Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, July 5, 2006:
9 Month Revenue Update
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.So it's been 9 months since HelpSpot went on sale, I can't believe it's been that long already! Totally amazing.
Below are a few charts on HelpSpot revenue, transactions, and trials. HelpSpot is far exceeding my expectations for this point. In fact in my planning budgets before I started I had right around now as the point where HelpSpot would start selling more than a few licenses a month. I'm very happy to have been so wrong!
The most interesting thing to me about the past 3 months is how the revenue was generated between May and June. May had some very large purchases, while June outpaced May with nearly double the transactions but all of more modest sizes.
Looking forward to your analysis, comments, and questions.
Discussion
Congratulations, Ian, pretty impressive.
Taking into account the numbers you gave in the beginning, you should've sold 100-200 licenses?
It will be great if you write about the lessons you've learnt along the way. I am sure you have good tips to share.
You commented in the past that you are doing well, thanks to the fact you are usually selling multiple licenses. That should be obvious, but was a real eye-opener for me.
Created by Boris Yankov on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
I did think of the saas model Jake, but I didn't like it for a few reasons. First it seems like a ton more work for not that much more upside. I have to be responsible for a bunch of servers, if something goes wrong every client will be calling me at once, etc etc. Second, Basecamps top version is $149 for unlimited everything. They're obviously delivering much more value than that, but it's hard to charge the proper amount with saas because most people think it should be cheap, so you have to make it up with volume.
I'm not a big fan of having to have volume on that level. I'd much rather have less clients I can work more closely with than have to be out trolling for thousands just to make a living.
Finally, I think many businesses don't like saas. They already have very large people and infrastructure investments in their IT departments. They don't like the idea of their private data being stored by someone else. This is especially true with help desk requests where there's often passwords and other sensitive information being passed around.
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Sounds good to me Ali! Make sure you let us all know how it goes.
Created by Ian on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Good job Ian. Very good. I'm going to beat you to this in an year :D
Created by Ali on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Hi Ian,
I know you partnered up with another hosting company to offer a "install" of Helpdesk but have you ever thought of offering a subscription type service, like 37signals products?
And while you were developing the application, did you ever think of SaaS? Or was it download all the way?
Created by Jake on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Yeah, named user is great. I really think it provides the best of all worlds. Low cost options for small organizations, properly priced options for large organizations and the ability to incrementally sell additional licenses.
Created by Ian on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Congrats, Ian, I guess this validates your "practical entrepreneur" stance that a crowded but fragmented market can be quite profitable!
For me, this also suggests that named-user licensing is a good way to go if you can manage it. Occasionally I have what seem like good product ideas, but they often seem to lend themselves to "per business" licenses. Given that it's so much easier to get sales from existing customers than new customers, I think the named-user model really opens up the door to new sales as your customers expand their teams. It's harder to scale like that when your customers only need, for example, one copy of your flower shop management software.
Created by Jesse Smith on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Hi Paul,
Just this blog really. I've done about 2K worth of ads on a few blogs and websites but so far those haven't lead to many sales.
The blog though is only indirectly responsible. A few posts have good search engine rank which drive some sales, but mostly it's other bloggers/websites who are interested in what I'm up to. They post about me/HelpSpot and that helps out HelpSpots rank. So most customers, especially larger customers find HelpSpot via the organic links in the search engines.
Adwords is out of the question for now because average cost per click for my words is between $5-$35 per click. Way to rich for my blood.
Created by Ian on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Ian, what is your main sales vehicle besides this blog? Are you doing an adwords campaign, call lists, pre-existing network? I am curious because one of the hardest things to do is to get people aware of a product. I apologize if you've gone over this in a previous post.
Created by Paul Lawler on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Heh, you guys really track this stuff 
More than 200 Boris. Raza is in the ball park, but I'll leave it at that for now.
MP I did them with Keynote in iWork, good call.
Created by Ian on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
you shared on 13th December that you surpassed $10,000. According to that information and above graph, you should be close to $70,000 
I hope i was close.
Created by Raza on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
A bit off-topic, but... what tool did you use to generate those graphs? They look very Apple-esque, so I assume it must be part of iWork or something?
Created by MP on 07.05.2006 9:07 am
Thanks for the info Ian!
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Created by Jake on 07.05.2006 9:07 am