One year after launch, the French Together app (my first SaaS) now makes $10k/month.
Find out how how I got there (and what I learned in the process) in my
@HighSignalio
interview!
Ever since switching my SaaS to annual only pricing, a few people have contacted me saying they would only sign up if there were monthly plans.
In every case, I gave them a link to sign up for monthly.
Guess how many of these people ended up signing up? Yup, 0.
Ever since launching my web app, people have been asking me for a mobile app.
After talking to a few users though, I realized all they want is an app icon on their home screen so I wrote a guide on how to add that.
I haven't received a single mobile app request since.
This is something I keep noticing. Just because people say they would sign up if X feature/pricing was available doesn't mean they will. People telling you they want something is not validation.
Last week, I tried removing my monthly plan and going annual only with my SaaS.
The result? 20% less signups.
Annual subs bring in 2 to 3 times more money though so I’m tempted to keep it that way.
Is that crazy?
Can confirm. Raising my price from $9.99/mo to $24/month eliminated 90% of problematic customers for me.
Also had surprisingly little impact on the number of signups.
The best reason to charge more is to make more money, but the next best reason is that you will price out “pathological customers.”
Customers like the one below *are numerous* and higher price points mean you’ll lose less of your brain cells dealing with their many challenges.
@PierreDeWulf
In my experience the issue is mostly customers not knowing what to expect and worrying they will not hear back. An auto reply acknowledging the message was received and saying how long a reply will take goes a long way.
UPDATE: It did not work. At all.
Not a single person replied asking to sign up.
Turns out building an email list based around offering free content wasn't the best way to acquire customers.
I have an email list with 80k French learners. Of these, 700 have email addresses ending in ".edu"
So I'm going to send an email asking them if they are teachers, and offer them a free teacher account.
Hopefully, some will like FT and then sign up their school for it.
3 months after launching the French Together app and I'm almost at £3,000 MRR.
Growth has been slower than expected but at least it's going up :).
#buildinpublic
#SaaS
Probably a B2C thing but I noticed that helping people who ask lots of question before signing up for my SaaS almost always backfires.
Worst case scenario: Tons of back and forth and they never sign up.
Best case scenario: they sign up and then send hundreds of support emails.
I don’t get why so many people are complaining that this is just a ffmpeg wrapper.
So what? If you prefer to use ffmpeg directly, go for it.
But the reality is that many people will happily pay for a tool that makes their life easier.
2 years ago I had almost no programming knowledge. Now I have a profitable SaaS built using Rails and JS.
I would like to build a second SaaS so I can improve my programming knowledge.
Should I build it with the same stack or try another stack such as Node + React?
I have been coding for a year and still feel like I barely know anything about programming.
How long did it take you to feel like a competent developer?
After years of growth, my blog French Together started declining in March 2021.
I tried to fix it but came to the conclusion it had more to do with the market than anything else.
So instead, I learned how to code and built a SaaS.
#buildinpublic
I recently increased my SaaS pricing and expected slightly lower sales.
What I didn't expect was:
- Lower churn.
- Much nicer customers.
It has made customer support so much more pleasant. Would 100% recommend!
One year ago, I was full of doubts and about to launch my first SaaS. I had an audience but knew nothing about SaaS and programming.
One year later and I just passed the bar of 1,000 paid subscribers.
The journey hasn't been easy but I'm pretty excited about the future.
I hate magic links.
They force me to open my email client, get distracted by new emails and often make me lose my flow.
If you are going to offer magic links, please at least give people the option to use a password instead.
October is over and I missed my MRR goal but not by much.
On the plus side:
- 143% increase in trial signups
- Churn down from 9.5% to 6.6%
- Lots of lessons learned (see link in next tweet)
I have a good feeling about November :).
#buildinpublic
#SaaS
9 months after launch, the French Together app (my first SaaS) is now close to 1,000 users!
This would never have been possible without all the support and encouragement I have received from fellow indie founders here on Twitter so thank you everyone!
My biggest regret as an indie founder is not to have learned how to code earlier.
Nocode tools were great to start but the limitations meant I frequently had to tell customers that the features they wanted couldn't be implemented.
Now I can do anything and it feels amazing.
Just removed monthly plans! Now my SaaS only offers annual pricing.
Probably one of the scariest decisions I have made as an indie founder.
Wish me luck!
I have been running an experiment to see the impact of removing my monthly plan and going annual only with my SaaS.
I expected less signups but lower churn and higher LTV.
Instead I got...44% more signups! An amazing result because annual subscribers are worth 3 times more!
I have been running an experiment to see the impact of removing my monthly plan and going annual only with my SaaS.
I expected less signups but lower churn and higher LTV.
Instead I got...44% more signups! An amazing result because annual subscribers are worth 3 times more!
One unexpected (although unsurprising) side effect of removing monthly plans for my SaaS is that annual subscribers tend to be:
- Much nicer.
- Require less support.
