many places).
In December Conor worked hard to make SiteBuddy the best tool it can be. We launched the new design for SiteBuddy and it came with plenty of problems. We expected it, so no worries.
Marketing
Due Diligence-ing
December was the month where we started using SiteBuddy for due diligence.
A lot of this happened through the Website.Investing.io newsletter. Our buddy Colin Ma has been using SiteBuddy for due diligence on website deals.
We’ve also started sharing SiteBuddy in Facebook groups with buyers and sellers. We find a seller, look at their asset, and give it a scan with SiteBuddy.
This provides value to the seller by making the asset more sellable (giving low-hanging fruit links to the buyer) or by increasing the valuation (after fixing problems him or herself)
This has been super well received so far and we’re excited to keep it up.
Cold Outreach Be Broke
We’ve been trying cold outreach for a while and the system hasn’t been working well.
We’ve sent 3369 emails letting site owners know that they are missing money. We offer each one of these people a coupon for a free month of SiteBuddy.
0 people have used those coupons.
Ouch.
We’ve stopped cold outreach. People aren’t finding value in our approach and we don’t want to spam anyone.
We might revisit this in future months.
Guest Posts Incoming
Our awesome friends have allowed us to guest post on their blogs. You’ll be seeing us mentioned in a few different places coming up soon.
Future Plans
Product & Development
Some exciting things on our roadmap. January might be a lot of bug fixes, but come February/March we’re looking to add:
- Use for all Amazon locales
- Support for using your own Amazon API
- Uptime monitoring for websites
- Monitoring other affiliate programs (Rakuten, Clickbank, CJ, ShareASale, etc.)
- Recommending other affiliate products for you
Anything else you’d like to see here? ;)
Marketing
First on the docket is finishing guest posts for our marketing campaigns.
We’re going to be reaching out to our list to conduct our first UX reviews. We’d love to see how you’re using the site and if we can make it better for you.
We’re also going to start collecting more testimonials and listing them on our page. The more videos, the better ;)
And we’re starting YouTube. Wish us luck.
Conclusion
December was a fun month where we got to work and saw some growth.
What are your thoughts?