Slides with Friends

We officially hit the ten grand monthly recurring revenue mark this month. Since we're selling annual subscriptions only, our revenue is accelerated. Add that to our one-time/non-recurring plan sales, our actual revenue usually runs around 2x our MRR. We've already hit an all-time high revenue of $19k for Aug, and project to end out the month over $20k.

What we're likely reaping here is our burst of content creation about 10 months ago. Content is a slow-moving beast, and when you write a good article you often need to wait around 6 months to let search engines test you out and start surfacing you to searchers, and then another 6 to see it really take root and grow.

We slowed down on the content recently due to life circumstances and some of our writers leaving us, and hope that in 6 months we don't see a slow down from this.

Since we moved from monthly to annual-only subscriptions, we've increased our gross revenue month over month.

The best part of this is it's large majority organic traffic rather than CPC. We've been slowly ratcheting back our paid ads and investing heavily (adding team members, increasing keyword research, and upping content output by 2+x) in blog content. Seems like it's working, since this august is the first time we grossed $10,500+ in a single month.

We hit a user milestone this month, with more than ten thousand signed up users. These are majority free users, but are often active and using our freemium product.

Fun fact about building on your own growth, of the full 10k list of emails, almost a third of them signed up in the last 2 months. Building up our organic traffic!

We're actually getting close to the $2.5k mark already. With 250+ paid subscribers and over 5k signed up users, we are slowly moving on a very nicely-steady upward trend.

With a lot of distractions in the past few weeks from other little jobs, I'm excited to turn our full focus back to this project for q4.

We're working hard on our content marketing and SEO, as well as optimizing PPC ads, and we're seeing a pick up in organic traffic in addition to paid conversions.

We're slowly and steadily increasing user numbers, and now the big next question is churn mitigation. We have a lot of ideas for how to manage this (better onboarding flow, actually connecting with our email list, etc). It's an exciting next step!

Yesterday we reached a big goal post — we hit $1,024 in recurring monthly revenue. New users keep signing up (which is exciting and interesting, because we haven't been doing much marketing other than gAdwords).

Our CPA in Adwords is around $5 per freemium user, which JUST MIGHT MEAN, depending on churn and conversion rates at larger scale, we could potentially be profitable using Adwords as our main (only?) marketing channel. This is huge.

And when we add on the content marketing SEO plan we're in the midst of setting up, we could have something real, and really profitable, on our hands here.🎉

1009, to be exact. Here's how we've done it so far!

• Content: creating sharable and high-value content (like https://slideswith.com/blog/how-to-host-an-exciting-event-as-an-introvert for example) for people in our target area. We even hit the front page of Hacker News with a post about gamifying team building (which lead directly to a ~hundred new users (and one paid conversion!)).

• Joining communities and creating online live events specifically designed for those communities to 1) show off our tool but also importantly 2) actually provide value to the community's users.

• Running games & events for our growing network. I ran a super-intense "Harry Potter Trivia Night" where a lot of ringers from Reddit showed up and swept the floor with us. We got larger communities like Running Remote to us us as an icebreaker game. Generally just offering our tool with no strings, with the intent of making these things more fun for people.

It's working!

We're working on SEO and community outreach as our main marketing channels currently. With a lot of little posts here and there, and some content up on our newly-launched blog, we've been seeing organic traffic slowly overtake paid placements.

It seems like it's working! We have people paying us for this product we invented out of thin air. It's very cool!

We're starting to get our first sight-unseen, un-marketed-to accounts created! People seem to need this tool right now, and we haven't been doing much promo at all yet.

Our next big hurdle is going to be getting those sign-ups to create their first decks and present them to a group. People are definitely copying the pre-made / template content to use, but the stumbling point definitely comes at the "Play Your Event" stage. So it's onboarding UI funnel time!