More Tender By The (Redacted) Numbers

Last time I posted, I left you with an image that looks a bit like this:

Offhand, that might seem to not be a particularly optimistic chart to talk about when we're talking about Tender's revenue (at least from a profit perspective). There's a bit more data that we have up our sleeve that make us feel optimistic even about this potentially daunting chart.

Investment

Fortunately we have been in a position where our consulting work with various client have been able to subsidize our development of Tender (and it sister-application, Lighthouse). This has permitted us to build Tender without having to seek outside investment. And because of THAT, we don't have growth quotas, or quarterly profit requirements, or a fund chasing after us to build a sales team that outnumbers our product team (as a matter of fact, we have no sales team members, all of our team is dedicated to the development and support of our products).

Retention

In part because we have been free to set our own functional requirements without (too much) regard for quick profitability, we've been able to focus on making Tender not just a good customer support solution, but an application that keeps providing value over the years. That might sound like a lot of fluff, but consider this:

In this chart above, this shows the fraction of people who have ever been paying Tender customers that are still current paying customers. TL;DR: 63% of all customers from March 09 are still customers in March 2011. This works out over 24 months to be a less than 1.6% churn rate monthly. MBAs and business team folks in the audience can corroborate when I say anything under 2.5% is exceptionally low, when one can expect anywhere between 1% and 10% to be typical, we're pushing right up to the edge of extremely high retention.

Another thing that you can see from the chart above (if you had the original numbers) is the following stat. I'm going to put it in bold, because this is something we're especially proud of...

79.44% of all paying Tender customers, ever, are still with us.

This chart below shows the monthly growth rate of revenues, you've also probably seen this in the last blog post:

As you can see, after every large bump in revenues, we had a period about a month or so later where we experienced some decreases; when we have a large influx of new customers, we expect a certain number of them not to stay with us. But if you look closely at the January 2011 part of the graph, you might be able to see something unprecedented: A significant growth period (November-December 2010) followed by a month that did NOT exhibit negative growth. Not only are we making Tender a better application as fast as we reasonably can with our small team, we're doing a better job than ever of keeping our current customers.

Operating Margin

We have spent a lot of money on Tender since months before our public launch, and we consider all of that to be valuable investment in keeping our customers happy (nearly 4 in 5 of all Tender customers ever are still with us, if I may shamelessly repeat myself), but we have also been focusing on our team's makeup to focus on building new functionality for the product, and supporting our product with personal responses from everyone on the team (where each person's expertise lies). For the first 2 months ever during the development of Tender, we have been monthly positive on costs:

While we don't expect this to continue indefinitely (we still will be maximizing our investment in our product), we've been able to keep Tender growing organically and been able to keep ourselves free of external entanglements that could take our eye off the ball. With our focus on dev and support, we've been able to keep our customers happy enough that our retention and growth are both at fantastic levels.