How much revenue did Buffer for Business generate in November?

Dec 8, 2013 3 min readReports

In November, we’ve seen some interesting developments for Buffer for Business. I’ve recently sent this email to the whole team and also included some thoughts and projections for the next month. I hope you’ll find them interesting!

For reference, here are last month’s numbers.

Revenue

Monthly Recurring Revenue from June & July : $2100Monthly Recurring Revenue from August: $4750Monthly Recurring Revenue from September: $4850Monthly Recurring Revenue from October: $4650 + $1250 + 2x Yearly recurring = $1020Monthly Recurring Revenue from November: $4650


+ 4x Yearly recurring = $2040
(1x $1020, 2x $510)

Total recurring revenue November: = $19190Total revenue November = $22250

Conversions

There was a total of 108 new paying Business customers in November.

85 new people started paying in October from 643 trials started in November. That’s a 13.2% conversion from trial to paying user.

Where did they come from?
71% of people coming from Billing page converted (6 out of 8)
60% of people coming from Modal converted (6 out of 11)
48% of people coming from Appheader converted (18 out of 32)
14% of people coming from Pricing page converted (15 out of 97)
9.2% of people coming from the landing page converted (59 out of 675)
(66% of people coming from inbound converted (2 out of 3)

In Nov, we removed Blog header, and added Billing page

(57% of people coming from Inbound converted (4 out of 7)

In total

12.95% of people who started a trial converted to paying users (107 out of 826)

There were also 23 new paying customers who started paying in November, but whose trials started in October (from 69 trials in the last week of September)

There were 595 new total trials started in October

Compare to last month.

Growth

17% increase in MRR compared to October (from $16350 to $19190)

-27% decrease in total revenue compared to October (from $30510 to $22250) (MoM from July to August: 479%)

Buffer for Business is 11.4% of total Buffer revenue in November (down from 15.3% last month)
4% increase in new paying Business users in November (from 104 to 107)

39% increase in new trials started (From 595 trials in October to 826 in November)
Total users on Business

November:
Large ($250) x 1
Medium ($100) x 12
Small ($50) x 95
Total new customers in November: 108

October:
Large ($250) x 5
Large 50% discount ($125) x 1
Medium ($100) x 9
Small ($50) x 89
Total new customers in October: 104

September:
Large ($250) x 2
Medium ($100) x 7
Small ($50) x 101
Total new customers in September: 110

Total

:
Large ($250) x 10
Large 50% discount ($125) x 1
Old low agency ($200) x 2
Medium ($100) x 39
Small ($50) x 324

Total Business customers: 376 (compared to 268 in September, a 40% increase)

(not accounting for churn, unfortunately we’re not quite tracking that right now)

Outlook and thoughts

Significant increase in trials – no increase in upgrades

Over the last 3 months the number of trials increased from 332/mo to 826/mo, despite that increase in trials, the number of upgrades hasn’t really increased.

I believe this is the reason:

Appheader+modals signups are becoming more stable

the current conversion (12.95%) actually feels quite healthy. I believe we had a lot of pent-up demand for Business for more than 12 profiles, more team members and that is now largely saturated. –> Modal/Appheader signups are down to 24 (Oct: 37, Sept: 69)

Overall, this development feels very expected, and it seems that now would be a great time to actively work on increasing the business signups as the internal demand from existing Buffer users is no longer as strong.

Similar number of new users every month

The upcoming launch should help to kick off higher growth on new users for the Business plans. It is almost flat at around 108 new users/mo.
Conclusion

It seems to me, that the Business launch with the addition of some new, core features would be a great experiment to see if growth on the Business side can be kicked into a higher gear.

Right now, it seems that through normal, organic growth, numbers would roughly hover around similar numbers we’ve seen in previous months.

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