We started doing monthly updates on Twitter with our learnings, revenue, new expenses, new features, and more. From this month on we will also share it on this blog. In this post we talk about referrer spam, abroad payments, Mindwave, badges, and password login.
At the first of May we had 399, but we passed 400 customers soon after. At the first of the month we had an MRR of $5451 and an ARR of $65k. We see a bigger growth than normal. It's likely due to our product being free for corona products. In exchange, we ask for a link back to the public stats of the project.
Especially corona-data.ch (data) gave us a lot of traffic with 6.6M visitors in the last month. We also helped build a COVID-19 app: coronastatus.nl which was started by BustByte. It's now translated in many languages and available in many countries.
This corona status project we paid quite some domains. That's why our hosting bill this month is higher than normal. You can see that more clear on our open page graph.
We also ordered a new bare metal server for Elasticsearch which James almost has completed. We tested this with lots of test data and the Elasticsearch API is super fast. We can't wait to show you what we have done with it. Expect new features to roll out in the next couple of months.
When installing our new server we didn't find a great guide on how to encrypt a server. We had some specific requirements. We decided to write a guide on how to encrypt your disks on your server (it's very technical and long).
To remove spam in your analytics data we added a feature where you can just do that in a few clicks. Sometimes silly referrals pup up in your dashboard from unethical companies trying to sell their products. We created a simple way where you can delete those.
We would love to explain a bit about how we deal with payments for our freelancers. It was a bit of work to figure out what was the best solution. PayPal is super expensive and others were as well. The cheapest and fastest option we found was Transferwise. We can transfer $1000 for about $10 and it arrives within minutes on their account. It might be different from your country.
Last month we also paid for a yearly subscription of Mindwave. It's an all-in-one journal for work and life. It's made by Marcel Hagedoorn and it's a great way of logging how your days go. It has a Telegram integration which I love and asks me a question every day. You can also keep your notes in there, and that's the place where these monthly updates originate from.
We are very proud to have almost 400 customers. It's something we could only dream of when we started. We hope this will continue for the next coming years so we can even build better and smarter features for your data.
We also launched our badges. We took some extra time to make the badges privacy friendly. For example we added referrerpolicies (documentation) to the HTML elements, preventing data from the page to end up on our servers. Scroll down to privacy on the badges page to read more.
A lot of customers asked us about password login. It's something we wanted to offer for a long time but never got to it. So we challenged ourselves. We promised 5 starter plans to give away when we would not finish this feature in 2 months. It was done just within that deadline, thanks for pushing us @nathfrederand and @JustinNoelDev!
We might have missed some numbers in this thread. We updated our open page again with all new data for this month. It also says we have more than 400 customers now!
That's it for this month! Thanks for reading and please ask any questions if you have some. We love to make this interesting for everybody. Have a good one!