July 2019, $100K ARR, 1 man team - it was the most stressful month in my business, I worked harder than ever

July 2020, $400K ARR, 2 man team - it was a fun and easy month, I even took a vacation for a week with limited internet connectivity

How?

Short thread below

1) We now have internal processes, procedures, and/or automations for every common support request

I wrote more about this here: https://blog.rchase.com/growing-my-saas-from-solo-founder-to-1-employee/

Back in July 2019 I worked on every ticket that came in from my memory of similar tickets in the past which was very inefficient. I didn't have many processes like scripts, or saved replies. Now we have a specific process in @NotionHQ for almost everything that ever comes in:

2) Even with 4x the revenue in July 2020, we had half as many tickets

In July 2019 I participated in 1,184 tickets in @intercom, but in July 2020 the two of us participated in only 539 tickets.

There are a few reasons for that

3) Better onboarding

Onboarding processes and guides are something that is continually being improved. We now have videos in our @intercom public KB to show every common onboarding step.

4) No more free plans

In August 2019 is when I stopped offering free plans. The free plan users were a huge support burden and rarely converted because they were the wrong type of customer (home users instead of businesses).

5) 2.5x'd pricing

In January 2020 I increased our minimum pricing from $19/month to $49/month. Higher prices, more revenue from fewer, more qualified customers results in fewer support tickets.

We actually had 58 new customers in July 2019, but only 56 in July 2020, yet those 56 customers created $3,224 in new MRR vs $1,141 created by the 58 new customers in July 2019.

I guess to summarize -> less work, more money...

Of course things don't start off that way, but with time, growth, gradual improvements each day that is always the direction we were and still are working towards.

In the end, the customer also benefits from all of this increased efficiency too, the onboarding experience and support experience has really improved as a result.