TL;DR: The top of our funnel is fine, and our app is making money, but it's not "easy money" and our trial to paying customer sign up needs some serious attention.
I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com. We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month.
We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords). We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up rates.
Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this:
April: 13.02%
May: 12.37%
June: 13.76%
July: 15.61%
August: 16.46%
Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this:
April: 39.54%
May: 40.06%
June: 37.21%
July: 32.8%
August: 31.17%
So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right direction.
Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time.
Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...
Please share anything you can about how things go in the future. I'd love to see how your dunning emails turn out. Can you also share some background? When did you start? How many people are on your team? What kind of initial investments did you do?
Really awesome to see people being so transparent about how they're doing.
By the way, if you ever want to write any blog posts and cross-post them to Lifestyle.io [0], we'd be happy to have them.
If there's a demand I'd be happy to share our lifecycle email updates...either way I'll be sure to keep track of our progress so I can report on it from time to time. Getting the onboarding process exactly right really is a combination of art and science (mostly science).
We launched Staff Squared about 18 months ago, it was originally an internal app that I used at my software company http://atlascode.com that we realised could be useful to other companies. We bootstrapped the app from the outset and haven't taken on any investment as I wanted to see if we could make this thing work first. Turns out it's possible to make a profitable business from it but it's by no means easy.
I do pretty much everything...sales, marketing, support, QA, specifying new features, and so on. My team of devs at Atlas consists of four full time .Net developers. I now also have a part time person who helps me with marketing, newsletters, copywriting and design. Our office manager assists with some of the support requests we receive and manages our oLark chat on the site...
We're looking to grow now and take on more developers as I'm finding it hard to balance the client work we've got at Atlas and keep Staff Squared "fresh". All good problems to have :)
I'll check out lifestyle.io and see if I can contribute something of use to that community. Thanks for your interest!
Thanks for this clarification, as I'm used to SME meaning Subject Matter Experts (which also applies to the product).
BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello project page.
We are also targeting SMB sith a SaaS in a different area (sales): http://www.quotty.com.
We haven't still defined a strategy, but your comment caught my attention because
we are facing the same issue. Your application is innovative, how do you announce
it? I figure that hardly somebody will search for an application like yours
that nobody figures exist?
In summary where you get most leads: keyword search, organic search,
partnership, ads placed in industry blog? Did partnership generate results? With
other software? With distributors?
Another issue we found is that many users are too lazy ans inexperienced for the
trial disert. I am conducting the following experiment: instead of immediately
sending a free subscription-trial password, we ask for a phone number that we
will call to make an interactive (remote) demo of the product using real client
data, This has improved results, but elevated cost.
Don't you have the same training problem with new users?
We're currently number 1/2 for "HR software" (at least on google.co.uk) and so we get a lot of traffic from that. I'm working on getting us to rank for HR Systems which gets just under half the amount of traffic as HR Software.
We have a limit of £30 per day on PPC. It drives traffic to the site but I'm still getting under the hood of whether it delivers real ROI.
We get a lot of interest in our app from the Chrome web store. I think a lot of people overlook that as a (free!) place to market their software. They have a whole section dedicated to HR software and the majority of the time we're featured at the top. We're going to get listed on the Google enterprise marketplace soon too.,
A bunch of other stuff we do includes:
* Advertising on various HR blogs
* Partner marketing - I could write a whole post on just this topic, it's a big undertaking
* Writing guest posts
* We're trialing influads.com at the moment, which is an ad platform. Again I'm not sure if we're getting value from that just yet...
The one thing we've not done to date is press releases. We've performed exactly zero PR for the app, but that will change once we complete a few super cool features we're working on that I feel will set us apart.
When people "install" the app from the Chrome web store it just puts a link in their browser. That's it.
In the Google marketplace it's a bit more advanced, and you can integrate with Google authentication for sign in, and with documents for document sharing and so on.
I think you might consider changing some of your cartoons so that a Woman is running the business. I think it's a bit strange[1] that it's the male character all the time.
I don't know if that's something that might turn off a woman, but it did sort of jump out at me.
[1]Full Disclosure:I only browsed through a few pages, I did not to a page by page gender analysis.
Yeah we know, happened yesterday. Thanks for the heads up..
To explain: I was experimenting with an app that it turns out breaks the twitter rules and so they've suspended us. I'm talking to Twitter now about getting us unsuspended.
I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com. We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month.
We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords). We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up rates.
Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this:
April: 13.02%
May: 12.37%
June: 13.76%
July: 15.61%
August: 16.46%
Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this:
April: 39.54%
May: 40.06%
June: 37.21%
July: 32.8%
August: 31.17%
So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right direction.
Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time.
Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...