Our First $37,800 in Annual Recurring Revenue

http://churnbuster.io/blog/our-first-37800-in-annual-recurring-revenue

by aculver • 12 years ago

132 45 12 years ago

aculver8• 12 years ago

Hey all, this is me. :-) Really nice to have a "new" product on the front page of HN again. Happy to answer any questions you may have.

vladtaltos• 12 years ago

good luck man. hope you'll have more clear skies ahead...

silver1• 12 years ago

How did you find subscribers with no spending on marketing?

aculver8• 12 years ago

I'm sure I'll write about this more later, but the earliest customers were friends and consulting clients who ran subscription services. They were onboard before it was even built.

saturdayplace• 12 years ago

I just wanted to thank you for writing about the doldrums, and about continuing slowly through them anyway. THAT piece of advice seems so universally applicable, and I don't personally don't run across it so much in places like HN. I loved that you didn't just stop, just maybe slowed down, and that the little steps just kept adding up anyways.

p.s. I remember originally hearing about ChurnBuster on Our Own Little Accelerator. Why'd that show die?

charlieirish• 12 years ago

Good to see an honest journey of a SaaS product.

Building a SaaS company that pays the bills normally takes much longer than you think[1]. Well done Andrew and keep going!

[1] Watch the slow ramp of death: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...

andy_adams• 12 years ago

The product grew, but at a slower pace than I had envisioned

This is the single biggest piece of advice I wish I'd known before I made my failed attempts at products. It takes a long time. When you build your product, make sure you have an income or savings plan for the next 12 - 18 months.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

My own rule is 3 years so at 12 to 18 months you're amazingly fast.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

Hey Andrew, this is a super nice product and you're doing an awesome job in the perseverance department. Unfortunately for you I'm not a stripe customer or I would have happily signed up. That $4K per month is definitely happening and after that who knows how far you can push this.

Have you considered teaming up with Stripe? They're nice guys and it looks as if you contribute considerable value to their product.

aculver8• 12 years ago

Hey Jacques. Thanks for the kind words! Stripe does include us on their integrations page and have been great about reaching out to Stripe Connect service operators like myself and asking what they can do to better support us. (It's been such a great platform to build on.) Now that I'm focusing on marketing more, I'll definitely reach out to them to share some ideas I've got. ;-)

jonathanwallace• 12 years ago

It sounds like you may be interested in https://www.fundinggates.com/ then.

Full disclosure: I worked on this project (as a consultant) when it was just getting off the ground.

stanmancan• 12 years ago

There's no pricing information, and no link to pricing information available on the home page. I had to click "Free Trial" before there was a nav bar at the top I could click on.

With that being said, I love the idea of the product as it's a pain point for me. Unfortunately, I only have a handful of customers, so even the $20/m doesn't really make sense. It would be great to see a free plan for "up to" X customers, once you pass that threshold send me an email to upgrade my account.

As of right now I see it, I like it, I want it, but I can't justify it so it will be long forgotten by the time I'm ready to sign up. If I was able to sign up for a free plan today I would in a heartbeat, and would be happy to upgrade if I got an email remainder once I passed 25 customers.

aculver8• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback and sorry about the missing pricing link on the homepage. Definitely overdue to revamp the navigation and put a pricing link right up top there. I'll definitely chew on that free plan idea a bit.

jd_114• 12 years ago

So, what is the price? I guess I could signup for the trial and see, but don't want to burden if it's not something within the budget off the bat.

lem722• 12 years ago

I am sure this is what you are already thinking, but I wouldn't spend to much worrying about a free plan.

We made this mistake on our last startup, we got a ton of feedback saying, oh it's too expensive, I'd never use it.. make something cheaper/free.

The truth is... until those businesses are making more money that justifies $20 a month, you probably don't want them as customers... they will take up a TON of time, with adding little to no value and will have no problem jumping ship when you say, hey, you reached the size you said you were interested in paying $20 and we would like you to upgrade.

