We Survived 2020 But What About Our Growth Rate?

FounderQuest

Show Notes:
Links:
How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?

Profitwell Retain

New Relic

Full Transcript:
Starr:
Okay, so you are listening to FounderQuest. We're a bunch of founders, we're on a quest. Thank you for listening, we are back after a rather long absence. Basically, people were gone different days during the holidays, and it was just a weird scheduling situation, so we just decided to take, I guess, two months off? A month and a half?

Ben:
Something like that.

Starr:
Something like that, yeah.

Josh:
A little more than we normally do at Christmas.

Starr:
Yeah, a little bit more, but I've got to say, I feel a little bit refreshed, I'm ready to talk into a microphone again, I missed talking to y'all.

Ben:
Likewise.

Josh:
Yeah, same. I also missed the routine of just having this call every week.

Ben:
Yeah, and our listeners missed us. I had people reaching out to me saying, "Hey, is the podcast coming back?"

Josh:
Nice, well that's a good sign.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
I know, that's so sweet. You've got to get all your business tips in before it's just a bloodbath. You've got to prepare for the anarcho-capitalist future.

Josh:
Well there's some hope on the horizon, right?

Ben:
Of course. Well I've got to say, I'm having a great day so far. I was able to upgrade one of our repositories from Tailwind 1 to Tailwind 2 without any snags or hiccups whatsoever. I'm pretty excited.

Josh:
Wow.

Starr:
Oh, nice.

Josh:
Nice Ben.

Ben:
It's not every day an upgrade goes off without a hitch.

Josh:
Yeah, for sure.

Ben:
It's kind of compensation, I think, from the universe, for how badly the upgrade that I'm trying to do with our Elasticsearch cluster is going. Because upgrading from Elasticsearch 6 to 7 apparently is not in the cards for me, so yin and yang.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Well that's a shame. So what are we actually talking about today? It took everything we had just to make it here at 10 am on a Friday together. I don't know if anybody had the energy to think beyond that, so...

Josh:
Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption.

Ben:
Well actually I had a thought on something that we could talk about, something that's been kind of on my mind for the past few days, and that is perhaps a slight recap of 2020. Because as I took the break, I was thinking goals for 2021, and things I wanted to see, and looking back at 2020, and looking at some numbers. And to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed with how 2020 went from our business standpoint. The growth was not great. We had growth, but it was definitely off from previous years. And obviously coronavirus was a factor no doubt, we saw our revenue take a hit in March-April. So there's that, but still, it just feels kind of eh to have the worst growth year... I don't know if it's the worst, I don't know, I'll have to go back and check previous years I guess. But it was not a fantastic growth year, and I'm just like, eh, what can I do during 2021 to make that a different story? So that's been on my mind.

Josh:
Yeah, I think I was telling you the other day, I've had the feeling that it just felt like a stagnant year, just in general. And I know a lot of that is because just of the conditions, and things that were out of our control. But then also, you can only sit and stare at the news for so many years in a row before we get back to work. We did a lot of work last year. Thinking back we did do a lot of work, but I also feel like... I don't know, I'm just looking forward to doing some new stuff, and getting back to innovating.

Starr:
Yeah. Well first of all, I have to say that it's not nothing. I also looked at our growth numbers, and it's not nothing that we grew, we had growth. We are making more money now in the midst of a global pandemic than we were when it started, so that's definitely something. That's definitely a blessing. Maybe we wish it was more, but it's still there.

Ben:
Yeah, I agree. Having some growth is certainly a blessing. We had customers, and obviously in the news there are a bunch of businesses going out of business, and they have nothing now.

Josh:
We have nothing to complain about.

Ben:
Yeah, for sure. I guess I was thinking of it in terms of... As being three developers who started this business, three technical people, it's always been a weakness of ours on the growth side, the getting customers in the door kind of side. Yeah, we've done some things, and we've stumbled on the way, but we're not experts. We're not sales experts, we're not marketing experts, we're just doing the best we can. And that's been great for us, we've got a nice comfortable business, things are good, growth has been good every year. But as I was thinking of these things and I was thinking about, well, growth last year wasn't great. And yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but looking forward, what can I do that's different than I've done in the past, right?

Ben:
So one of the things that I've been thinking about... I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, but I am a big fan of goals. Not that you need a new year to set goals, but... So I'm thinking, my goals for the year, my goals for the quarter, and so on. I'm like, eh, maybe I need to get better at this whole figuring out growth thing. Maybe I should really spend a fair amount of time just trying to get into what that means, and doing some... I don't know. That's the problem, I don't know exactly what that means for me, but the one thing I had thought so far is, maybe that means I spend a little less time on the detail, getting things done, upgrading Elasticsearch clusters, and that sort of stuff, and a little more time than I have in the past on, "Okay, how do we get growth in our business?"

Josh:
Yeah. It's easy to fall back into the comfortable routine. Believe it or not, upgrading Elasticsearch clusters is comfortable for you. It's not enjoyable, but it's... You know how to do it.

Ben:
It's the well worn rut in my experience.

Josh:
Exactly, and I have the same thing.

Starr:
The nice thing about technical tasks is that generally you know if you did it right, you know if you succeeded. And with marketing it's like, oh, I don't know. Or marketing, or sales, or whatever. I guess sales would be a little bit more direct feedback, but with marketing, it's like, "Okay, let's circle back in a year and see if we can notice any change." Yeah, well that sounds really good. I would love for everybody to be involved in chasing growth and all that. A couple interesting stats I just want to throw out there that I was looking at yesterday, and I'm not going to throw out absolute numbers, but we all agreed it was okay to discuss percentages, or percentage changes, and everything. So I think this interesting just to show how 2020 has been different than previous years.

Starr:
So what I did is, we use ProfitWell, and I went in and did their... They let you export a CSV of pretty much every page on their site. And so I got a CSV of customer numbers, right? Total customers, new customers added per month, customers who downgrade, who upgrade, et cetera. So the majority in the change in our growth... Our growth was lower this year, and the majority of that change came from having fewer upgrades, and... I forget the exact days, that kind of makes sense to me because we were doing this thing, I think in 2019, where we were asking people who were basically using t...