My Airtable Plugin Grew 4X To $23K/Mo
This is a follow up story for Data Fetcher. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hey! My name is Andy Cloke, and I’m the founder of Data Fetcher. Data Fetcher is an Airtable extension that lets people import their data from other applications. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, Airtable is a spreadsheet tool like Google Sheets, but with powerful automation and visualization features.
The Data Fetcher extension has no-code Airtable integrations (e.g. Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, OpenAI etc.), and custom requests for people familiar with APIs.
Data Fetcher has thousands of users and several hundred paying customers. We’re at $23,000 MRR with just one full-time employee (me!) and some part-time contractors.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Since we last spoke, the business has grown from $6,000 to $23,000 in MRR. In some ways, it’s been more of the same: developing new integrations and improvements, then creating blog posts and YouTube videos to tell people about the changes.
I also started offering free support calls to both free and paid users. As a small company, this is an area where we can outcompete large competitors. It has been the main source of customer feedback that I’ve used to improve the product and only takes a couple of hours each week
Having a free plan is still a huge driver of growth. I think this is because Data Fetcher is in quite a price sensitive market, and has a good split between free and paid features. People can test 90% of the functionality for free, then upgrade weeks (or even months!) later when they have a real business use case.
Whilst it’s no rocket ship, it’s now a really solid lifestyle business! I’ve also signed Data Fetcher’s first enterprise deals with household name companies, and the business was named one of G2’s new products of the year.
One of the biggest changes since we last spoke is I hired some amazing freelancers.
The first hire was a freelance content creator who makes all the videos for Data Fetcher’s YouTube channel. This has worked well, since YouTube is much less competitive than SEO for our target topics, and the videos convert well.
The second hire was a brilliant software developer who wanted some part-time work whilst backpacking through South America. He is a friend I’d worked with previously, and it was so stimulating and fun working together again. He massively improved the testing and stability of the backend, as well as developing major features and improvements.
There have definitely been some missteps along the way too, including a hire that did not work out so well. In early 2023, I was starting to drown in customer support emails, so I hired a technical customer support rep to work two hours per day.
It quickly became clear that her communication skills and technical proficiency were not at the level that was required, and I had to let her go. With hindsight, there were red flags in the interview process that I ignored.
Another mistake was launching a second product too early. I thought there was a gap in the market for a data visualization extension, and that I could promote it to the existing Data Fetcher audience.
So I launched a second Airtable extension, called Charts & Reports, under the Data Fetcher brand. Unfortunately, it has been stuck at $300 MRR for a year. It’s an unwanted distraction, and hard to justify working on it when it makes so little revenue. I may even get rid of it at some point.
Someone could copy the basic functionality of our extension and our marketing with a few months of effort. But it is much harder to copy the hundreds of edge-case bugs we’ve fixed, the five-star reviews, and our relationships with customers and Airtable.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Data Fetcher hit a revenue plateau in August 2023, which lasted for 5 months! Every month, we would gain and lose the same number of subscribers. I knew what the issue was: the churn was stubbornly high (10-11%), but I couldn’t figure out how to reduce it. Nothing I tried worked, and I was starting to wonder if the business had hit its natural limit.
A friend gave me the advice to add a large (50%) discount for annual plans. In December 2023, I made this change, as well as switching the default tab to annual billing on our pricing page. You can see the dramatic effect in the charts below: churn is down to 7% and MRR is growing again!
The other big challenge this year was the changes that Airtable made. They are moving upmarket towards enterprise customers, so customer support on their lower plans has become more limited and extensions were removed from the free plan.
They also introduced a pricing change where customers had to pay $54 instead of $24 to keep using certain features. The knock on effect of these changes has been a reduction in Data Fetcher sign-ups.
At a more technical level, they introduced rate limits on their API, which we rely on and had to mitigate. Platform risk is something I will always have to live with when running Data Fetcher, but this has been a particularly interesting few months.
