24 Apr 2015
Josh

Existing month to month, March 2015

Although there were low points, March was a good month for Exist both in terms of income and feeling reinvigorated to build something great.

Product development

In mobile-land both Android and iOS received updates to handle the "official" way of updating attributes (specifically for updating mood).

Early in the month we also launched the Trends page, an overview of changing attributes and correlations for each user. It also includes mood note analysis, highlighting which words you're more likely to use for each mood rating. Trends was a big feature, and well received.

With the one-year anniversary coming up, we sent out an email to all backers thanking them for their support in our first year, encouraging them to renew their subscription, and giving them a 50% discount on their upcoming yearly subscription. Unfortunately many backers took this as a reminder to close their accounts and give us feedback on what we'd done wrong or had failed to accomplish, which wasn't a good feeling. However, the majority decided to recur for another year, phew.

In light of this one-year anniversary we decided to send out a survey to all our paid users asking for some feedback on what they used and liked, what was lacking, and what they'd like us to work on this year. Our spirits were buoyed again by the lovely, positive response we got, so thank you! The vast majority of users reported that they were using Exist regularly and finding lots of value in features like correlations and mood tracking. We also received lots of positive, encouraging written feedback, along with plenty of good ideas.

Based on some recurring points that popped up, we made some immediate changes to Exist allowing users to change the nightly mood email time and the display of dashboard graphs. Long-term, we'll be focusing on launching our API (the most popular choice in the survey) so that developers can get data from any source into Exist, freeing us from creating all the integrations internally and speeding things up.

Marketing

Belle published four link round-up posts, and one post on how she manages client work vs Exist, Client week. She published a great post on the Groove blog on turning our shortcomings into features, which is one of my recent favourites, and also did well with the Groove readership.

Other business stuff

We published episode three of our podcast, Learning to code. We also made Littlelogs official by adding it to the Hello Code homepage.

Numbers

Business stats
  • 477 users (324 paid)
  • 83 free trial signups
  • 10% growth with 53 conversions from free to paid (64% conversion rate)
  • 1% churn with 8 cancelled accounts
  • 33 suspended accounts
  • $1,852.76 income after Stripe fees

This is the highest income we've made from Exist since our initial backer campaign, and doesn't even include our backers recurring, which will happen in April. With 63% growth from February, it's a great result. Let's keep it up!

Site stats

We continued to benefit from being on the RescueTime blog and integrations page.

How'd we do?

We launched our esteemed Trends page this month, and made some important progress as a business too, laying the foundation to do some big things in coming months. Let's see how that turns out.