Episode Transcript
Hello, this is Danny with XO, I'm going to go through our September 2023 monthly recap. If I were to give this month sort of a theme, I would say spinning plates and
Baby steps and, you know, with sort of a goal that we had with our XO 2. 0, where Andrew talked a little bit about this in a culture doc that he's developing about quality, quality of the people we have on the team, quality, high quality work that we produce day in and day out and high quality.
Products in our portfolio companies, high quality companies, and ultimately a high quality experience that we deliver with our people and product to our customers. And this is maybe difficult to say, and I don't want to overdramatize this, but, you know, there's, I guess it's a little bit CastingWords
Quality over quantity that that's a difficult process. Because it just means that we may be lacked in quality. Right? And that's tough. Tough to admit, but it's clear. Our customers are not shy about communicating and sharing that feedback. And we need to do something about that. And so September was.
Baby steps towards transitioning that for our portfolio and what's really been interesting in September. I think was a good qualitatively a good indication and quantitatively a good indication of sort of like the different flavors and and characteristics our portfolio Has you know, they're all not they're all not the same.
They're all not On a similar growth trajectory, they don't all experience the same issues or growth problems. They all are so very unique, which I think is cool to talk about and observe and learn from. But obviously it can be a little bit difficult when. Just trying to operate, operate them successfully.
And that's sort of why I also described this sort of a spinning plates where it's like, you know, it it's I see myself and I see us being more reactive than I would like when it comes to solving. Problems foreseeing problems and anticipating them and having solutions ready in waiting. That's been, that's been difficult, I think.
And, and I'll talk a little bit about that and the effects of that. But September was a little bit of a down month. This number actually September goal. This, this is a little bit off because some of the August numbers when I look back, they had a few tweaks just, I think, because of like stripes and like their refunds and how long some of those things can take to process.
But anyways. In comparison to August you can sort of see in the net volume we, we were down a little and we're sort of split cold DM. Although net volume was down a little bit. MMR was up, which I can show here. Screenshot was up a little bit and growth part was down, but Again, if you guys have read a little bit about that, I want to kind of give this growth bar a couple more months just to see kind of how things.
After us getting the, the checkout and onboarding experience back to the way that it was before we acquired it. But also say we sort of, we've had a split in terms of growth. Some grew and some, some did not talk about analytics and sort of what we're observing there and what we're trying to do.
It's sort of the leash that it's on as a result of just the. The struggles that we've had in being able to grow that product. Nothing really to call out in The customer acquisition funnel, I think, you know, at the end of the day, this is this is where, like, the rubber meets the road for us. You know, for a company that doesn't spend a lot of money and resources on paid advertising.
You know, we play the long game with with with content. You know, and we rely on the product and the product experience. You know, we still haven't figured out and nailed sort of, you know, the activation point and getting the time to value. I think with some of these, we saw it early on, but you know, we, we haven't really adjusted and we may need to do that.
But at the end of the day, that's where. We need to improve and that's, you know, reflected here in the free to paid conversion term overall was lower which was interesting. But I think. You know, total paid was lower. This is a bit of an anomaly because of the growth bar number. But you can see with analytics, it was down.
She best it was down screenshot. It was up. But, you know, churn for whatever reason for screenshot was higher than than it usually is. So it's interesting that sort of everyone again, all the companies are. In a little bit of a different state. They are all kind of experiencing different things.
And this is just an observation, but I really do think that's a function of us having 5 companies that we're operating. We, some of them we pay attention to today. Some of them we paid attention to tomorrow. Some of them we pay attention to yesterday and, you know, there will be neglect. And as a result.
You know, maybe atrophy happens, maybe I'll talk a bit about this with like analytics, a new, a new competitor popped up and I truly believe they built a lot of buzz and it affected our churn with cold DM. It was a little bit of the opposite. I think we, you know, we sort of held tight since March. I can jump down in here cold DM, but since March, you know, we can pull this up.
I'm sorry for that sudden change in March. You can see, you know, we were, the business was, you know, had nothing. And then we grew it pretty quickly to about 2000 MRR in 2 months, you know, made our our money back on the acquisition on the deal. And then we saw, you know, significant decline because of Twitter's API changing a cost being associated with Twitter's API.
Bye. Then changing what end points were available, and we struggled to maneuver that. And to be honest, that's partially because of, you know, our limitations with resources and things like that. But we decided to stick it through. And I think. The product is now is back to a very stable place. And for September, we saw the 1st sort of like uptake back up, which I think is, you know, it's a good sign.
