2023 W46 - Finding the 2nd hockey stick
Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!
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Last week the US slowed down a bit for thanksgiving, but the rest of the world kept running.
For this post, I think it's time for a recap like the one we did in the beginning of October!
Acquisition: ✅✅✅. We're getting a lot of people through the door still. Every week we get >10k new accounts.
Activation: ✅. A small percentage of those fully understand the product quickly, which means they do 15 actions we think are necessary to activate. We're <5% user activation (inc. sandboxes). This Not OK, but understandable: we grew acquisition a lot and new users have different tasks to accomplish (it's an horizontal tool)! What we know is that it can be massively improved, as there are specific points where people get stuck.
Retention: ✅✅. Of the activated, we get a good retention. Can be improved.
Activity: ✅✅. Those who retain use the product significantly. Can be improved.
Revenue: 🌱. Revenue has started to come in since we launched our pricing plans in October, organically (we're not paying for the users). Right now it's still growing at a linear rate. We are complementing the organic revenue with an effort to convert inbound from larger companies to use advanced spreadsheets APIs (create, execute) and custom data flows.
Conclusion:
We got the first hockey stick in user growth.
The goal of the company is now to get to the 2nd hockey stick — Revenue.
We have a plan with improvements and changes to get there. Run lots of experiments, fail, learn, change. We need to move fast.
One final comment: our user growth (1) has required a lot of human energy to happen, and so will the "revenue revolution" (2).
So thanks to all of the spreadsheet fans cheering us on and helping us! It is a privilege to work for the future of spreadsheets with my co-founder Torben (the best!), our senior team Henrique, Ricardo, João, Daniela, and all the Rows team. We are all supported by a larger group of very encouraging users, investors, founders, families and friends.
Let's F go!!!
- Humberto
