From The Plateau

Whoo boy. Where do I even start? So much has been happening. So much that I haven’t had time to to write. That’s both a good and bad thing, I guess.

I think I figured out the issue(s) with growth. Years ago, I made the decision to go deep on Stripe, while competitors went wide and supported multiple platforms. My theory was that by going deep on one platform, we’d be well differentiated from the competition because we could offer features that others couldn’t (or at least couldn’t offer easily). That proved to be true, and many customers used Stunning because of those features, which recovered more revenue on Stripe than the competition.

Building on top of a platform always has inherent risk (like what sadly happened again and again to Twitter developers), but Stripe has proved time and time again to be a fairly safe choice to build on top of. They’ve embraced developers in a way that I haven’t really seen any other companies do. I think it’s mostly because they’ve historically been developer-first. And since Stunning has been a good partner to Stripe for 12+ years, they’ve been a good partner to us. When they allowed outside companies to sponsor their annual conference, Stripe Sessions, we were among a handful of companies that were allowed to do that. We were also one of the first companies that they brought in to the Stripe Apps ecosystem, and everyone I’ve met there (from Patrick and John all the way down) has been awesome. They’re always asking what they can do better, taking that feedback and actually making changes.

We also got to take advantage of the fact that I was very early to Stripe, and many of our customers in the early days were people in a similar situation as I was when I started using Stripe… developers or product people who just wanted to focus on their product. They were happy to pay for a solution like Stunning and some of our customers have been around since then, which is amazing to me.

But things change, and now, Stripe has free basic dunning for everyone now. So that’s mostly cut the low-end off of the market, unless people want other features that we offer. Generally, at that level there aren’t enough failed payments to make paying for an additional service worth it. Catching people super-early was a good source of leads in the past, because we could sign customers up for free and have them grow into Stunning, not paying until they got enough value out of it.

Also, many people don’t use Stripe directly anymore. The market is mature enough that many customers use it through other platforms that are built on top of Stripe. So we have to change the way that we sell to and reach those customers. We’re finally expanding to other platforms. That’s part of the reason I haven’t had time to write here. We’re close to finishing up our first integration with another platform, and there will be more in the future!

**If you have contacts at any companies who enable their customers to offer subscriptions on top of Stripe and might be interested in partnership (subscription management, e-commerce), please let me know! I’d love an intro. https://stunning.co/contact **

Our cold emails are going ok. I wish we had more conversions from them, but we started this in the last quarter of the year, so as we get into the end of the year people reply to less and less email. I expect things to pick up in the first part of next year.

I’ve come to the conclusion recently that I need help following up with these sales leads and someone focused on growth/marketing. I had a good call with the founder and CEO of a virtual assistant company who has a deep bench of about 70 people who can help with all sorts of tasks, but especially being on sales calls in my case. We’ve signed the contract, and onboarding starts in a few weeks due to the holiday, I’m excited to have someone else following up on these things for me so that I can turn my focus back to product.

Some odd things have happened with these cold emails as well. One that has stuck in my brain is a lady who received a cold email from us. She replied, saying that her company has a bad failed payment problem. She signed up and connected her Stripe account. We could see that she has a bad failed payment problem that we could really help with. We reached out to offer help with setup. She never replied. Then a few weeks later she just cancelled her account, and the reason she left was “dont use it”. So weird.

That was the worst for me. Our cold emails resulted in a confirmed, perfect customer for us who won’t reply to our emails, signed up and then did nothing.

I’m finally starting to work on the new Stunning homepage. To try to figure out what is and isn’t working on the current home page, I started building a widget to collect that information from visitors, and it has sort of snowballed into its own thing. It’s called Receiver. The goal with it is to help business owners convert more visitors into leads. I have a lot of ideas about how to do that. I’d love to have you join the email list for that, if you’re interested!

We’ve signed up a couple of large new customers through our recent efforts, and we have 30 or so in the pipeline in various stages of interest in Stunning.