And I think we'll sort of continue to see that trend as we have some build out some growth plays now that we're confident in the actual product itself. But but yeah, each of these are seem to be sort of in an interesting Interesting place. And you know what I mean by that with growth bar. I think we're still sort of holding there a little bit to kind of test a couple of growth things that will be doing.
We added more content bottom of the funnel content. We started a back linking. Process where we're going after B2B SaaS software companies to partner with and to exchange links with we're almost done with our Google search cloud integration. This is console integration. This would be our largest.
Feature since the acquisition we'll put a product hunt launch behind it. And we have a YouTube product review ready to go and teed up with that with an affiliate. We're actually hosting like a Udemy course, and we're going to be. Sort of the main product used in that you Demi course. So there's a lot of cool growth plays that will test with growth bar before the end of the end of this year.
So it'll just give us a good barometer going into 2024 on how we want to best move forward. In growing that product. So we're excited about that. With analytics, I think, you know, we're sort of on its last straw a little bit. I think, you know, we've just dealt with a lot of things. Some of them out of our control, new competitor pops up.
LinkedIn changed several things in Sep in September that really drastically affected us. So having to reconcile with that, having to deal with that, and then in the meantime also just improving. You know, the product overall, I think for this one, we put a new design and front end on it, but we didn't really touch outside of just the design and what it looks like we didn't spend a lot of time optimizing and updating the backend and front end code.
So September we did a lot of that because we have new dashboards that we'll be launching. So really cool things. And this is sort of us trying to put a mark in the sand a little bit to say, Hey, like we need to start seeing growth here after just some. Plateauing and some dips and plateauing. And so with analytics, September was definitely rough for a variety of reasons, but we do have a path forward.
I think I've spoken about this now for a couple of months, and we just haven't been able to trigger. Or to do it because I want to coincide it with the product release, but because of, because the new, new features will affect pricing, but transitioning this to a trial, right? We get a thousand signups.
You know, we average about two to 3 percent conversion, not good. Us getting us getting to a free trial. I think that will help us in terms of activation. And so we're, we're leaning on those things to come in October. I'm excited about that. Yeah, I can't really say anything bad about Screenshot API.
We have a couple of really big enterprise deals that could be looming, which would be a huge lift for this product. But whether it's cash collections, like, you know sorry, yeah, net volume or MRR, it's, it, it's been pretty, pretty darn steady. And it actually had its best month in a while in terms of new customers, 21.
But growth wise, it was a little lower because we lost a couple of larger customers. Some of them were paying a hundred bucks per month, which is, you know, I think quadruple. Yeah. It's like, or three X, the, the ARPU. So we lost a couple of those, but we expect a good cash collections month in October because of some overages and things like that.
So that screenshot mentioned cold DM sort of sitting where it's at. It's in a good spot. Now, product wise, we're going to run sort of low hanging fruit growth play where we just blast the email list, sort of reengaging them, reminding them that the product exists and that we've spent a lot of time improving it and getting them to try again.
And then the last one, I think, and again, just going back to this, this theme of September feeling like just spinning plates being reactionary. You know, this one sort of has done a bit of a dive and I can't necessarily point my finger to any one thing. You can sort of see here where it was at the beginning and then it sort of declined part of it.
We, we paused for two months doing Google ads that could have definitely played a role. We're definitely not spending as much as we did. We're spending, I spent like 115 bucks last month which I think is, you know Way less than half of what we used to spend, but we're going to continue to ramp it up just to see if we get a little closer.
But well, she best. It's just 1 to, I think, analyze because if we look at
C. If we look at signups, historically speaking, it's been pretty solid. So in January, like you can see there was a point where we were getting like 5, 000 and that's partially because of how much money we're spending on Google ads. So again, like it might be one of those things where, you know, if we want to get to 40 new customers instead of 20.
We maybe we need to pay two X and see if that if that's enough so we don't want to pay more if the ROI is not net positive, but again, just something that we're experimenting with a little bit because of the decline that we experienced. But but, yeah, I mean, October again, it's us continuing to creep towards.
A steady state for our products and our portfolios, where just the amount of lift product wise and engineering wise, isn't so focused on like, catching up and being reactionary, but giving us a chance to be proactive. And so that's a recap. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out.
But hope everyone has a good month of October and we'll see you on the other side.
