Last week I launched the new StoryLearning app to my wider list, and so today I thought I’d document what happened and give a few thoughts.
First, here are the headline numbers for the week, as always with last week’s numbers in brackets.
- Active users: 1,089 (656) (351)
- MRR: $12,652 ($6,260) ($3,408)
The Launch
So, last week I told the story of launching to our interest list and then to a webinar, and how we saw an obnoxiously high conversion rate of ~27% on both.
I think I’m right to be chuffed to bits with that, and also had some justification in being very excited going out to our main list, because we had a very large list of people in waiting who had not seen this offer yet.
So I thought we could be in for a real treat.
I also knew it was possible that we’d already scooped the proverbial cream off the top…
And that the launch was going to amount to little more than a damp squib.
Tldr; I’d say it was more towards the latter.
In total (including the webinar) we added another 738-ish paying customers, which takes us to over 1,089 active users, which, overall amounts to about a 0.8% percent conversion to our wider list.
So look, it could have been better, but I think there are very good reasons why we didn’t get more:
- 30% of our list is inactive and should really be cleaned
- A big chunk of our list are learning languages that we don’t support on the app yet, like Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, so that was a non-starter.
- I don’t think we did a great job of explaining the relationship between the app and our other products, so that caused some confusion.
- It’s definitely the case that we launched to our most engaged customers earlier last month, and so it’s only natural to see a drop off. (Tale as old as time.)
So overall, I’m slightly underwhelmed.
But that’s just ego talking.
Taking a step back, we have:
- got this thing off the ground in about 6 months
- have over 1,000 paying customers
- $12,000 of MRR
- and some very, very happy customers
So I’ll chalk that up as a great start.
Ref: my team chat…
Also, we’re still getting 70% annual sales, so we have plenty of cash to work with.
(Or to buy cigars with. I’m still undecided.)
What’s Next?
Naturally, because of such a big influx of customers, we’ve had lots of suggestions, bug reports, and a new perspective on which features should be prioritised.
So we’ll be busy working on that at the moment.
It’s worth reiterating:
My belief right now is that my #1 job is to make a product that our best customers absolutely f-ing love and that becomes part of their daily routine.
If we can do that, we’ll hit our target of $1m ARR in 12 months.
Next up…
Design
If you checked out the app, it probably won’t have escaped you that the design is a bit meh.
That’s because we’ve gone very much form follows function on this, and haven’t given a second thought to design.
That’s changing now because I’m quite certain that I want this to be a premium user experience. I have Amazon Kindle and The New York Times as my benchmark here in terms of an app experience that just wows you.
That you actually look forward to logging onto.
That feels like a luxury.
If our goal is to get people coming back and reading every day (which it is), then it damn well better be an enjoyable experience.
So I’ve decided to reinvest a chunk of early revenue right back into design, and we’re working on that over the next few weeks.
Expect some fancy new screenshots coming your way soon.
Q&A
I’m answering a few rapid-fire questions from the audience now.
How do prices compare to your other products?
The price is $15 a month, so that’s the price of one of our books.
Our main digital offerings are quite a lot more expensive from $100 to $300, and then our coaching programmes go up to $5,000.
So it’s definitely on the lower end.
Is all the churn from monthly subscribers?
It’s a new experience for me, being in this software analytics model, so I’m still figuring out how it all works.
Stripe calculates things like MRR and churn automatically on subscription products, so we’re just using Stripe’s metrics.
Essentially, annual plans are prorated to give the MRR figure, and churn is only calculated when people cancel, which I guess comes out in the wash over a longer period of time.
(Don’t quote me on that, but I can’t see it working any other way.)
I’m curious how many of the app users are former customers vs first-time buyers.
Me too!
Certainly the first cohort of people were existing customers because that’s who we generated the interest list from.
I don’t actually know how many people were first-time buyers, but I will run those numbers and report back next time.
How are you avoiding cannibalising the main business?
It’s my plan moving forward to keep our traffic and funnels pretty much unchanged, meaning that we’ll still be focusing on lead gen on YouTube, and running the same email marketing marketing strategy as always on the backend.
I intentionally want to avoid cannibalising the main business until this new model is proven, because, well, I got bills to pay!!
But more importantly, growth of this thing is necessarily going to come from external growth.
We’ve got to $12,000 MRR for our existing list, which is great.
But I need to 7X that if I want to reach $1 million ARR.
So, if the bulk of the work is going to be finding customers elsewhere, I may as well start now.
In fact, one of the bigger lessons learnt from previous escapades is not putting enough time into fresh lead gen once something new is up and running – the topic of this video, if you’re interested:
So that’s the goal.
Business as usual outside this initial launch, followed by a lot of elbow grease on my side.
That’s all for now.
In other news, I was in Nashville last week, at an annual author event I somehow got myself invited to.
Seen here with Jay Papasan (The One Thing), Michael Hyatt and Ryan Levesque…
Inspiration off the dadgum charts.
And it’s got me in full swing finishing off my own book, which a few buddies have been kind enough to help workshop with me this week as I had a mini crisis over the big idea.
(It wasn’t crisp enough. But now it is. So we’re good.)
Also…
I’m looking for some beta readers for the book.
Hit reply and let me know if you’re up for it.
You’ll need to commit to reading the whole thing and giving meaningful feedback.
In return you’ll get a mention in the acknowledgements!
Last but not least, I have two spaces left for my UK small group mastermind starting in February next year, so check it out here if you’re interested.
What a time to be alive.
Appreciate you all.
Olly
