July 23 in Review: Travel, Churn, & $500 Explosions of Joy
July was a jam packed month with a lot of travel, some big headaches, and joyful celebrations.
Hi friends,
I recently published a post on LinkedIn which exploded in views and engagement.
Over 100 of you saw this post and decided to subscribe to the newsletter which was awesome to see. Thank you.
In this edition of the newsletter I’m going to cover the performance of my two businesses, and share some of my plans for August. You’ll also be introduced to my second acquisition, Meet Slack. I will go into a lot of detail on the Meet Slack acquisition in a future newsletter.
If this is the first time you’re reading my newsletter, here’s a bit of context.
I run two businesses, projectBI and Hawkeye Ventures. projectBI is a boutique analytics agency that works primarily with established DTC brands, and my main business. Hawkeye Ventures is a holding company which I formed late last year. My long-term plan is to shift profits from the agency to the holding company and then either acquire, build, or scale SaaS applications. Currently Hawkeye Ventures owns 3 properties which are listed in the LinkedIn post shared above.
July was by far the busiest month I’ve had in a long time. The month started with me wrapping up my time in Varna, Bulgaria. I spent over 2 months in Varna and my experience of the city was a mixed bag. I think its an ok place to visit for a short vacation but I doubt I’ll be back anytime soon.
The one thing Varna has going for it is the fact that so far its the best location I’ve found close to Europe, but outside of the Schegen Zone. Since I’m a digital nomad I’m limited to the time I can spend in the Schegen Zone, so it’s good to know Varna is an option if I choose to stay in Europe beyond 3 months.
At the beginning of July I left Varna for Athens where I spent 4 days before taking a short flight to the Island of Lesvos, a greek island near Turkey.
A child-hood friend of mine was getting married on the island and I decided to spend 6 days there enjoying the Aegian along with the festivities.
After a short but sweet time in Greece, I left for a familiar place, Barcelona.
I’ll be staying in Barcelona for the next few weeks before heading to Thailand. I plan to spend the rest of the year in Asia, most likely jumping between Thailand and Vietnam.
July Performance Review
projectBI
projectBI had a very strong month in July with over $20k generated. That’s now 4 consecutive months at over $20k, something I’ve never achieved before with the agency.
We’ve also passed $150k for the year with still 4 months left. Last year the agency generated $168k, which was our best year ever. We’ve already passed $150k and should pass $200k before the year is up.
I’m sure you’re wondering what happened in June? The reason for the spike in June is I received the remaining payment for an annual contract that I had signed with a client earlier in the year. It was a lump sum covering most of the year.
The main reason July was so strong is because I closed 2 new projects, one with a new client, and one with a legacy client. In addition to these 2 new projects, we also worked with our 3 retainer clients in July. Unfortunately one retainer client decided to put things on hold which wasn’t great news but I’m close to closing another large retainer which will more than make up for the loss.
Looking back over the last 4 months, the main factor for the success was connecting with larger, more mature DTC brands thanks to our partnership with Glew, a popular BI tech vendor in the DTC space. This has allowed me to charge higher rates and focus our efforts on our core services.
My main plan for the agency in August is to wrap up the existing projects so we can either convert these clients to retainers or remove them from our roster.
Hawkeye Ventures
PulseBanner
PulseBanner had a really bad month. In July it generated just $645 in revenue which is by far the lowest month since I acquired it in November last year. My annual rate of return for the investment has also dropped below 40% for the first time.
PulseBanner has a number of factors working against it at the moment. The biggest culprit is a conflict with Twitter Blue which prevents its subscribers from updating their profiles without losing the blue checkmark temporarily. PulseBanner’s entire purpose is to update Twitter user’s profiles to let their followers know they are live on Twitch. So basically users have to choose between Twitter Blue or PulseBanner. There’s nothing I can do about this except feel the pain and learn from it. Platform risk is a real thing.
Twitch is also seeing some serious competition from Kick. Unfortunately Kick doesn’t have APIs so we can’t support the platform. Kick is supposingly coming out with an API soon. I’ve reached out to them multiple times to try and get early access without success.
In late June we also had a serious outage where the service was negatively affected for over a week. I didn’t have a developer on standby so it took longer to deal with the issue than I anticipated.
In an attempt to stop the massive churn issue, I’ve hired a developer to work on “PulseBanner 2.0”, a relaunch of the service with a number of enhancements including:
14 day trial instead of 7 days —> This is already live in production.
Remove branding for all paying customers —> Currently to remove the PulseBanner branding, you need to be on the most expensive plan. This irritates paying users.
We are researching the option to integrate with Instagram, YouTube and TikTok so users could post images when they go live, or to celebrate reaching certain milestones.
Unlocking more features for the lower tier paying users
I’m planning a big marketing push once we’re done with the dev work which should have an immediate effect and spike the MRR similarly to the campaign that I ran in January. Churn will always be high since PulseBanner is B2C, but the current level is not sustainable.
If this plan doesn’t work, then I’m most likely going to try and sell PulseBanner to recoup some of the investment. It would be a shame but it would be better to sell it for a lower multiple and get some of my initial investment back than let the cashflow continue to decrease.
Meet Slack
Meet Slack had its first full month under my ownership and over $1.6k in revenue was collected in the month.
One of the first things I did when I acquired Meet Slack was to double the pricing for new subscribers. Meet Slack has 3 different paid tiers depending on the number of members in the organization’s workspace.
Unfortunately this price increase resulted in a big drop in conversion and I decided after 3 weeks to reverse the decision. Since Meet Slack is a “nice to have”, I have to accept that the conversion to paid will always be low. I’ll share more on my thoughts on pricing and how I’m working on increasing the conversion rate of Meet Slack in my next newsletter.
After I reverted the price back to where it was before I bought it, the conversion rate improved and new customers started subscribing. This included 2 enterprise customers who each paid $500 for an annual subscription of Meet Slack.
The feeling of joy I got when I saw the first successful $500 charge appear in Stripe is hard to describe.
Meet Slack only started monetizing at the end of June 22, and only introduced the 3 tiers in August 22, so I’m expecting over 2k in renewals in August. If I assume the trend of new business (+-$2k a month) generated per month continues, then I expect to generate about $4k in revenue in August. Fingers crossed.
I should probably mention that 90% of Meet Slack subscribers opt for the annual plan, and monthly churn is <1% (one of the main reasons I bought it:)).
Meet Slack is a mature product and there’s zero work planned for it for the future. It’s a cash cow in the purest sense of the term.
Project Echo
Another nice milestone that we hit in July was the public launch of Project Echo.
I’ve yet to start marketing the solution beyond just a few select connections on LinkedIn and the occassional post. The plan is to use August to fix some bugs, improve the public site, onboard some initial users, and work on some initial tracking so I can see what users are up to in the platform.
The most important thing for me is to make sure Project Echo is providing value to users and work towards getting it validated by the market. Once I’ve got a dozen power users in place and some initial subscription revenue (AKA “product-market fit”), I’ll have what I need to double down and shift my energy to Project Echo. I might even raise a seed round, who knows. In the meantime, I’m in no rush.
If you’re a business analyst or manage a data team, and would like to be an early user of Project Echo, sign up to the service and then hit reply on this email so I can be in touch. I need all the help I can get to validate the service.
Thanks for reading and if you have any questions on anything I covered in this newsletter, feel free to hit reply and let me know.
Regards,
Justin