My life has recently been filled with too many sales calls, which is a good problem to have, but it’s killing me personally. As a painfully introverted person, it takes a lot out of me to do demos. I enjoy having talked to people once I get off of the call, but before calls, I am just a ball of stress. I don’t enjoy it. I’d rather be writing code, planning and managing our dev team.

Also, our marketing/customer support person has too much on her plate already. So I’m looking to hire someone to take over these calls.

I have some feelers out in my network, and I’m also looking into potentially hiring a VA to do these. I have a call with an agency about that this week.

The integration with our new partner continues to move along as well. They are writing the API methods and webhooks that we need, basically right before/as we need them. It’s like we’re a a train and they’re building the tracks in front of us. Sometimes our team catches up, which is where we are now.

Our cold email company seems to be hitting their stride. Up front, they told us that it would be a couple of months before they got really dialed in. Things seem to be clicking now. We’re getting good replies & booking demo calls with people who have a burning problem that we can help with.

One company just signed up directly, with no extra work required. And now something is happening that I didn’t expect: people who we’ve cold emailed are sending us to their friends / business partners / network. Without me asking. Pretty cool.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to work on the new partnership. I know that this new partner already has customers who want to use Stunning, so this work will be worth it.

So far, we have a good number of warm leads from the cold emails we’ve sent. We’re working through the followups. I even have a call next week with a company that uses a competitor and is possibly looking to switch.

One of the things that I did not expect about cold email is the tiny number of companies who turn the emails around on us. I think I mentioned the one who wanted me to go on their podcast in exchange for hearing my pitch. This week, I got one where they wanted to do a double-header call where I pitch them for 30 mins and they pitch me for 30 mins.

I would possibly have entertained both of those things, but neither of those emails actually expressed any interest in using Stunning. With my limited free time, I feel like that would be a waste of my time. Over the past 12 years I’ve found that good Stunning customers are not the ones that I have to work too hard to convince. It’s the ones who have a burning failed payments issue and need someone to help them fix it now.

I have more important things to focus on at the moment, like the partnership that we are currently working on.

So far it’s been good. There is a lot of integration code to write between our two companies, but we are working through it. We’re excited and they’re excited, which is a great thing to have from a partnership.

I’m also continuing to figure out what our full homepage redesign will include, jotting down ideas and looking at other marketing sites for inspiration. More on that soon!

It’s been about a month since we started cold emailing. It took a little while to tune things, but we’re actually getting some positive responses! The pipeline is slowly filling up and we may have some new customers on our hands soon.

In other news, we’re starting an integration with a really cool new partner that I mentioned here before. That will bring us some new customers as well, because they literally have customers who want to use Stunning now. They are on a sprint and taking us along for the ride. It’s going to be a wild month, but I’m excited for what’s on the other side of it.

Ok, I’ve been bouncing around the West coast for a few weeks, but now things are settling back down. In the meantime, our cold emails have been going out and we’ve been getting some good responses. We’ve sent about 2000 emails so far. Some of the leads that we’ve emailed want us to check back in. We’ll see if they convert to paying customers down the line. From what I understand, these things take time and we’re going to refine the process over the next 5 months. Our targeting was a little off, but we have fine-tuned that now, I think.

In the meantime I have some calls next week. One with a potential new customer that has a burning failed payments problem, and one with a large potential partner who could bring us a lot of new customers. I’m tentatively excited about both.

Oh, and last week I finally emailed all of our customers about our affiliate program. Some of them signed up immediately, and there’s been a trickle since then.

Good stuff.

This week, we have a lot going on! Our cold email agency has been hard at work building a lead list and a campaign for us. We got to review both this past week. It’s a very important step when someone is going to send out a bunch of emails on your behalf. It turns out that even after the phone calls and emails that we’ve had, there was still some confusion about what we do. The emails mentioned helping potential customers with chargebacks, which is something that we don’t do. Good catch!

Our cold email campaign is live now! Hopefully we’ll get some sales out of this. I’m excited to be trying something new, with a company that has a playbook that’s gotten results before.