- More motivated => More success stories.
The downside is that my trial to paid went from 50% to 25%.
One year ago, I had a struggling business and a product I was ashamed of.
I had just spent a year learning how to code and had one clear goal: turn the ebook into a web app.
Here are the stats 6 months after the launch:
- 678 customers
- $51,614 in sales
- $5,644 MRR
I used to hate HARO. It just wasn't working for me.
Then I tried it again a few months ago and have already earned backlinks from Business Insiders and other top publications.
Here are my best tips! THREAD
I'm sorry, I really tried but I can't stand LinkedIn.
Every time I open it, the feed is just an endless stream of posts written by a worse version of ChatGPT.
@robwalling
Honestly it has gotten to the point where I assume most people writing things like that earn nothing. The highest earners I have met tend to have very unassuming bios.
@levelsio
For me it increased account signups but not trial conversions. Ended up removing it because all it did was lead to more customer support requests.
You know what I love most about SaaS?
The revenue keeps stacking up.
With one-time products, every day was a blank slate so I would always worry about revenue vanishing.
With SaaS, I know I can count on recurring revenue and that's an amazing feeling.
A rarely-mentioned downside of using a MOR like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy is that you often end up paying tax you don't need to pay.
I don't sell enough to reach the sales tax threshold in most most US states but Paddle does so I end up paying sales tax in many states anyway.
GPT-4 is an incredible tool but it’s a tool you have no control over. Pricing could double, the API could be restricted. You could get banned.
Think carefully before basing your entire business on it. You are building on someone else’s property.
I love living in the UK but one aspect of British culture that really puts me off is the blatant anti-Americanism and exceptionalism.
If you think your accent and place of birth make you inherently superior, there is something seriously wrong with you.
When I switched from ebooks to SaaS, I thought it would convert better because it was a vastly superior product.
This didn't happen and the road has been quite bumpy. But growth has been steady and that's one thing I'm very grateful for.
Hoping to reach 10k MRR by April.
Just got a message from a school district saying they are interested in a French Together subscription for 150 students. They also asked if there is a way for teachers to track students progress.
Let's see if I can build a basic way to do that today!
#buildinpublic
I see more and more tweets and replies that are clearly written by ChatGPT and it makes me sad.
Being social is the whole point of a social network. If all you care about is posting vague content anyone else could generate in seconds, you are missing the point entirely.
Last month, I stopped offering monthly plans and switched to annual only for my B2C SaaS.
Pros:
- 30% more trial signups
- 34% higher average transaction
- Doubled cashflow
- Lower churn
- Nicer customers
Cons:
- 3 times more refunds (4% to 12%)
I felt really demotivated last week.
MRR was down, I was stuck with a bug I didn't know how to fix.
It just didn't feel worth it anymore and I briefly entertained the idea of selling French Together.
So I did the only thing I knew would help: turn off the computer, go out
Just increased the price of annual subscriptions to my SaaS from $119/year to $144/year.
I considered going for $168/year but it feels a bit too violent of a jump.
Existing subscribers are grandfathered but I'm curious to see what impact this will have on new signups.
This month has been pretty awful.
My trial to paid went from 60% to 30%.
My churn is up 33%.
Back when I was selling one-time purchases, a month like that would have meant no money in the bank.
But the beauty of SaaS is that I still have recurring transactions so I know
It finally happened! I got my first copycat!
Someone made a copy of French Together for German. They even copy pasted my landing page copy.
They even sent me a DM to tell me about it.
I’m not angry, I’m just confused honestly.
Recently
@daniel_nguyenx
asked me about my experience switching from Paddle to Stripe so I thought I would share more detail.
I switched because:
- I'm under the sales tax threshold in most countries but Paddle isn't so I was paying thousands in undue tax.
1/5
Indie founders often try to build everything on their own.
But using a SaaS template is probably the best technical decision I have made.
It means I have time to work on features that make my SaaS stand out instead of spending hours on authentication, billing etc.
The past 2 months have been a disaster.
I have been feeling incredibly overwhelmed. I tried to do way more and ended up doing way less.
I made lots of changes I should never have made. Why? Because I wanted to go faster.
Time to go slow again and enjoy the journey.
There is a huge difference in MRR for French Together depending on the tool used to calculate it.
ChartMogul: $15,309
ProfitWell: $10.2k
Paddle: $9 625
I know they all calculate MRR differently but this seems a bit extreme?
Unexpected issue I’m facing after switching from Paddle to Stripe.
Nobody is signing up. I went from 5 signups per day on average to 0 and I have no idea why.
I have been testing 2 version of my SaaS pricing page. One with monthly + annual, one with annual only.
So far the annual only version gets 27% more trial signups.
Definitely not what I expected and proof that it's always worth testing.
Unexpected side effect of trending on Hacker News:
Lots of detailed feedback on how to improve the French Together app from people who are much better at coding than me.
This month has been such a SaaS rollercoaster.
