Jan-2018: FormFor Business Update
This is the first in a series of monthly business updates I will write about launching and growing FormFor. My goal is to be as transparent and open as possible in the event it might be helpful to anybody else. Mostly, I anticipate, it will help others know they are not alone. And that building new products and businesses is really fucking hard. Most people ain’t “killing it.”
This first update was written before I spun FormFor out into a side project. You will see references to “we” in the post below, but going forward it will just be “I”. I now work on FormFor on nights and weekends as a side hustle. I hope to generate some income and to learn more about running a SaaS business. I have no hopes or dreams of quitting a job or anything like that.
This was the biggest month for FormFor yet. We got our first ever SaaS product sign up. It was very exciting to see, and we should all be proud of the efforts we put in.
That said, I’m cautious about moving forward from here. Feels like we are very much in the “build it and they will come” mode. Not where we want to be.
Also, we were very busy this past month on other projects, and couldn’t give FormFor the nourishment it needed. Structurally, the opportunity with FormFor may not be big enough to invest any major resources in. But who knows. It may just continue to be a side project whenever free time opens up (this is exactly what ended up happening!).
Economics
- 2018 YTD Revenue: $9.00 (w00t! w00t!) 👍
- Net: $8.44 (just Stripe Fees), not accounting for any other costs at this point 💸
- Current MRR: $9
- Net New MRR: $9
Product KPIs
- 22 new free trial signs up in January (+700% MoM)
- Most of the above sign ups have let their trial expire already
- Of new sign ups, within the first week, 63% created a new form, and 13% got a submission on those forms (this is a measure of them actually adding the form on their website — most of the submissions looked like “tests”)
Current Customers
- Our first paying customer! One paid sign up this month.
- Looks like they work for a small design company
- They actually let their trial expire, and then came back two weeks later to upgrade (may want to extend our free trial)
Our marketing efforts
- Wrote a short post on Indie Hackers which drove traffic
- That post was picked up and someone posted FormFor to Product Hunt
- Our submission was finally released on Beta List
- We had about 500 page views in January, with ~4% conversion to sign up.
The biggest source of traffic in January was from BetaList, though that will evaporate in February. It seems like staying engaged in the IndieHackers community might help to continue to drive traffic. If that’s where traffic comes from, we will probably want to either create a custom landing page for that traffic, or rewrite copy on our marketing site. And also refocus our product and dev efforts — more towards the startup/entrepreneur — and away from the agency.
Our support efforts
- I was able to write personal emails to about 6 sign ups, no response. I need to be doing more of this.
- We do have an email drip which is getting clicked on — need to add unsubscribe link though
New features shipped
- Shipped TOS and PP updates
- Not really focused on developing any new features until there is demonstrated customer demand of some sort
Market Landscape
- Another competitor launched called Basin
- They have an analytics feature which was one of our main differentiators
- It’s a very crowded market already so no need to focus on anything but our own customers
That is all. I’ll touch base again in a couple weeks with my Feb-2018 business update.