Over the next couple of years I want to hit 1000 customers and $500k in ARR. The aim is to do this whilst keeping the team very lean and getting money out of the business into index funds.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
One thing I’ve learned is that it’s possible to do technical support for hundreds of customers as a solo founder. After failing to hire and onboard a customer support rep, I took a different approach: every time there was a support ticket, I looked for an opportunity to improve the product or documentation to avoid that ticket happening again.
For example, I got a lot of support tickets about usage limits. So now when someone hits their usage limit, we show clearly when your usage cycle started, when it resets, and link to our documentation on how usage is calculated.
Dozens of minor improvements like this have reduced the number of support emails from 3 to 2 per day, even as the customer count has gone up, as shown in the graph below. It also means I am much closer to customer feedback.
I’ve also learned to develop new integrations much more slowly! Data Fetcher has 40+ no-code integrations with the most popular third-party applications. It’s technically possible to add them very quickly since there is so much common code between them.
However, each integration can require significant ongoing development, which becomes a real drag in developing other parts of the app.
I’m now much more selective when adding new integrations, even if customers are requesting them. It’s a balancing act, and I still add popular applications when needed.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Now that Data Fetcher is more mature as a product, I want to position it more clearly in the market. I am going to figure out who our best customers are, and why they pick Data Fetcher over other tools. I will then redo the marketing website to reflect the new positioning, to increase conversions.
The new positioning should hopefully improve our marketing too. For example, the majority of our customers use Data Fetcher’s more technical custom request features, but our marketing focuses on the other no-code integrations. So I want to double down on marketing the things that make Data Fetcher most valuable.
Over the next couple of years, I want to hit 1000 customers and $500k in ARR. The aim is to do this whilst keeping the team very lean and getting money out of the business into index funds. This is my strategy for reducing platform risk: diversify the profits, not the product.
People often ask if I’d sell Data Fetcher, but I don’t see the point at this stage. I’ve created my perfect job: I love working on it, making more money than I ever have, and getting to enjoy the biggest benefit of a lifestyle business: lifestyle!
Since we last spoke, I’ve taken extended trips to Brazil, America, Japan, and shorter trips all over Europe. I feel incredibly lucky to have had the lifestyle and financial freedom to do this in my 20s.
On top of this, I do not think it’s worth selling at this stage of ARR. If I sold now for a typical multiple, I could probably buy a home, but it would not be enough to stop working. So I’d have to start something else from scratch, which is difficult, or get a normal job, which doesn’t sound very exciting.
That calculus might change in a few years if I can keep growing the company.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Range by David Epstein is a great book about how having a diverse range of careers and interests can lead to better outcomes than specializing too early. As someone who had no idea what I wanted to do for a long time, it connected with me.
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is an amazing book. It taught me that wealth is relative and the importance of having an ‘enough number’. It motivated me to start saving and thinking about what I want from life, both now and in the future.
More closely related to SaaS, Starting and Sustaining by Garrett Dimon is a brilliant (and free!) e-book that comprehensively covers starting a SaaS business. It was written a few years ago, so some of the advice is a bit dated, but there is so much timeless advice.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
One thing I like to think about when looking at a business is what is easily copyable and what isn’t. For example, for Data Fetcher, someone could copy the basic functionality of our extension and our marketing with a few months of effort.
But it is much harder to copy the hundreds of edge-case bugs we’ve fixed, the five-star reviews, and our relationships with customers and Airtable. Data Fetcher also gets a decent amount of word of mouth recommendations and is reasonably well known in the Airtable community.
These things take much longer to build up. Thinking about them can help you analyze a business opportunity in the early stages and work out what to prioritize on later on.
Another thing I’d recommend is experimenting with pricing every few months. I mentioned the pricing change above that transformed Data Fetcher’s trajectory recently.
This is not the first pricing experiment I’ve tried, and it will not be the last. I’ve tried a free trial (alongside the free plan), making our usage limits more generous, and getting rid of pricing plans. None of these were as transformational, but the important thing is to keep tweaking things.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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