At the same time, we are still pursuing a partnership with the company I mentioned previously that makes it easy for their customers to sell subscriptions and a lot more on top of Stripe. They aren’t really interested in building the failed payment features that their customers want, so it seems like a good fit. I have a call with their CEO in a few weeks and we are both excited about it!

Also, I’m starting a newsletter about customer happiness and retention, among other things. Interested? I’d love for you to subscribe! stunning.ck.page/7c7834393…

This week, we’re continuing to move forward with the cold email process. Our agency is hard at work identifying potential good leads for us, and writing the contents of the emails. They’ve set up a Slack channel within our company Slack and we’re working closely with them to get these emails rolling.

We’re also getting some inbound interest in partnerships. One potential customer of ours is very interested in having us integrate with another platform that she’s using that’s built on top of Stripe. We’ll see how that goes. Also, a partnership kind of fell into our laps, where a non-competitor company that’s also built on top of Stripe reached out and we’re going to try to do some cross-promotion. They’ve already promoted us to their audience, and we’re going to do the same. It might be worth identifying that sort of thing proactively and reaching out to companies like that as well.

I’ve been trying to drum up some interest for that sort of thing, where we can cross promote SaaS products. Basically, what if we brought webrings back, but for SaaS products, with links that go to non-competitor products? Interested? Find out more here: stunning.ck.page/eff325b65…

And someone reached out from a large app promotion company (that we’ve all heard of) that we had to say no to last time in favor of focusing on Stripe Apps. They’re following up, and this might be a much better time for it, depending on what the promotion looks like.

Let’s go!

Historically we’ve only done inbound marketing (SEO, etc), with the exception being the fact that we had a booth at Stripe Sessions 2 years in a row.

At Sessions, we were surprised at the number of people who had no idea that Stunning existed, so part of our growth experiment is going to be to try and identify industries/potential customers who would get the most out of Stunning, and to reach out to them directly.

This week, we’re kicking off something that we’ve never done before… cold emails. Based on a referral from a friend and doing our own research, we picked a company to work with. We’ve been chatting with them and doing calls as they set everything up, and now we’re going to run a test for 6 months and see how that goes. One of the things that they pointed out was that in order to really move the needle with cold email, our offer has to be really compelling. So we did some thinking and made an offer for these cold emails that we’ve never done before.

We’ll see how that goes!

Unrelatedly, I also made a fun website to express the exasperation that I feel towards Apple for the limited watch faces that they offer on the Apple Watch after 9+ years: thirdpartywatchfaces.com

Of course, the footer links to Stunning.

I’m down in this hole again Trying to find a vein or something Hammering these walls and hoping Hoping I find my way through But what if I strike it? Rich as I wanna be Will it set me free or be just another hole to dig?

I can’t give up on this What am I supposed to do? Hammering these walls down here Trying to find a way out But what if I strike it? Rich as I want to be Will it set me free, or be just another hole to dig?

What will it mean? What will it mean? What will it mean? What does it matter?

But I can’t give up on this Always trying to break on through This air is choking me But hammering is all I know to do Do you remember, when I was digging again? I can’t stop looking, but what am I looking at?

What will it mean? What will it mean? What will it mean? What does it matter?

Maybe I’ll find the vein Hammering these walls and hoping

Give it a listen: album.link/i/1666979…

We’ve never had a coherent strategy for growth. Especially not for tracking results, and which channels work best.

The last big growth thing that we did was sponsor Stripe Sessions 2 years in a row. This conference is one that basically was full of potential Stunning customers. It was incredibly well-run, and when we did have a glitch or two, we felt very taken care of. It had about 5000 attendees, and I even got to give a talk to a crowd that ended up being standing-room only.

We had conversations with people from large companies that everyone has heard of. We got a lot of leads, but only one of them has panned out yet, because no one was really ready to try Stunning yet. They all had too many other projects going on. This is a thing that I’ve noticed with conference attendees. People are looking for solutions, but generally there’s a good bit of lead time between them finding out about us, and us closing the deal.

