A Look Back at HelpSpot’s First 6 Months of Sales
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.
Now that HelpSpot has been out about 3 years I thought it would be fun to look back at the early days. I always get a lot of questions about how I started UserScape, how long it took to get rolling, what the process was like, etc. I think a look at these numbers might be interesting for new software entrepreneurs. Enjoy.
Month 1: October 2005
HelpSpot was released on October 24th 2005 (my birthday, yeah!). For 4-5 months before that while I was in development I really focused on building up some semblance of a beta group. I think I got about 80 companies to sign up for the beta, though since it was over a long period probably only about half actually participated (I don't remember really). I offered a 50% discount to the initial beta group which I think worked out really well. Many of the people who participated provided invaluable feedback, even some who didn't buy it. The sales numbers below reflect the 50% discount:
| October 24, 2005 | $872.96 |
| October 24, 2005 | $179.00 |
| October 25, 2005 | $1,599.50 |
| October 25, 2005 | $89.50 |
| October 26, 2005 | $447.50 |
| October 26, 2005 | $89.50 |
| $3,277.96 |
I was pretty ecstatic over this first week of sales. While it's hardly huge money, it gave me some validation that the ideas in HelpSpot were what at least some in the market were looking for. This is one of the big reasons I think startups shouldn't hide what they're building. Startups should use their development time as an opportunity to market themselves and build up a group of interested individuals. Otherwise, you have to do all of that after you release and it means you're not going to get any sales for months after you release which is going to be extremely discouraging.
Month 2: November 2005
I knew this was going to be a rough one. Most of the beta people who were going to buy had done so and now I was going to have to build up my trial users. Since the trial is 45 days and most companies take a while to pick their help desk solution, November was bound to be slow and it didn't disappoint!
| November 2, 2005 | $626.50 |
| $626.50 |
Yikes! Even though I knew it was coming, a little fear did set in.
Month 3: December 2005
Sales picked up a bit here, though one sale a week is a little nerve racking. On the up side though it gave me time to continue to improve HelpSpot which I did. Some of the 1.x releases were the most important as they really added core functionality that was flat out missing.
| December 2, 2005 | $1,969.00 |
| December 7, 2005 | $875.00 |
| December 13, 2005 | $1,140.00 |
| December 29, 2005 | $179.0 |
| $4,163.00 |
Month 4: January 2006
Again I suspected sales might be weak in January due to the Holiday's in December which limited trial sign ups and I was right. January was light.
| January 22, 2006 | $895.00 |
| January 27, 2006 | $358.00 |
| $1,253.00 |
Month 5: February 2006
Things started to pick up in February again and it's really from here that it started to take off. After this month sales climbed higher and never really looked back. Here you also see the number of transactions starting to increase slightly. Given that I don't do any advertising having more transactions means more customers talking about the product which is really key for HelpSpot.
| February 2, 2006 | $773.28 |
| February 14, 2006 | $179.00 |
| February 16, 2006 | $494.19 |
| February 18, 2006 | $193.99 |
| February 21, 2006 | $1,074.00 |
| February 26, 2006 | $1,253.00 |
| $3,967.46 |
Month 6: March 2006
Ah, spring time. Finally a nice up tick in transactions and revenues. You can also see the nice mix of customers that are starting to appear. The little 1 and 2 man shops along side the 10-20 user licenses.
| March 1, 2006 | $456.45 |
| March 1, 2006 | $179.00 |
| March 2, 2006 | $358.00 |
| March 6, 2006 | $1,586.40 |
| March 8, 2006 | $358.00 |
| March 8, 2006 | $402.75 |
| March 9, 2006 | $179.00 |
| March 15, 2006 | $179.00 |
| March 16, 2006 | $179.00 |
| March 22, 2006 | $194.43 |
| March 22, 2006 | $1,074.00 |
| March 29, 2006 | $179.00 |
| March 29, 2006 | $3,199.00 |
| March 29, 2006 | $179.00 |
| $8,703.03 |
This month also has some of our first transactions where customers are purchasing additional licenses. This ends up being a major revenue source as companies start using it in just one area, but expand to others or expand to more staff in the same area.
