[MSM #9] October 2021 Month in Review

Welcome back to another issue of Micro-Saas Monthly. This month was a bit of a slow month on the Kanban front as finalizing the WP Pusher acquisition, getting things running, as well as some other personal things took more of a front seat.

Revenue continues to hold steady for Kanban for WordPress, even though we haven’t been able to execute on the product/marketing improvements that we have wanted to make. This is a great sign and one of the reasons we wanted to acquire the business in the first place: it’s a stable base from which to grow.

While we did have more than a few customers churn, we essentially made up for those with new customer purchases so we ended up at about net zero change from last month.

Neither Kanban WP, WP Pusher or Branch make enough at the moment to be my full time living, so consulting with Alpha Particle continues to be my day job. We had a particularly busy month this month, with a few production outages and just a higher workload in general. I found that when it got to the end of the day and I knew there was “side project” stuff I needed to work on, I just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. That coupled with the fact that the WP Pusher acquisition was wrapping up as well as a few things on the personal side that needed attention this month meant that we were basically “treading water” as opposed to making forward progress on any of our major initiatives.

I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to make some more progress and that things start to line up with Kanban WP and WP Pusher so that we can start to take advantage of initiatives and activities that would benefit both businesses and get some efficiency back there.

We had two refund requests within a couple days of each other this month and overall we’ve had more refund requests than I would expect. Kanban WP offers an explicit 90 day refund policy which, as I’ve talked about before here I’m happy to honor. Interestingly, when I inquired about the reason behind the refund request, I got two very different answers.

The first refund was from a purchase back in August, which means they were just under the 90 day window. They said the couldn’t get their staff to adopt the plugin and so I’m guessing they had a calendar reminder set or something so that if it hadn’t gotten any traction internally in their business, they would ask for a refund.

The second request came just one day after they bought the plugin. With this one, they gave much less of a clear reason. With something like this, I’m always cautious of people just trying to get plugin code to add to a collection of “nulled plugins” but I investigated and the domain name seems to be legit.

As promised, it’s a bit of a shorter update this month. There are a few exciting things in the pipeline that I’m hoping to be able to share in the coming weeks.

Are there any questions you have that I didn’t cover in this issue or is there something you wanted to ask about specifically? Just hit reply here, or if you’re more comfortable with Twitter, my DMs are always open @kkoppenhaver. I’d love to answer your questions in a future edition of Micro-SaaS Monthly, so let’s talk!

Until next time!