Crossed $17M ARR
by Nathan BarryWe crossed $17M ARR this week. I'm really proud of the team! This time 4 years ago was $10k MRR.
But the bigger accomplishment is—for the first time ever—we grew by more than $50k in net new MRR for two months in a row!
We've also steadily cut churn in half over the past few years. One big change was moving to credit cards not required for trials. Revenue decreased, but it cut churn significantly.
All the metrics are here: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com
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Congrats! Thanks for sharing. Can you explain a bit more about moving to credit cards and the consequences? Why did it cut the churn? Thanks.
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We used to require all accounts paid from the beginning (no trial). A few years ago we switched to a free trial that still required a credit card. Then last summer we went with a free trial where you add a credit card at the end.
We got a lot more trials coming in (up to 7,000 or 8,000 per month), but revenue took a short term hit. Ultimately after a lot more tests we are fairly certain it makes us more money to stick with not requiring credit cards for trials, but the change is so close it's hard to be sure.
But one change is that it has cut our churn down a decent amount since those trials that never add a credit card never appear as churn in Baremetrics.
We still have a long way to go in reducing our net churn, which is a big focus now.
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Thanks for sharing your insights. It's very helpful. Good luck!
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Congrats Nathan! Also curious, as we are actually thinking of switching from no CC required to CC required for trials.
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It's a tough call. We had the hardest time making an accurate decision based on data. I've seen companies go either way. Personally we want to get more leads in and keep refining our onboarding, so we went with no CC even though the data wasn't conclusive.
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Why? You think it attracting a lot of users who are not potentially going to pay?
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interested in this as well.
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
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It makes sense! Thanks for the explanation!
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Remember your talk with Justin Jackson from 2013-2014 when you were scrapping funds to keep it afloat. Congrats mate, just mind-blowing.
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Thanks! A lot can change in 4 years!
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Congrats, Nathan. Big fan of ConvertKit
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@NathanBarry congrats for the stunning growth over the last years and thank you for your transparency while running Convertkit as an open startup!
I've had a look at the m-o-m evolution of MRR in Baremetrics and see a huge jump / change from Sept to Oct 2015. What did you specifically attribute that to?
Would be thankful if you could share so we might learn what worked so well and try it out in our businesses. 🙏
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Congrats again Nathan.
Been following through your personal blog over this period.
Your content actually inspired me to write 2000+ words per day
for 40 days in a row, for the very first time. And that still serve
as portfolio that bring me clients till this day. -
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Congratulations. I just heard Sahil mention you on a podcast the other day, as one of the notable creators that started on Gumroad, and now run a company larger than Gumroad itself.
Also, thanks for doing the creator conference. I saw Casey's talk. It was great!
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Yep! I believe I was the first independent creator to sell over $10,000 on Gumroad.
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p.s. Curious, but what value do you find in putting all your user/revenue metric in public using Barametrics? I mean, I certainly enjoy looking at them, but how did you make a decision to put it all out there?
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Good question. It's one of my core values and how I give back to the startup community. Here's a full post about it: https://nathanbarry.com/ignore/
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Love Rand's answer. It makes perfect sense. Make a decision once, and you never have to worry about being correct on any decisions that follow. I might adopt that! Thanks.
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Pardon the silly question. $17k in new MRR added?
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This is so awesome, congratulations!
I'm going to launch my blog this month and want you to know that your resources are extremely valuable. I'm looking forward to being your customer and I'm sure this will be a great experience.
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Hey thanks! Drop me a link when you get the blog launched.
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
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