Wrap Up
I hope this was interesting. I don't think I've seen a B2B app break down their initial days like this, hopefully it's another useful nugget of information and motivation for the would be entrepreneur.
Discussion
Ahhh, sales figures, as an mISV owner I love reading this stuff, wish more people would open up with the hardcore data!
Created by James on 05.21.2008 12:12 pm
Hi Ian,
Thanx for the information. This give us would-be-entrepreneurs a view into real sales data.
Two questions:
1. At what point did you know you could release the product and start charging for it? Did you see that your beta users used it for real data?
2. How did you get 80 companies to sign up for beta testing? Ie what did you do so as to make it so attractive to them that they were willing to beta test the product?
I've followed your blog for a while now. Some of your articles are a real source of inspriation!
Thanx!
Created by Vivek on 05.21.2008 12:33 pm
Hi Guys,
Vivek:
1. I didn't really know. I got to the point were I thought it did enough useful stuff in terms of tracking emails and then released the beta. Over the beta I got some good feedback and worked that in before the final release in October. I don't think there's a good formula for this, just get to the point where it actually does something useful even if it's not complete and get some real customers in it.
2. Mostly I got the companies to sign up by blogging a lot about the process. I also was active in a few related forums and so on. From there other bloggers helped spread the word on it. The key for me was really blogging about the process which got people interested and word spread to folks who were actually looking for this type of tool.
Created by Ian on 05.21.2008 1:26 pm
Ian, thanks a ton for this post, it's certainly interesting. I'm not sure you represent the typical ISV - I think those sales are way up from what most people see. It's probably because you picked a great product to build and you did it successfully. I'm extremely happy when I read stuff like this 
Created by Brian on 05.21.2008 1:37 pm
Well, that's usually a big part of the equation Brian 
However, you don't really know that until you try and a big part of truly trying is giving it time to succeed.
Created by Ian on 05.21.2008 1:46 pm
Ian, thanks for sharing the information!
Created by Alex Kolesnichenko on 05.21.2008 8:36 pm
Ian ... you are always a reference for me .... thank you !
Created by Gian Luca Farina Perseu on 05.22.2008 11:46 am
Bravo Ian!
You're the only mISV I'm really impressed with. Very well planned and executed!
Thanks for sharing this kind of information.
Created by digi on 05.23.2008 2:59 am
Thanks Ian--as usual you're more than generous with the information sharing!
Created by a on 05.23.2008 1:50 pm
Just wanted to say I really appreciate your sharing this.
Created by Brendan Macmillan on 05.25.2008 9:27 am
Hey Ian,
Thanks for sharing this info. You're right - there's not much out there in terms of B2b sales info. So this is really handy.
If you don't mind me asking - in the first few months, were you doing any marketing other than blogging? I think I remember reading that you were considering ad words, but decided against it. Am I right?
The ChatSpring beta is going to be wrapping up in the next week or so & I really need to get my marketing in gear. Wish me luck!
Created by Starr Horne on 05.26.2008 5:47 pm
Thanks All!
I was only doing blogging Starr, no ads. At $35 a click for most of my words it's too rich for me. I've done a little here and there, but I think that total in 3 years is probably under $2,000. I just think it's hard to make it work under a certain point especially without a mature product.
I think HelpSpot is starting to get to the point where people might be like "hey I've heard of that let me check it out" so I'm thinking about it more. With a brand new product I think it's really hard especially if you can't risk putting 50K into it (which isn't that much and even then is likely to not return your money). If you're going to spend money on marketing try to do it on things that get people talking about your product rather than you just trying to reach everyone with an ad.
Created by Ian on 05.26.2008 5:56 pm
Great, great stuff. I've been following you and UserScape for a while (since the early days).
Congrats on pulling off a non-trivial feat.
Created by Dharmesh Shah on 05.26.2008 11:58 pm
Ian,
Thanks for the encouragement!
At what point did you hire your first employee, and how many do you have now?
I guess your role has changed allot since the early days, do you still get a chance to code much?
How about a post describing a typical day for you? (maybe detail things like time spent on the phone with customers, fraud issues etc).
Created by Salman on 05.28.2008 1:59 pm