Welcome to our October 2020 monthly update on SiteBuddy.
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.
Key Metrics
Revenue
October started out great with revenue and MRR, but we saw a bit of a drop in both.
You can see that we continued our growth in early October and hit our all-time high MRR of about $780, then decreased to about $740, and went back up to $775.
From there we had a couple of customers churn after the first month, so we took a little drop.
And then our revenue…
We had a killer month last month: our first true month and we made several thousand dollars. There is no way I can tell you how good that feels to us.
A lot of that came from the Done-For-You solution we offered to a few lists. We had one of these ask for a refund, so we returned the money.
We were riding off of the September High, so we didn’t do as much as we should have. Jon and I spent time on other projects and SiteBuddy was a bit neglected.
While Conor made progress with the code, sales fell flat. It’s a lame excuse, and the business deserves better.
Users
As of the end of October we had 578 total users (we’re working on a dashboard to show this) and 45 paying users. We acquired 8 new customers, had 1 customer reactivate, and had 10 churned customers.
I’m including the churn metrics from Baremetrics below, and then I’ll discuss why I don’t think they’re shining examples of good reporting yet.
You can see that our current user churn is about 23%. You can also see that it hit a peak of about 300%. And the revenue churn mooned to 800%, putting Bitcoin and all of Elon’s rockets to shame.
So I don’t think these metrics are really relevant yet. I don’t think there’s enough data.
Revenue Per User, ARR, & More
There are still some metrics that don’t have enough data to be useful. Average revenue per user, annual recurring revenue (ARR), run rate, and some others to be in this category.
Churn falls in this category as well, but I felt it helpful to discuss its weird behavior.
We’ll start including these metrics in future updates as they become more useful.
Expenses
Profitable isn’t the buzz word around here… yet ;)
We were able to finish all of the Done-For-You customers’ websites and come away with a profit on those.
But when you make a couple thousand bucks and pay expenses… we aren’t popping champagne.
Features & Development
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 October, Conor worked hard to make sure that websites were scanning as they should. It’s still a work in progress, but Conor is building a new scanner that will be faster and have a lower failure rate.
Right now we are unable to scan some websites and we aren’t sure of the root cause. But the new scanner will be more reliable and much faster. Small sites might not notice the speed, but it will finish big sites in half the time.
New User Interface
Conor is also working on a new user interface. We’re upgrading, baby, and it’s going to look like visual ecstasy.
The new interface will also give you several more features, which is more important.
You’ll be able to:
- Get better reporting on your Amazon products
- See the page URLs of the products that are giving you problems
- Upgrade more easily
- Rescan pages on your website to check and see if you’ve fixed everything
- Have a great product table that allows you to sort by affiliate tags, products, pages, etc.
And a few more goodies. We’re very excited.
Marketing
Finding Affiliates
We’ve spent a lot of the month trying to find affiliates. We’ve had some success with this in the past. Our friends Spencer Haws, Doug Cunnington, the team at The Website Flip, (check out their awesome SiteBuddy review) and Ron Stefanski have all sent some love our way.
We appreciate it guys!
(if you want to be an affiliate and get a call out, you can join here).
Growing affiliates is a major strategy of ours right now. Our primary driver has been the podcast that I host for BrandBuilders.io. We’ve had great success in getting people in, making a connection, and offering to work together.
Email Marketing
We’re also working on building strong email marketing funnels. We don’t want these to be too strong – we all get plenty of unappreciated emails in our inboxes.
We’re going to use these emails to teach people how to better use the tool. We want to go as low as possible on the pitch, as high as possible on the value add.
And that’s not too a bad summary of the entire company.
Cold Outreach
“Wait a sec. This guy just said he provides value first, then he talks about spamming people.”
I get it.
We’re working on a cold outreach campaign that makes life easier for people. We provide value by helping people stop losing money…
And there are a lot of people losing money.
Our cold outreach campaign lets people know. Then we help them fix the issues for free.
At least, that’s the plan. Still working on finishing it up.
Future Plans
Product & Development
We have some very exciting things coming up in our R&D department (that’s Conor).
Mid-December, we’re going to be launching a new user interface. This is going to make it easier for you to scan your site, rescan after you’ve fixed your site’s issues, and see details about what’s going wrong.
Plus, it just looks sexy.
SiteBuddy is also about to do some other neat things. In no order:
- You’re going to be able to use SiteBuddy for any Amazon marketing (not just the US and Canada)
- You will be able to use SiteBuddy with tons of affiliate programs (Rakuten, ShareASale, Clickbank, etc.)
- You will get notifications if pages of your website go down
- You’ll be able to use SiteBuddy with link shorteners
And then we have some wild long term plans…
We’re going to be solving some problems that we’ve had for years as affiliates and content-site owners.
Marketing
October was an OK month. We set ambitious goals and didn’t do a great job to fulfill them, but we’re getting there.
Plan numero uno for November is to find more affiliates. Affiliates have killed it for us in the past and will in the future. We want more awesome people who can kill it.
Finishing up the cold outreach machine is also top of the list. If we can get users by sitting on our tails and outsourcing to machines…
we’re doing that.
We’d also like to do a couple of things with current SiteBuddy users:
First, we’d like to hear your thoughts and collect some testimonials.
Second, we’d like to hear your complaints and make the tool awesome for you.
Expect some emails to come out soon.
Conclusion
There’s still a long ways to go.
Will you let me know: What do you love/hate about SiteBuddy? How can we make it much cooler for you?