Well, we've officially turned one year old . As we look back over our first year, we're proud of what we've accomplished but we're more excited for what's to come in our second year. Here are some graphs, stats and other interesting tidbits that happened in our first year.
The StatusPage.io Team
Grew To 4 People
Scott and Steve started working on StatusPage.io part-time in November while still consulting. After a brief consulting stint, they started working on the project full-time in January.
Danny Olinsky came onboard in early May to focus on growth while also helping out with rails development.
At the beginning of January we added Mike Novi as our second full-time developer. He's been contracting with us for the past few weeks and we hope to bring him on as a late CTO.
Distributed From The Start
StatusPage.io has been distributed for most of its life. Scott and Steve started the company while Scott was living in Fort Collins, CO and Steve was living in Raleigh, NC. The only exception is the whole team lived together in Mountain View for 3 months when we were part of the YC S13 batch.
Here's A Few Things We Learned
Content Marketing Works Great! (for a while)
We did a pretty awesome job with content marketing. We were on the homepage of Hacker News several times which got us pretty solid brand recognition within the startup community. We experienced some diminishing returns here but it was definitely very effective for the first few months. When you're just starting, getting your name out there is half the battle.
If you're looking to get into content marketing, Buffer does an amazing job and might be a good role-model to look to.
Have A Great Onboarding Experience
We have a 13% conversion rate from sign-up to paid account and we attribute a lot of it to our onboarding experience. It also shows through in the amount of support we have to do (hint: it's not a lot). It's 2014...if you haven't done a good amount of usability testing to make sure your users can actually use your app, you're doing it wrong.
For more information ways to improve your onboarding experience, read this post by Intercom.io. We're also working on a similar post too so subscribe to our blog at the bottom!
Talk To Your Users As Much As You Can
We love talking to our users. We try to set up a call with every qualified new user that signs up. There are a few benefits to doing this.
1) You learn so much just talking to your users. It turns out Eric Reis has been right this whole time (who knew!?). This information is so valuable, we recently emailed a lot of users and offered them a $25 Amazon gift card just for getting on the phone to talking to us. If there's one thing you can always do more of, it's talking to users.
2) The users you talk to are more likely to convert to a paid account. People want to connect with other humans and they want the people they like to succeed. It looks like the Groove team is seeing a similar pattern.
Maintain Product Momentum
As founders, we're always hopeful that the featuring we're working on "that one thing" that's going to take your product to the next level. Unfortunately, it's rare that any one new feature unlocks an enormous amount of growth. However, a steady cadence of improvements to the product makes for happier users that will be more likely to recommend you to their friends.
Some tips:
- Talk to your users often to know exactly how and why they use your product. This is the only way you'll be able tell the difference between feature requests that will benefit many of your users as opposed to just a few. It will also help you shape your long-term vision for the company.
- Golden rule: do things, tell people. The unfortunate reality is your users probably don't care enough about your product to explore the entire interface for new features every time they use it. Keep them up-to-date with improvements via newsletters, blog posts, a "recent updates" page, and let them know when you talk to them personally.
Revenue, Customers And Other Fun Numbers
Total Revenue In Year One
We've come a long way from our first customer (thanks Customer.io!). Here are some stats on the currently health of our business.
- We have 410 paying customers
- Our monthly ARPU is $74.83
- Our churn is around .5%
- We've averaged 10.6% WoW growth since YC started in June.
Here's a graph of all the monies. All $130,311.15 of them.
Seed Funding To Date
To date, StatusPage.io has raised around $185,000. The first $100,000 came from YC and the YCVC program. We raised about $85,000 afterwards from a handful of angels -- several of which were actually founders in our YC batch (thanks @polvi and @HuaNancy).
Big Customers In Our First Year
We're incredibly lucky to be working with some of the best companies in the web tech space. In our first year, notable customers include MediaTemple, Citrix, New Relic, BitBucket, Kickstarter, Disqus, Shutterstock, Vimeo, Shopify.
Grab Bag Of Other Things
- 99.98% uptime
- 46,185 SMS notifications sent
- 669,193 emails notifications sent
- 18,782 people getting downtime notifications
- 12,000 reqs/min highest server load
Thank Your For Making Our First Year Great
We want to finish by thanking all of our customers, friends, mentors, investors and most importantly, significant others for supporting us through the entire year. We couldn't have done it without your unwavering support and hope to start making it up to you in year two.