January 2022 "Investor" Update

Andrew Pierno -

We're going to do a monthly wrap up and write them as if you're invested along with us. Maybe one day soon you will :)

Someone proposed an interesting question last week about how many of Screenshot APIs subscribers also subscribe to Sheet.best.

sheet.best has 27,000 users. screenshot api has 6,265. overlap: 20 users.

This is an astonishingly small number. It makes me want to be a little more cautious about rollups.

Wins:

  • Danny joined full time. Diego (full stack developer) joined full time. Julius (EA) joined full time. We have a team now :).
  • XO hit $10k in MRR ($40k MRR if you include Cold Email Studio)
  • We moved Workclout's servers to a new AWS account saving us about $2k a month
  • Both Sheet.best and screenshotapi.net have already made more money in cashflow than we purchased them for.

Losses:

  • Growth this month was slow. January was not a great month for our SaaS companies.
  • A PR Miss. When we buy companies, we typically only buy the assets. That's what we did in Workclout's case. The actual entity (with the team) ended up being acquired by another company Luxury Presence. There was a press release that said Luxury Presense acquired Workclout, which was true but also confused one of our customers who were just getting used to us. Everyone was cool about it and it was definitely an error of omission and not one of malice, but was still kind of a bummer we weren't mentioned.
  • We are cashflow negative for the first time. I'm not worried about it, we'll grow into it, but bootstrapping is tough.

On to the numbers:

Screenshot API

Screenshot API didn't grow much in January, but had killer (for us!) 10% growth in December. Our subscriber numbers continue to go up and and our LTV continues to go up. CAC is down quite a bit as well since we stopped running Google Ads.

Screenshot API

That peak sticks out like a sore thumb. We had a whale who used the heck out of the service for several months and then went away. We never got a hold of him (after trying about 6 or 7 times). Sometimes that's just how things go. The good news though is that we have a foreign police department using us consistently. Screenshot API has the weirdest customers.

Sheet.best

Sheet.best grew about 5% last month through some expansion revenue, and kept the total number of customers the same. Fun fact, sheet.best has just over 27,000 registered users. That's a heck of a lot of people!

This tool consistently reminds me that you sometimes just need to build something very simple. If you're struggling to come up with a business idea, try building something extremely simple that solves something extremely specific.

Cold Email Studio

I constantly underestimate this business. We hit $30k MRR (and yes it is recurring, customers sign up for a subscription). Of course we're painfully scaling the team and its much harder to grow than SaaS but Dec / January were our best months yet.

WorkClout

We're still getting our feet under us with this one, but we're stepping into about $5k of MRR. We sent out our largest contract ever (still waiting to hear back). Nearly 6 figures for one customer. This is the striking difference between a self service SAAS at $29 a month vs enterprise stuff. TBD which one is ultimately better for us but this one feels good so far.

Asks

  • we're always looking for companies to acquire, if you know of a great profitable business ready to sell for a reasonable (2x-4x)  (i.e. not venture) multiple, we'd love an intro!