contentmarketer.io
Sujan Patel co-founded contentmarketer.io in February 2015 alongside narrow.io. He described his motivation plainly: "I'm a marketer, so I wanted to see if I can grow my own companies." There was no fixed revenue goal at the start. The aim was to grow the business as big as possible and prove his marketing skills.
The company was fully bootstrapped. Patel put in about $45,000 of his own money to get the first products running, with roughly 75% spent on development and 25% on design. He said the company lost money in its first year. The first year was spent building an MVP. The product line centered on Connector, a tool for finding contact information and running email outreach. Patel said a polished design mattered to him, and he credited a team member with strong UX work. The team stayed small, at four people for the Connector products.
The biggest growth lever was an AppSumo deal. Patel said he treated it as a marketing strategy rather than a quick cash grab. Launching Connector a month or two before the deal let the deal's thousands of new users stress-test the software and show him what customers wanted. He said the deal "resulted in another thousand paying customers, regular price customers" in the 90 days after it ended. Some AppSumo buyers were on one-time plans rather than recurring ones, which lowered the average revenue per user.
The company reached about 6,300 customers across its products. Patel put the average spend at about $6 per customer per month, and he said the MRR was about $35,000 as of August 2016. He did not simply multiply customers by the average, because promotional and one-time deal customers distorted the math. Gross churn ran between 9% and 11% per month, and upselling was not a focus. Patel said Connector was the most successful product, and the team was working on a next version for about four months. Because the company was bootstrapped, development moved more slowly than it could have with outside funding. A trademark issue forced a rebrand of Connector 2.0 to Mailshake.
As of August 2016, contentmarketer.io had about 6,300 customers and roughly $35,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Patel was also running an agency, Web Profits, and several other SaaS businesses, and he described his focus as growth across them.
- •Using an AppSumo deal as a distribution test gave the product thousands of real users and stress-tested the software before it was fully proven.
- •Treating a low-margin deal as a marketing channel, not a revenue event, let the company turn a temporary spike into about 1,000 regular-price paying customers.
- •Patel's shared customer persona across his products allowed cross-promotion, so distribution work on one product helped the others.
- •Keeping churn in the 9-11% range while growing to 6,300 customers suggests the product retained users well enough to sustain revenue despite a small team.
- 1.Launch the core product before running a large promotional deal so the deal's users can test and reveal what to fix.
- 2.Negotiate a deal with a distribution platform such as AppSumo and plan for how one-time buyers will be converted to recurring plans.
- 3.Track MRR separately from total customers and account for one-time and promotional revenue when calculating average revenue per user.
- 4.Use the surge of deal users to identify which features they actually use, then follow up with a regular-price offer within 90 days.
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