New to this series? Checkout the first report for background info on Postcard Panda.
tl;dr – Revenue was down again. I had a bug which cost me about $20 in profit, but if you don’t count that, profit was actually up compared to September, because I cut out an app store optimization tool I was using.
Overall Stats
| September 2016 | October 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $420.71 | $307.76 | -26.85% |
| Total Expenses | $394.68 | $269.94 | -31.61% |
| Profit | $26.03 | $37.82 | 45.29% |
Expenses Breakdown
| September 2016 | October 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kite.ly | $261.25 | $190.00 | -27.27% |
| Hosting (Heroku) | $14.00 | $14.00 | 0% |
| Advertising | $33.00 | 0 | -100% |
| Stripe | $75.34 | $54.83 | -27.22% |
| S3 + Cloudfront | $5.12 | $5.14 | 0.39% |
| Refunds | $5.97 | $5.97 | 0% |
USA App Store Stats
| September 2016 | October 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Orders | 22 | 18 | |
| Logged In Orders | 177 | 123 | -18.18% |
| Total Orders | 199 | 141 | -29.15% |
| Signups who placed an order | 23 | 22 | -4.35% |
| Downloads | 85 | 112 | 31.76% |
| Reviews | 1 | 1 | 0% |
UK App Store Stats
| September 2016 | October 2016 | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Orders | 0 | 0 | 0% |
| Logged In Orders | 10 | 11 | 10% |
| Total Orders | 10 | 11 | 10% |
| Signups who placed an order | 1 | 2 | 100% |
| Downloads | 5 | 1 | -80.005 |
| Reviews | 0 | 0 | 0% |
Retention
What Went Right
- With the exception of the bug fix that I’ll talk more about below, the app was largely on auto pilot. It’s nice to let it run without having to invest a ton of time into it.
- Profit was up nicely because I dropped my app store SEO tool. I actually liked the tool, but after 3 months of using it, I wasn’t seeing results.
What Went Wrong
- I had a bug in the back image creation code I pushed up last month. Specifically, if the message was short and didn’t wrap to two lines the code didn’t actually write a message. I had to reprint 22 postcards out of my own wallet after fixing the bug, which lost me an extra $22.50 that I didn’t include above.
- The above bug resulted from sloppy coding on my part, without proper unit tests in place. I rarely write code without unit tests and fell into the ‘prototyping trap’ of many organizations. I had prototype code that appeared to work, but was poorly written. Instead of going back and re writing the code, I just called it good enough and pushed it to production. Note to future Matt… write tests for all the things!
Next Month’s Goals
The top priority for next month is to try a new marketing channel for Postcard Panda, which will likely be Apple’s new search ads.
Thanks for reading, and check back next month!
Catching up on these reports since you haven’t been tweeted about them lately 🙂
Bummer about that bug, but it sounds like a good lesson came out of it! And, as always, it’s great to hear about you doing the right thing for your customers (reprinting all of them—it may seem like a no-brainer to some, but I could imagine some companies only reprinting for people who complain) and being transparent about what went wrong.
Ughhh typo! That should be “haven’t tweeted” (no “been”), haha