On top of that the focus on beginners alienated some people who would have been much better customers – people who already had serious online businesses wondered if ConvertKit was right for them. What we found is that these beginners complained the most about price, lacked the discipline to produce content consistently, and were very likely to cancel when their project failed. Unfortunately the focus on education-particularly building a list from scratch-attracted an audience that didn’t make the best customers. It was initially very successful ($7,000 in revenue in one month), but then seats stopped selling and I once again lost motivation.Įven though ConvertKit Academy didn’t turn out to be as financially sustainable as I’d hoped, it was still a good experiment which helped dozens of people start their email lists. Summer 2014 I experimented with selling SaaS like an info-product by launching ConvertKit Academy. I still worked on ConvertKit, but the limited effort I put into it didn’t result in any growth. I was making over $15,000-25,000 from book sales each month so that’s where I started focusing my energy. By this time I had three books out that were all selling very well. When things didn’t work out as planned, I focused back on my books. The actual numbers were closer to $2,000.īut I made it to that number only having spent slightly more than my initial $5,000 investment and another ~$5,000 that we brought in from customers. Note: this was actually based on an estimate of what the month would be (with payments from multiple sources), not final numbers (it was before I had Baremetrics). ConvertKit revenue stayed steady and then gradually declined. At first I thought, “Oh well, we’ll continue to grow and hit our goal in a few more months.” Unfortunately that didn’t happen. Unfortunately July 1st, 2013 arrived and ConvertKit was only at $2,480/month. I decided to solve my email marketing frustrations and build a tool that had all the email marketing best practices I was using to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of books built in by default. If you don’t want to read through the entire history I’ll sum it up here: You can also go back and read the posts I wrote as I worked through the challenge. I called this The Web App Challenge and you can read the announcement post here. The other catch is that I could only make an initial investment of $5,000. The storyĢ years, 2 months, and 9 days ago I announced my big new goal for the year: to start a brand new SaaS company and grow it to $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue within 6 months. Now I’d like to share the behind the scenes stories that explain exactly what happened and what every curve of that chart means. So if you want the short version of the last 2 years of my work, just look at this image: If you could sum up an entire story in one image, it would be the monthly recurring revenue graph for ConvertKit.
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