Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

Re:Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side... by AznHisoka on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:09PM (#15594778)

That's not a real risk. That's an outcome. A risk is something that LED to that drop in conversion. It could be a competitor coming in with the same feature set, or something else. But a drop in conversion is not a risk, it's an outcome.

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Re:Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side... by learc83 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:47PM (#15595052)

The risk part is the small margin that means you can't survive small bumps that lead to a drop in conversion.

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Re:Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side... by AznHisoka on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @02:02PM (#15595191)

as the person who responded above me noted, that's not a small margin at all. That's a huge relative change.

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Re:Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side... by learc83 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @03:49PM (#15595973)

I'm not talking about the previous posters 30% drop being a small margin. I'm saying that 1% paying customers is a risk and it's likely to get lower than that, the more exposure it gets.

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Re:Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side... by AznHisoka on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:42PM (#15596365)

First, why is 1% paying customers a risk? That's actually a fairly average/normal conversion rate for a freemium product. Trello, I wager gets way less than that.

Second, why is it likely to get lower the more exposure it gets?

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Re:Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side... by learc83 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @08:05PM (#15597846)

I'm not an expert. I've never ran a SaaS business with a freemium model (I have ran SaaS businesses with other pricing models).

But, everything I've ever read on the subject indicates 1% is either bare minimum or too low. [1,2]

>Second, why is it likely to get lower the more exposure it gets?

In my experience the more hype you get, the lower your conversion rate all other things being equal (in my case conversion rate after free trial, vs freemium) because people who had to search you out to find you are more likely to convert than people who are just checking out the hottest new thing they saw on HN.

That's obviously not always true, and it may not be true in their case, but if I were the CEO, I'd be very focused on increasing my conversion rate.

1. https://hbr.org/2014/05/making-freemium-work 2. https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/04/should-your-startup-go-fre...

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