August 2022
August was one of the best months for EmailEngine. Probably the best so far. Did people return from their summer vacations or what? My only "concern" is that all the potential customers in the pipeline suddenly converted, so I'm going into September with an empty pipeline 📭
My current solo venture is EmailEngine, an email syncing app. I have no investors and no one to report to, but I find it a good exercise to generate a recurring overview of the business, so I'm publishing these reports here.
Highlights
- Released IMAP proxy support for IMAP clients that do not speak OAuth2 but need to connect to such servers (looking at you, Outlook 👀).
- Added built-in email deliverability testing (EmailEngine validates SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup for sending accounts).
- Improvements for ElasticSearch and OAuth2 features.
- Minor achievement: 15 different DigitalOcean customers were running EmailEngine from the DigitalOcean 1-click app marketplace.
Numbers
| July 2022 | August 2022 | MoM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website visits | 5,900 | 5,800 * | -2% |
| New paying customers | 3 | 8 | +166% |
| Total paying customers | 38 | 46 | +21% |
| Churned customers | 0 | 0 | - |
| Net cash flow | $1,510 | $4,027 | +166% |
| MRR | $1,120 | $1,456 | +30% |
* I changed the website analytics host, so the numbers might be slightly off.
Plans for September
- TBH I have not followed the plans I've been publishing with these reports. Usually, I promise to do a thing but end up doing something completely different. My excuse is that these deviations are caused by adding/fixing features customers actually need and request. In September, I plan to concentrate on stability issues and bug fixes.
Things to consider
- Customer churn has been 0% for a while now. Like all good things, this situation won't last forever. The main reason for the low churn is that I sell yearly subscriptions, and I started selling these last November. The first subscribers have not used up their annual plan. There are still a few months to go, but I guess I'll start seeing higher numbers than 0 sometime in the future.
- The USD-EUR rate change is affecting the results. I charge and operate in euros but list the results in dollars. If the decline of EUR continues, I might consider switching to dollars as the pricing currency. Most paying users are outside the European Union, so they don't care about paying in euros anyway. For now, still, the added complexity is not worth it for me.
- Releasing the IMAP proxy feature is something I'm not too happy about. It's a cool but complicated feature no one asked for and maybe never needs. My main reasoning for it was that I needed something like this to debug occasional IMAP protocol issues and packaged it as a feature. In the future, I must avoid bundling new features that might end up as feature bloat.
For general details about the business, see the pitch deck. For the July report, click here.
If you want to get these monthly reports to your email, please subscribe.