It appears to be correlated with the size of the company, which is expected. Many small/mid-size companies aren’t attending conferences, because it’s pretty expensive, especially these days with airfare and hotel costs being pretty high. So you get a lot of people showing up at your booth who can afford to send people to conferences: Fortune 500 companies, and a lot of VCs… and unexpectedly, students looking for internships.

We’ve had some good talks with potential customers since then, and I hope to see some growth from this in Q4 when we’re scheduled to start following up. It takes awhile to close some of these deals, but when they close, the impact is usually pretty dramatic. And these will be pretty easy to track.

We haven’t touched our home page in years. It’s our front door. It’s what people see when they first hear about Stunning. We need to do a better job of explaining our positioning and what we do better than anyone else.

So now it’s time for some homepage tweaks. The reason I’m just going to tweak it and not go for a full redesign right now is that we have a growth experiment coming very soon, and the page needs to change to support that. The full redesign and new positining comes later.

I really just focused on the top part this time, since it’s time sensitive. It used to look like this:

and now it looks like this:

The reasoning here is that we’ve always highlighted how much revenue we’ve recovered over the years. It worked fine when we’ve recovered $250,000, or even somewhere in the millions. But as the number has grown, it’s been more and more disconnected from what people can even wrap their heads around. There are just too many digits when you get into the billions.

Also, it’s always bothered me a bit that it looked like a button. So after reading this tweet from my friend Jesse I decided it was time to take action:

sound like a broken record but if you're an indie you really gotta have a "book a demo" link on your homepage.

this tweet generated >20 demos over the last 2 days and a lot of pipeline.

if I didn't have that link most of those people would have bounced and forgotten @bento. https://t.co/4Bnsi4402M pic.twitter.com/GQmBSamiyz

— ˗ˏˋ Jesse Hanley ˎˊ˗ (@jessethanley) July 5, 2024

I decided to move the amount recovered into the paragraph, highlight it with an animation, and to use the space for buttons to sign up or book a demo.

And while I was at it, I rewrote the headline and the intro text as well.

We’ll see how it goes! You can check out the tweaks here: stunning.co

When I think of plateaus, I think of a photo I took recently. My wife and I were looking at some land that had a really good mountain view, and I took a few photos that completely fail at capturing how incredible it felt to stand there, looking down into the valley, and across to the mountains. It was truly awe-inspiring to just stand there with wonder.

After 12+ years of running Stunning, we are finally starting to hit a wall with regards to growth. It has plateaued. Something’s got to change if we’re going to thrive. Stunning is still doing really well, but it’s headed in a direction that I don’t like, and it’s good to fix things before they become a real problem.

I think that mentally I’m standing on top of that plateau, looking down into the valley. Maybe that’s what plateaus are all about. You’ve climbed the mountain for awhile, and you’re standing on a flat part where it’s fairly safe. It’s a good time to catch your breath, look out into the distance and find something new to focus on. Your new customers are out there somewhere.

This blog will highlight the journey that we’re on to start accelerating our growth again. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to others who are going through the same thing, or who will in the future. At the very least, I’ll be able to look back on it and see what worked and what didn’t.

I have a few theories about why growth is slowing down:

• Increased competition
• Incorrect positioning
• Being bad at marketing - Historically, we’ve gotten a lot of customers due to being very early to the market and having a lot of links come our way. We’ve had a pretty active blog that brought us a lot of customers too. We historically haven’t been that great at outbound marketing/sales, so we need to change that.
• A home page that may just be too long for people to care about reading these days.
• People having issues with failed payments, but not even knowing that we exist.

We clearly have product market fit. We have served, and continue to serve some of the biggest brands on the planet. We’ve recovered over 10 billion dollars and some of our customers have been wth us for 10+ years. Stripe has millions of customers. We can get growth back to where I want it to be.

Here goes nothing (everything)!