Typically I do monthly Starter Story reports, but I'd like to start doing this for Pigeon. Since they are two very different businesses, I'd like to do them separately.

TLDR

Overall, I'm feeling really good about Pigeon - better than I've ever felt about it, I think.

This road of building a SaaS has been really hard - a lot harder than I expected. I've gone through some pretty depressing times - wondering if this is even worth it. But, I keep coming back to it, chipping away, and really proud to not have given up and gotten as far as I have.

If you go back and read some of my daily entries here, you'll probably find some stuff about this.

Signups for Pigeon have been really strong and MRR is at its highest right now.

This next month I will go through the Google audit and I'm really excited for 2020. It's going to be a big year.

YC

Right at the end of October, I was rejected from YC. That really sucked, but a month later, I've mostly forgotten about it.

After the rejection, I put my head down and focused on building a better product. I improved a ton of UI/UX, onboarding, signup, and added a bunch of features.

I spent a lot of time on marketing this year and validating the product. Now, I'm confident it's validated. It's time to get serious.

MRR/Customers

MRR is at $783, which means 27 paying customers. This is up from about $667 last month, about 12.5% increase.

I also track active users, because I think it's more important than revenue.

Here's what a weekly graph looks like since we started in May:

Churn has been rough, although I think it's too early to look at the numbers too seriously.

Weekly newsletter updates

A big win this month has been the weekly newsletter I've been sending. I have about 300 people on my email list, who are both existing/past customers or people who are interested in Pigeon but have not become a customer.

Every Tuesday, I send out a newsletter about exciting new Pigeon updates, usually new features.

This has done a couple things:

1. It's brought in new customers
2. It's kept me accountable to ship new stuff in a consistent manner
3. It's helped me ship faster and become more productive
4. It's showing customers that we are dedicated to Pigeon

• Re-engineered the entire email templating engine
• Made signing up much easier (oAuth flows, etc)
• Quoted text in email replies
• Email batching
• Test sequences
• Smart fields
• Lead status updater in sequences
• Gmail reply box reminders/sequence setters
• General onboarding / documentation / product education improvements

November - our biggest month ever

But this month is about November, where we hit over 100k uniques!

Much of this is thanks to a really big Hacker News post that went viral. You can see the 20k+ uniques we got in one day. Even without the big Hacker News push, this still would have been the biggest month.

Interviews

In November, we published 57 interviews. I'd like to be publishing at least 60 interviews/month but this month had a holiday and November/December have historically been slow for us because businesses are focused on Black Friday and the holidays.

In the new year, I expect a big spike in traffic as well as content output.

Email subscribers

We are just days away from hitting 10k email subscribers.

However, email list growth has been really slow. I removed the CTA on the main page to put in the search box, which hasn't helped.

In December, I have a project to increase email optin rates, which I will use a bunch of tactics from this article.

I think it will go up a ton.

Revenue

Big tasks completed

Nowadays, I'm more focused on "bigger projects" within Starter Story.

Now that much of the content and "day to day" is owned by our small team of freelancers, I'm freed up to work on development/experimental projects, scaling, and generating revenue.

We try to find a way to automate or outsource most things and stay as lean as possible.

Here are some of the big things completed in November:

Adding more Pinterest templates

I'm always looking for new ways to distribute content for Starter Story, and I've been running an experiment on Pinterest where I auto-generate image assets and post on Pinterest.

Been doing this for a couple of months now and it's starting to pay off, you can see the graph taking off in last 30 days:

Improved social media

Our social media is completely automated, but I did spend some time making captions better and getting the auto-generated assets working properly.

I also added a LinkedIn channel to Buffer, and I post there regularly now.

Submit form

I added a submit form to the site.

We never had this before, as I always encouraged people to email me and go from there.

This new form brings in 1-2 legitimate interview opportunities per day. Pretty cool to see it working!

One of my goals for next year is to build a more "self-service" interview process. This form is one of the first stepping stones to get there.

Follow up stories

We are now doing many "follow up stories", as we call them.

These are interview "updates", i.e. we interview someone again 1 year later. This project has been really successful, and we have over 50% of founders agreeing to do one. Surprisingly, most of them say yes!

This is great because it's confirming that founders do see a nice benefit from sharing their story on Starter Story, and they're willing to go through the work to do it again.

I set up a Pigeon integration that would reach out to past interviewees to see if they want to do another interview.  And getting them to write good content is really easy since they've already been through the process :)

Testing out lifetime membership

For our premium membership, I removed the free trial and only included a monthly, yearly, and lifetime membership.

I thought that we would see a lot more people signing up for the lifetime membership, but that has not been the case - we haven't even had one lifetime signup since introducing it about a month ago.

Signups are very much down after removing the free trial, and overall, I'm not very happy with results. I will reassess at the end of the year and see it makes sense to bring back the free trial.

I also paywalled a couple more things around the site, such as filtering businesses.

Increased exposure for Klaviyo

Lastly, I added new ad spots for Klaviyo in an attempt to drive more traffic and exposure to their site.

Since they sponsor the site exclusively, I want to make sure to send them as much traffic as I can, so I added this to all interviews on the site:

The results for that have been super good, driving ~3x more clicks for them across the site.

I hope you enjoyed this month in review! Lots of cool stuff planned for December.

1. Pigeon is a much more scalable business (and business model)
2. I wouldn't be proud of myself if I didn't try to build Pigeon.
3. Info products life time value is much shorter

1. You don't have to provide value every single month (to avoid churn)
2. You can rely on one-time impulse purchases (funnel, buy this book, course, etc)
3. Can easily differentiate (there are millions of books in the world)
4. Can use your own audience / founder "clout" to propel the business

1. Not recurring revenue and unreliable business model
2. You take advantage of people's impulses (which is morally questionable - that's just my opinion - but there are thousands of scummy courses out there)
3. It's hard to scale the business beyond "yourself" and your own brand
4. You will likely not be acquired or have a big multiple on your business.
5. Can the business run without you? 
6. Fulfillment for the founder. Are you really adding value the world?

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"Our department decided to switch things up and we no longer need your tool."

• Focus on the vision. 
• Focus on the marketing.
• Focus on the customers.
• Build something great. 

• Paywalled filters on Starter Story (1 hour)
• Added more categories to Starter Story businesses & some random design stuff (30 mins)
• Added smart field for "last opened date" for Pigeon - users can quickly see last time email opened (1 hour)
• Fixed date inconsistencies in Pigeon data model (1 hour)
• Added ability to send a "test email sequence" for Pigeon users (1 hour)
• Added ability to update a status for a Pigeon entry automatically, as part of a sequence (2 hours, still working on it)

But I do spend money on/with others

 If tomorrow my company goes under, I will just start another paper company, and then another and another and another. I have no shortage of company names.

Today I got the new Macbook Pro!

Basically, I had been waiting for this for 6 years. The last computer I had was a Macbook Pro 15" from late 2013.

That computer was literally falling apart:

• The webcam stopped working
• The fan made this strange grinding noise
• The battery lasted 30 minutes
• The fan would go off like a jet engine all day
• I couldn't even screen share on customer sales calls
• Could barely edit videos
• It was kernel panicking often