I accidentally canceled 50k/year worth of subscriptions, a huge hit to my MRR...
And then had a B2B customer inquire about a potential 800k/year deal.
Not sure what's next but I can't wait!
I love living in the UK but one aspect of British culture that really puts me off is the blatant anti-Americanism and exceptionalism.
If you think your accent and place of birth make you inherently superior, there is something seriously wrong with you.
Social media is full of MRR graphs showing meteoric rises and people reaching 100k MRR in months.
But it's far from being the reality for everyone so I thought I would share French Together's growth over the past 12 months.
Not bad but definitely not as impressive.
At its peak, French Together was getting 350k monthly visitors from Google.
It now receives 1/3 of that...
Sounds bad right?
Except that the traffic I now get converts 4 times better.
You don't need a ton of visitors, you need the right visitors.
A while ago, a very rude customer decided to do a chargeback instead of asking for a refund.
I just received an email from
@PaddleHQ
saying they fought and won the dispute for me :)
September growth for French Together:
The good:
- £3,574 MRR (+£914)
- 191k monthly visitors (+16%)
- 3.2k new email subscribers
The ugly:
- 13% churn
Main goals for October:
- Test new sales page copy
- Add more practice exercises to the app
- Publish 16 articles
I have a customer who uses the French Together app a lot but is also very critical and sends me suggestions for improvement every week.
This week, the only feedback she sent me was "The recent changes are quite good."
Language learning is a super crowded market. There are hundreds of Duolingo clones, flashcard apps and AI chatbots.
But you know what's missing? A great pronunciation trainer.
If I were starting from scratch, that's what I would focus on.
Now I ignore such messages. It's a shame for the few people who would genuinely have signed up and benefited but it helps me keep my sanity and help all the other students.
It seems totally wild to me that I keep increasing my prices and people keep signing up at the same rate.
If you haven’t already, try raising your prices, you won’t regret it.
A few months after switching from
@PaddleHQ
to Stripe, I'm considering switching back.
I thought Stripe would save me lots of money in undue tax but registering for tax in the EU has been a nightmare. To this day, I still haven't been able to pay tax in Ireland.
People often talk about the cons of B2C. Lower prices, demanding customers...
But nobody ever mentions the pros: no compliance audits, no sales calls, much easier to run on autopilot.
Makes B2C a better choice for new SaaS founders and people who want a lifestyle business IMO.
6 weeks after switching to annual only for my SaaS, I’m now considering adding the monthly plan back because many of the people who signed up are not real customers.
They signed up yearly because they had no choice but then request a refund after a month.
I have been running an experiment to see the impact of removing my monthly plan and going annual only with my SaaS.
I expected less signups but lower churn and higher LTV.
Instead I got...44% more signups! An amazing result because annual subscribers are worth 3 times more!
I promised to share not only the good of building my SaaS but also the bad. So here goes:
The latest Google update has been devastating for French Together. The articles that generated most of my leads are now at position 6 or even further.
Not sure what to do next.
I have an email list with 80k French learners. Of these, 700 have email addresses ending in ".edu"
So I'm going to send an email asking them if they are teachers, and offer them a free teacher account.
Hopefully, some will like FT and then sign up their school for it.
After a few rocky months involving a major overhaul of my customer acquisition strategy, French Together is finally growing again!
Feeling good about 2024! :)
@muneeb
@dhh
The problem is that alternatives are only useful if people use them. I have signal and telegram on my phone and would love to stop using Messenger but many of my friends and family members only use Messenger.
Has anyone tried sending pre-billing notifications to their SaaS customers?
As a user, I feel like that's the right thing to do and really appreciate when companies do it.
As a SaaS founder, I'm terrified it will double my churn.
What do you think?
I'm really happy about the progress I have made working on the French Together mobile app today.
And I'm even happier about the neighbours' cat coming for a visit.
#buildinpublic
#buildwithcats
Frankly most of the negative replies seem to come from people who think they are too smart to use a wrapper… while actual smart people will happily use a tool that saves them time so they can focus on harder problems.
There is no way I’m giving Apple 30% of the revenue from French Together subscriptions but the App Store rules are confusing.
Can I bypass Apple payments by simply not allowing signups from the app?
Me 2 days ago: OMG I beat my all-time record number of trial signups, I’m going to be rich.
Me today: OMG last 2 days signups are way down, I’m a failure.
Has anyone built a SaaS based entirely on Rails + Hotwire?
I keep thinking I should use React or other frontend framework for more interactive parts of French Together like drag and drop quizzes or chats.
But do I really need to?
The awkward moment when you hit send on a launch email to 76,000 people...
Then realize you linked to the wrong landing page.
Thank god
@Bento
has a "pause sending" button.
I love London in the fall but the lack of sunshine is having a very noticeable effect on my mood.
Anyone else struggling with this? Did you find anything that helps?
I’m considering buying a SAD lamp but not sure how helpful that would be.