Hi folks,
did another round of my income reports: http://www.it-engelhardt.de/linksspy-com-monthly-income-report-october-2014/
Cheers,
Christoph
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Congrats!
I however believe your accounting is over-optimistic. For example, your two users with failed CCs shouldn’t be accounted at their face value, but at face value multiplied by probability that they will update the data and pay. That probability is not 100%; it is probably closer to retention rate.
Same for those 50 trials you’ve got. Should calculate their future MRR as function of trial-to-pay ratio.
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Also, how did you manage to pay $25 for a single click? Tell us. We love horror stories.
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Hi Vlad,
you’re totally right that the “failed CC” customers can’t be accounted at face value - and I do. Sorry for giving the wrong impression here.
Same goes for the people in trial: I know that they came over from Product Hunt and about 30% seem to cancel during trial - which is totally fine and better than I expected.
I’ll have to postpone telling you about the retargeting: I don’t know why it is that bad and I have to leave for the day job right now.
Cheers,
Christoph
I have found that retargeting clicks through perfectaudience are expensive. Significantly more expensive than clicks from Adwords. However the important metric is ROI, not CPC. You might be getting benefit from people that see your ad, but don’t click (reminding them to carry on with the trial). I am currently running an A/B test to find out how effective retargeting is for PerfectTablePlan. Currently it is telling me that retargetting increases visit to sale conversions by 3.2%. But it isn’t statistically significant. I plan to publish something on http://www.successfulsoftware.net when I have more data.
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Hi Andy.
That is interesting. How do you know when someone saw the ad and didn’t click through?
Cheers,
Christoph
I can see the number of impressions and clicks in the PA dashboard. But what I really care about is: what is the difference in conversion rate between the 50% of visitors who are cookied for retargeting and the 50% that aren’t. I don’t really care if or how often they click on my ad. I Googled to see if anyone has measured this. Amazingly I could only find 1 other company that had. It was for ecommerce and they claimed a 12% increase in conversions (IIRC).
I might have to run my test a few more months before I have statistically valid results.
Another great writeup, and it sounds like things are looking up. SaaS signups usually take a hit in November & December, so if you get a dip… defer fretting 'til your January results are in. I also didn’t realize you were juggling family & a day job with LinkSpy. How’s that going?
Hi @itengelhardt, thanks for the report!
I’m currently charging companies for stuff, but in the future I also want to offer paid features to the community (I run a jobboard in Germany). Since these would be smaller amounts (e.g. 2 or 5 EUR a month) I would like to automate this part - for companies I still write the invoices in a cloud software and still write it one by one - this is ok, because the invoices are somewhere between 20 and 300 EUR. But for 5 EUR, it’s not really worth it, I think.
I wanted to ask, what your experience is with Stripe especially being in Germany? Were there any technical or regulatory hurdles?
Would appreciate some input!
Regards,
Oliver
One stripe hurdle will be including all the relevant info on their out of the box email invoices. You need to generate and email your own invoices since there is no way to include address, business id etc from stripe.
Hi Oliver,
I too write invoices manually for my other product: It sucks and I often forget to do it in time. Which is bad, because I don’t get money if I don’t invoice 
I totally recommend Stripe (even for Germany): setup is super easy, you get your money without problems (I’m looking at you, Paypal…) and - most importantly - the ecosystem is amazing. There are dozens of open source libraries (e.g. koudoku for Rails) that handle a LOT of stuff for you. Then there are apps like HookFeed or FirstOfficer which visualize and distill your KPI with the click of a button.
I <3 Stripe.
Also, there’s Quaderno for invoicing with the hassle of VAT. They seem to have it nailed as well.
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Holy smoke. That’s a great option. I will have to look into this.
Hi @itengelhardt,
thanks very much! I will look into it, then!
Twice a month I always set aside a bit of time to send my invoices (15th of a month and last day of month). For now it works well :-). The KPI stuff I will do internally, because I have so many different variations of packages (e.g. discounts, package deals, etc). And it’s a mix of SaaS and one-time products.
Hi @daverodenbaugh,
cool! I will check it out. Since this won’t be my only income stream, I will need to check whether I can combine it with my current system (my current system isn’t just invoicing, but also does all my accounting and e.g. in Germany the invoice numbers have to follow a system - you can set your own but it has to be somehow continuous / logical).
Cheers, Oliver
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Do you pay your content marketing genius $50 an article or $200 as a retainer?
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Hi John,
I pay $50 per article.
Cheers, Christoph
hey Christoph! drop us a line in case you have questions or need extra help with your invoices, VAT, etc. hello@quaderno.io 
thanks for the mention @daverodenbaugh