People want the world... focus on customers that find $20/month to be a huge value to them.

baudehlo3• 12 years ago

I have 100 paying customers and this wouldn't make sense for me either - $20 a month is a significant chunk for that many customers and low subscription prices (I charge $3 a month).

lxmorj• 12 years ago

Interesting. I wonder if total recurring revenue is a better pricing gauge for something like this? What's your product?

Aqueous• 12 years ago

It's really impressive that you built that much revenue even without even notifying people who specifically told you they wanted this product. That's a very good sign that you're headed for a lot of growth.

aculver8• 12 years ago

Thanks for your kind words. :-)

agotterer• 12 years ago

Well done and thanks for sharing your story! You said you did almost no marketing and haven't blasted an email to the wait list. I'm curious where and how people are finding your product?

aculver8• 12 years ago

Thanks! So, we've benefited a lot from word-of-mouth thus far. For example, we've received referrals from friends running Baremetrics (http://baremetrics.io), HookFeed (http://hookfeed.io), and FirstOfficer (https://www.firstofficer.io) because Churn Buster is a logical progression for customers of those products who are now more aware of how much they're losing to failed payments. Our customers themselves also talk about the results they're getting in the subscription product circles they travel in.

baudehlo3• 12 years ago

Small suggestion - people who have done payments before know this process is called dunning, which you don't mention at all on your site - that's going to affect your SEO potential when I'm looking for a solution to this (which almost always takes me straight to your competitor: bestunning).

dangrossman• 12 years ago

A bit tangential: If you have a problem with losing customers to expired credit cards and already have a good dunning process, talk to the guys at Spreedly about their "Card on File Updater". They're a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault, but one of the services they're trialing (you have to ask to join the beta right now) is automatic updating of expired credit card numbers. They have access to the bank systems that do this automatically, so your charges continue going through without your customers having to update their numbers themselves.

https://spreedly.com/

Spreedly works with Stripe and 70+ other payment providers.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

This has been in the works for a number of years now, but keep in mind that you are breaking an 'unwritten contract' with your customer that assumes that they get the option to renew the agreement when their card expires.

People in general do not like to be charged for a service after the card expires and they have not explicitly authorized further payment. So better make sure this is written into your terms and conditions and that your merchant agreement actually allows you to do this.

Most businesses don't know about this possibility and very very few end users do. Technically you can basically fantasize any expiry date as long as it is in the future the charge will (likely) go through but to do this unauthorized is not smart. (Adding 3 or 5 years to the previous expiry is likely going to be on the money.)

In dispute situations you will possibly also have less recourse.

icelancer4• 12 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. I would never expect this unless it was explicitly disclosed up front, and I got an email around expiry time.

jusben13692• 12 years ago

I think this is a really interesting topic where merchants and card users see it quite differently. For example, you usually sign up for an agreement to use a service. No where in there does it say that "you can cancel at anytime by just letting your card expire or having it stolen and replaced" The merchants really don't see any correlation between your need to pay and the current state of your card. And often they want you to actively cancel a service so as to remove any confusion around responsibilities owed.

Then you have some services where you can go either month to month or commit to a year long agreement and get a different price. Lastly, who enjoys losing a card and having to restart auto billing at their 10 favorite/required services?

I agree a lot of people by default think that if their card expires they're off to hook for paying for services and would be surprised that their service provider got an updated card from networks vs you. I'm just not sure it holds up though under closer thought/examination.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

Honestly, reading about how detailed ChurnBuster gets (they have an actual real live human doing white-labeled calls on their clients behalf) I feel like if anything Spreedly should hire them to handle things on behalf of their clients.

jusben13692• 12 years ago

Spreedly here. That's not a bad idea although in reality the better idea might be for ChurnBuster to build on top of Spreedly and solve this problem across 70 gateways? That way too if Stripe ever rolled out something similar all your eggs aren't in one basket.

aculver8• 12 years ago

So, just want to make sure it's clear to folks reading (because it's been a source of confusion for prospective customers in the past) that "card account updaters" and a service like Churn Buster are not mutually exclusive. For example, we have customers who utilize "card account updaters" like what you're talking about, and they still have a substantial number of customers failing payments even after that process has run it's course. That's where Churn Buster comes in.

