BSSA #80 - Jump Into 2024 With Me 🚀

Hey! 👋

I hope you’re doing well! It’s been 2 weeks since I didn’t send a newsletter. I had a huge migraine and with Christmas and the end of the year, I couldn’t send you this newsletter.

As expected, we get fewer installs (it’s actually really low!). It’s a great way to show you that it’s not always growing!

We haven’t been under 500 installs per week for months. And post Black Friday, we started to get closer to 400, and last week, we were even lower.

But it’s okay, it was the exact same thing last year and the year before.

In this newsletter we’re going to talk about:

• Hiring A Technical Support Expert

• Objectives For 2024 And How To Set Up Your Plan

• My Strategy To Change Pricing Without Risking To Lose Money

• $57,000 MRR reached for 2023… so close!

• Questions To Answer To Validate Your App Idea

Let’s go!

Hiring A Technical Support Expert

For a long time, I didn’t know if I had to hire a developer who would also handle bugs or a technical support expert.

As anybody, I wanted to optimize my expenses. So I naturally chose a developer who could fix the bugs but also work on new features.

The problem has always been the same: I never had problems building new features, but fixing bugs has always been hard.

I want to grow. And to grow, I have to remove myself from operational so that I can focus on hiring, strategy, process, and content.

I completely delegated everything in my company: support, daily marketing tasks, and building new features.

But something was still missing: fixing technical problems.

Even though I had someone for that, he wasn’t an expert.

Fixing bugs requires excellent knowledge in JavaScript, HTML, and Shopify. But the developers I wanted to hire needed something else: PHP knowledge.

The problem is that the more skills you need, the harder it is to find someone who matches everything (and the more expensive it becomes).

Since one of my developers is leaving at the end of the year, I decided to do the contrary. I decided to hire a technical support expert only.

Someone who would work only to fix bugs.

It allows me to hire the best at that job.

Because:

• He will work less than a developer since he doesn’t have to focus on features.

• He will be an expert in his field.

And what changed my mind is the book “Buy Back Your Time” where Dan Martell explains that you should hire someone to get back your time rather than to grow (at least in the beginning).

And if I look at everything I do, the only thing that I still do and that is not taking us further (but we have to do it) is fixing technical bugs.

Now I didn’t have to fix every technical bug. Because the developers were there. But many times I had to take the lead because they didn’t know how to fix a complicated bug.

At that scale it’s still doable, but what if we double our size?

So that’s my advice. If you’re looking to hire: What is something that is taking your time that needs to be done but isn’t growing your business?

Delegate it first to an expert.

Objectives For 2024 And How To Set Up Your Plan

2024 is almost there, and it’s time for you to prepare your 2024 objective.

In this section, I will tell you how to prepare it.

My goal for 2023 was $60K, and we almost reached it.

For 2024, my goal is 83,333K ($1M ARR).

How did I come up with this objective? → I already had some growth so I knew at which rate I was growing. I can then pick a higher rate to challenge myself. And that number is still reachable in my opinion.

Do the same. Look at your current growth, what would be the MRR at the end of 2024 if you’re still growing at that pace? Now add some MRR where you think it’s doable.

Now what if you started this year and you don’t have numbers to compare with? You can look at your growth in the last few months and apply it to a year so that you can do the same thing.

And you can then pick a number that you feel is complicated to reach but doable.

Finally, if you’re just starting, I would go with something between $1K and $10K based on what you feel comfortable with.

The number you choose matters. Because after reaching your goal you have to choose your sub-goals.

What other goals would you need to reach in order to reach your primary one?

It could be:

• Getting 1000 total users

• Getting at least 150 users per month

• Increasing my conversion rate from 10% to 20%

• Increasing your ARPU from $20 to $24

• etc…

IMPORTANT: Every goal or sub-goal has to be very specific.

You can’t say “Getting more paying users every month”, you say “Getting 150 paying users every month”

To know if your goal is specific enough, you need to be able to say whether you reached it or not. 0 or 1.

“Getting more paying users every month” is not specific enough.

My Strategy To Change Pricing Without Risking To Lose Money

I tested my pricing a lot in 2023. And for 2024 I think I found something really interesting that I can’t wait to show you… (but I have to finish my testing!).

And for many people, changing prices is scary (it was for me too!) so here is what happens:

You pick a random price and start to see paying users. You feel like “it’s working! I shouldn’t touch it anymore!”

But let me tell you something, the biggest growth can happen just by changing your pricing!

Imagine this: You don’t make any change to your marketing, your product, or your team, yet you double your growth overnight.

That sounds amazing, right?

The problem is that you’re not making changes so you might be killing your business there!

So here is the method I used:

1. Don’t make changes to your current users (for now). Make your tests on new users to reduce the risk

But if I make changes to new users, how do I know if I earn more money with old pricing or the new one over time?

Here is the framework:

1. Know your funnel metrics: installation rate (on the app store), activation rate (on your dashboard), conversion rate (on your paying users) and your churn

2. Change your pricing to get a pool of users (for me, 1 week is enough but for you it can be 2 weeks or 3 weeks) then put back your old pricing

3. Now your goal is to track these users during 2 months.

4. At the end of the first month, compare the different metrics with the amount generated

5. Do the same for the second month

6. If the results are good you can change for all the new users and later for old users.

This is the best method I found to make tests to the pricing without impacting MRR.

With this method, at the end of the 2 months, it’s impossible to fail: you either change your pricing or keep the old one because you KNOW which one is better.

And the test for one of the pricing is ending soon for me… And for the moment the results are great so I can’t wait to show you this!

$57,000 MRR reached for 2023… so close!

I didn’t tell you about the $57,000 MRR milestone so here we go.

It’s the maximum we will reach this year.

We started the year at $40,000 and the initial goal was $60,000.

So 85% of the goal has been done! Not so bad!

If you reach your goal, you didn’t put it high enough haha!

For 2024, let’s go for the biggest milestone for any SaaS founder: $1M ARR 🤩

That’s $83,333 MRR we’ll need to reach! So $26,333 MRR to add.

If we do reach it, it’s a 46% growth (which is complicated but doable)

Questions To Answer To Validate Your App Idea

I wanted to make it simple so here are the questions you should answer to validate your app idea so you know exactly what you have to do:

1) Do merchants have the problem I’m trying to solve? → Go where your target it → Ask many questions → Find a painful problem → Ask them if they would use a solution to fix it

2) Do merchants like my idea to solve the problem? → Think about a SaaS idea for this problem → Are they enthusiastic about this idea? → Is it just a nice to have? → Are they asking you to start it now? → Are they asking many questions?

3) Do merchants like the way I will create the app (design)? → They want to know where to find what you just showed them → They follow up to know if you finally built it

That’s it for today’s email!

I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to share my newsletter with someone else: https://news.matdesousa.com/

And let me know what you want me to discuss in the next email!

See you next week,

Mat