April 2022: High churn, reached $6K MRR, and other updates.

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Tony Dinh

@tdinh_me

Hello everyone!

Welcome 150 new subscribers since my last issue, I’m glad to have you here! 👋

Here is a quick update from me in April 2022.

This should make a nice thumbnail for this page! 😁

🔻 Suffered from high churn

In early April, Black Magic observed the highest churn ever.

Churn 😱

I gained $989 new MRR in March, but also lost $779 MRR, so in total, the net MRR movement was only $233.

High churn

The reason(s)?

I did look at the numbers, and to the best of my knowledge, the reasons are because the growth in February was very high, and I think a lot of people tried the app and figured that it wasn’t a good fit, so they left.

This makes me think:

I should position my app to target the right customers
Deliver the right messages (e.g. on the landing page)
Potentially give a longer trial period, so people have more time to evaluate if Black Magic is a good fit for them before paying.

I also send an email to ask people why they canceled their subscriptions. The most frequent feedback was:

Black Magic gives a lot of data, but no suggestions on actions.
They don’t have enough followers to make use of the CRM features.

Positioning the product

Based on what I learned, I think I know what kind of product I want to turn Black Magic into.

Since the beginning, Black Magic was an “all-in-one Twitter tools” kind of service. But since the introduction of the Magic Sidebar, it gets popular as a Twitter Analytics & CRM tool.

The hard truth is that I can’t build a product for everyone.

I advertised Black Magic as a Twitter tool for everyone in the early days so that I can capture the most eyeballs to the product. But now, advertising it as such can be harmful to both me and the customers.

So what’s Black Magic’s position?

I want to build Black Magic to be a product that focuses on people who have a decent size audience, typically 1,000+ followers.

The product will focus on:

Analytics, insights
CRM (reminders, take notes, search, tag, etc.)
Tools to manage and engage with the audience
Data and reports

This tweet from Arvid summarizes it very well:

Arvid Kahl

@arvidkahl

@dvassallo @dinkydani21 @tdinh_me @blackmagic_so I agree, that's what I use it for too. Insights, charts, rankings, and ways to connect with people. Taking notes, setting reminders, that stuff. It's my Twitter CRM and BA tool :D

12:26 PM - 7 Apr 2022

Why do I choose this customer segment?

Two reasons:

Because it’s a great product-founder fit for me.
There are already a lot of Twitter products that help people build an audience on Twitter, but there are not a lot of products to help them manage their audience.

This doesn’t mean Black Magic won’t help people with building an audience (with features like scheduling, tweets inspirations, growth tactics, etc.) The features around building an audience are still available, but they will not be the main focus.

A slight recovery

Near the end of April, the churn has reduced a bit. I managed to reach 6K MRR.

I imagine the churning wave (that was caused by the “hype” growth earlier) has finished, let’s see 😂

Some more learnings in the Twitter thread below:

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

6K MRR! 🥳

It's been a real struggle from 5K → 6K because I suffered high churn (~17%) last month.

I also noticed in the lifetime of Black Magic, that the most significant growth periods are contributed by sudden jumps.

Here are my observations: https://t.co/qxNJudJx19

9:08 PM - 26 Apr 2022

🔍 A new experiment: Glance

Glance is the latest tool in the Black Magic Twitter toolset.

Jack's profile on Glance

It allows you to inspect and study Twitter profiles based on public data, things like:

How active they are on Twitter?
How often do they tweet?
How often do they reply to their audience? (responsiveness)
What do they tweet about? (keywords)
When do they often tweet?
How many followers do I have in common with them?

I had this idea because sometimes I do have these questions when I want to quickly skim through a profile.

(still Jack's profile, but more info)

I’m still unsure how I want to continue with this, but I wanted to push it out there first to see people’s reactions.

In terms of usage, there were quite a lot of page views when I announced it on Twitter. But then the traffic dies out fast after that. In the last 7 days, there were ~200 visits to the Glance pages.

I’m still experimenting with this. Do take a look and let me know what you think! 😄

🧰 DevUtils 1.14 release

Also in April, I released a new version for DevUtils.

This is the 2nd release of the year, and the biggest release ever in terms of the new features and improvements added.

Color Converter tool added in DevUtils 1.14

Read the complete changelog here.

The most significant change is the new script runtime engine that allows DevUtils to run custom scripts based on the built-in script runtimes in macOS. This will open many opportunities for future features around custom scripts and plug-ins!

I have a long list of items in my backlog for DevUtils, and I’m very excited to get to them one by one. Stay tuned!

✈️ I start to travel

In personal news, I started traveling!

The plan is to work remotely and travel until I or my GF get bored! First around Vietnam, then the world.

By the way, I’m amazed by the iPhone camera, live images, and the overall image quality, which I had never paid attention to before. The Memory feature is great but sadly that it doesn’t work with Shared Albums.

If you have tips on any app that can fetch images from 2 iPhones, remove duplicates, apply filters, and create Memory videos easily, please share! 😄

👀 Other small updates

Product Idea!
Black Magic got a mention on Tech Crunch!
Join my communities: Twitter Makers, Paddle Sellers, DevUtils Beta Testers

👋 That's all

…for now!

I hope this issue has been helpful to you! If you like it, please share/forward it to your friends!

See you next month! 😊

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Tony Dinh @tdinh_me

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April 2022: High churn, reached $6K MRR, and other updates.

Older messages

March 2022: $5,316 MRR and my journey to 30K followers

February 2022 updates – 6 months milestone

Feb 2022 updates: 4K MRR, new release, new features, new learnings

My entire marketing strategy (+ December 2021 updates)

$322 → $2K MRR in 60 days by building in public

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