DEV Community: Wojtek Krzciński

Last day of January brought us our 1st paying customer🥇

Wojtek Krzciński — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 13:55:28 +0000

Just so you know what type of business I'm writing about - it's a SaaS.

On the last day of January we got our 1st paying customer and they already purchased an annual subscription. A day later they requested an additional data connection for which we charged them extra as it was more than what was in their current plan. They agreed without any negotiations.

This one customer required and still requires a lot of support. It seemed annoying at first but we soon realized it’s actually great. That’s because we get to improve our product (fixed few bugs and added new features). Having a customer that is willing to share so much feedback is something I wish for each of you.

Except from fixing the bugs, thanks to their requests we added Disputes and Disputes Ratio from Stripe. And we break them down by country which is something you don’t even have in Stripe’s dashboard.

We are also going to add MRR by the end of the week. It is also something that this customer requested. We wanted to add MRR earlier but prioritized other things. Now we have the motivation to do that.

Here are some milestones that led us to this point

We're still far from reaching our first revenue goal but it's already something. If you're interested in what we're building, it's Raport.

From 0 to 100 users in 5 weeks

Wojtek Krzciński — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 14:40:18 +0000

Hey 👋🏻

We've just reached our first milestone of 100 registered users and I'd like to share briefly how we got here.

Week 1

We opened Raport beta to public on 17 November.

Around 20 November we sent emails to our waiting list subscribers. There were around 60 subscribers on that list. Not everyone decided to sign up. I expected more sign ups from people that seemed genuinely interested in the product but it's just another learning for us.

Week 2

We've been posting and commenting on Indie Hackers, ProductHunt, Reddit etc. We've also tried a bit of direct outreach through Reddit and email. Direct outreach had the highest conversion rate but was the least scalable. Indie Hackers and Reddit were our primary sources of visits.

On 30 November we've published a fairly good post on Indie Hackers. It was very loosely related to our product but still resulted in some new sign ups.

Week 3

We introduced new features to Raport on 7 December. We've also kept posting and informed people on our waiting list about newly released features.

Week 4

On 9 December we've published a popular post on Reddit and Indie Hackers. You can see the biggest growth in sign ups here.

Week 5

We were quite sluggish in terms of marketing and we didn't publish any good posts.

We've focused more on the product. We've been working on new integration with Stripe and some really cool updates. The Stripe integration has been quite challenging but should be worth the effort. We've also started working on our pricing.

As you've probably noticed, we didn't use any big launching platforms like ProductHunt or Beta list. We will launch there soon. First, we wanted to make sure that our product performs well. Also, having some users before launching there should give us an opportunity to have more support on launch day. Hopefully this approach pays off.

We want to reduce the complexity of data analytics.

Wojtek Krzciński — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 13:18:59 +0000

I manage several different online projects. And I find myself jumping between multiple analytics dashboards, comparing metrics like SEO clicks, ads CPC, revenue and pageviews to name a few. Then exporting data (especially revenue) to Excel to sum it up and get some insights. All that so my projects can grow in the most efficient way.

The problem is that growth, even when defined as increase in a single metric, requires improvement in lots of secondary ones. These secondary metrics are scattered across multiple dashboards and apps. And I face the same problem regardless of the type of online project I'm working on.

To give you an example.

I go to Google AdSense to see my revenue. It turns out that it's lower than the week before, so I start searching for the cause. The most possible reason is less visits, but I need to make sure. That's why I open Google Analytics. Yes, number of visits has decreased week to week. But visits to my website come from different channels: ads, organic, social media. So, I need to look over each of them. I open Google Ads, Facebook Business and Google Search Console dashboards. It takes about 20 minutes, but I finally know what happened. The average SEO position is lower, and I got less organic traffic than last week. Next, I need to go through all the dimensions. I'm searching for drops in specific pages, countries, and keywords. Now, I know for sure. The page that usually generates most traffic ranks lower for my target keywords. I can begin resolving the issue.

I can name dozens of similar examples from my daily practice. I spent way too much time analyzing data this way over the years. Maybe it's similar in your case?

So, over the last couple of months me and my co-founder have built an MVP of our all-in-one analytics app — Raport. Currently the app allows integrating 5 data sources in one dashboard and delivers email reports containing your most important metrics.

If this message resonates with you, try our beta for free, and let us know what you think. You'll have more time, and fewer spreadsheets. And isn't that what everyone wants?