Normally you'd expect Churn Buster to implement this background behind-the-scenes card account updating itself, but the reason we don't is that the trend and expectation in the industry is, or is becoming, that the actual payment gateway themselves provide this service, because they're by far in the best position to do it at scale. For example, Braintree already does this and I think you'll see more and more payment providers doing it down the road, including Stripe. (I could be wrong, but I don't think so.)

danbruc• 12 years ago

Well, if the customer with the expired payment information is still using and valuing the service, he will soon realize that he needs to update his payment information without any outside intervention or he will lose access to the service. If the user no longer cares about the service and just forgot to cancel or was to lazy to do so, why not just let him go instead of continuing to sell him something he does no longer need?

UPDATE: I probably got the wrong first impression - I thought the service was kind of last resort if the user did not respond to the normal notifications that he will lose his service; I missed that you can completely outsource this.

itengelhardt• 12 years ago

Because that is not how people work. We forget things. Today I got a reminder that one of my hosting accounts expired. I happily put down the $90 for the account and even sent an email to my contact there, because loosing that account would be a major headache for me. I need that account, I just didn't remember to update my CC

rgbrenner• 12 years ago

Same here.. Once let our DNS provider subscription lapse (yearly renewal). Luckily discovered it about a week before the grace period ended.

trcull• 12 years ago

Couldn't disagree more. I've forgotten these things all the time and actually appreciate a reminder from the service that I need to do something about it. It's so much easier than keeping track of what's stored where and updating it

zrail• 12 years ago

Think about a system that gives you, as a customer, piece of mind, but doesn't actively intrude on your life. For example, something like Pingdom. They tell you about problems with your systems but don't actively tell you anything if nothing is going wrong.

Let's assume you're happy not thinking about Pingdom when nothing is going wrong, and happy with their service when something does happen. Would you appreciate Pingdom silently ending your service when your credit card expires? Would you consider that good customer service? If they do contact you, would you consider it "sales" to get a gentle reminder?

koa• 12 years ago

Some apps are like that.

There was this analytics tool called get.gaug.es that i really liked looking at for $6/month. In addition to my existing mission critical analytics apps like mixpanel and google analytics.

I would never have cancelled guag.es but since my credit card switched, i just didn't like it enough to be bothered to update it. A phone call is probably the only thing that would have gotten me to update it. Probably not, but it increases the odds from 0% to greater than 0%

citadelgrad• 12 years ago

We have no less that 60 different web services that we use in our business. The last thing I need to have happen is for one of my apps to stop working. Send me an email and tell me somethings wrong.

icelancer4• 12 years ago

This is great and the pricing seems reasonable (and not too low, like tarsnap). I will be signing up once we launch our full online training courses. Our monthly revenues are around ~$150/month per user, so definitely worth it for us.

As someone else said, though, a free plan that is limited to a very small number of people might be helpful. I'd sign up for that with our small group of clients right now just to test and trust the service. 10-20 users or something would be enough for testing purposes but obviously not nearly enough that you are cannibalizing your product. Something to think about - since now I have to bookmark your site, remember that I need it in six months, and come back and sign up. Even though I KNOW it's something that will save me thousands of dollars per year.

physcab• 12 years ago

A bit OT: Why is the churn graph so wave-like?

nicksergeant• 12 years ago

Just a heads up. I went to https://manage.churnbuster.io/pricing to check out pricing. I hacked the URL to hit https://churnbuster.io/ to go to the homepage, and I get an SSL error: http://i.imgur.com/Dwoa2Hn.png

Our First $37,800 in Annual Recurring Revenue

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