ConvertKit Monthly Report — August 2016

A big reason why we publish these monthly reports is because we value transparency. We want you to know exactly what’s happening within ConvertKit. That includes sharing revenue numbers, the growth of our team and the hiccups along the way. Let’s get to it.

The Stats

Monthly Recurring Revenue has continued to climb, up 7.4% from the month prior. Growth is important to us, just like any company. But we are extremely focused on how to consistency improve our application and serve our existing customers.

Net Revenue came in just $1k lower than MRR for the month of August.

Our customer base continues to grow! We finished last month with 7,830 customers. We feel so lucky to be partnered with so many bloggers and entrepreneurs!

Churn is holding steady around the 8% mark as we grow and this is something we’re seriously focused on. Like any company with a recurring revenue model, churn is a major impact on our bottom line so we’re focused on reducing it. You’ll see things like a new onboarding checklist, new welcome sequences for new customers, and more.

The Team

You spoke, we listened. We have had some app performance issues this past month, which left several of your frustrated and worried. At the end of last month, we gathered in one location from 7 cities and 4 different countries to work and strategize how to make ConvertKit better.
We spent four days discussing app speed, features, and customer success. You will see our strategies play out over months ahead.

Development

Monitoring, measuring and improving performance

As we flood messages out of our system, and statuses on those broadcast messages come pouring back in (statuses like “delivered”, “bounced”, those kinds of things), we hastily do several of updates to make sure the interface can keep up, and so that we don’t accidentally send the same message twice. That, combined with sending out sequence emails, can sometimes cause some issues. It’s about evaluating, and sometimes our only window to really see what’s going on is while it’s happening. We’ll keep improving, and do the best we can to keep it going.

Heading off spammers

This is a taxing job. Sometimes emotionally — fraudulent accounts are draining. But, we’ve been working hard to reduce both the effects those that have already leaked through have created, and to prevent future spammers from joining or causing damage. We’re a little tight-lipped about some of this, because we’re big enough that fraudulent users are reading these words, and we don’t want to give any hints on how to weasel in.

Improving deliverability

We’ve done a few different things here. First, we’ve switched out some IPs so that they’re not already on some blacklists. Second, we’re increasing our internal ability to modify sending domains and IPs (two big things that can get a message stopped for spam once reputation is damaged). The other thing with deliverability is that we’re still small enough that we’ve often been able to help our customers directly over the past few weeks in the instances where messages didn’t hit the inbox.

Scaling Up

We upgraded our web servers and have been tuning them. We’ve upgraded database sizes and the power behind them as well.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for this month! We can’t thank our customers enough for their support. Our mission is to help you be more successful in your businesses.
Have questions? Drop them in the comments below!