Hitchd Update: How We Grew Revenue From $3K To $15K/Month
This is a follow up story for Hitchd. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hello! I'm Ollie Rozdarz, a Product Designer living on the Gold Coast, Australia. I'm one of the Co-founders of Hitchd, the honeymoon registry for modern couples. You can think of Hitchd as your very own wishing well, cash fund, and Kickstarter, all rolled into one beautiful package. We make it super simple for couples to create and fund any kind of gift or experience for their adventure of a lifetime.
I've been working on Hitchd for five years with my co-founder, Isuru, who's an Engineer and Solutions Architect. Before Hitchd, we each had various roles for companies such as Microsoft and Accenture, and in a wide range of industries from consulting to insurance to start-ups to nonprofits.
Right now, Hitchd is completely bootstrapped and currently making between $15,000-$30,000 per month in net revenue.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
The world has been suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic, which as a business, really hit us hard in the initial few months. I think the combination of fear and the unknown led to the vast majority of couples canceling their upcoming weddings, which caused us to lose a tremendous amount of growth around April 2019. Surprisingly, in August 2019, things started to get better. By the start of 2020, we hit a new level of growth that only a few months before felt impossible.
As 2020 turned into 2021, we started to achieve consistent months of $10,000 revenue and beyond, despite lockdown and restrictions being in place across the world, which is a real testament to the appetite for travel which still exists.
Reflecting on the past year, there are two key things that I believe helped us. The first was breaking through our SEO plateau and finally seeing some solid results. This was the culmination of blog post consistency, as well as mindfully targeting long-tail keywords that we knew would be achievable to rank highly. Despite our domain authority dropping slightly over time, we now have a much healthier amount of organic search traffic. Nowadays, we monitor our blog posts closely and update them regularly with new information to keep them fresh, which is good for users and even better for Google.
I attribute doubling down on product excellence as the second key factor to our growth. For me, a product designer, it would be all too easy to spend every free moment polishing pixels and refining parts of the application which are rarely seen - but we doubled down on the most impactful touchpoints, from onboarding to launching, and it paid in dividends.
We focused heavily on the pre-activation moments, guiding a user smoothly through the product and providing more critical moments where we surfaced things like next steps and guidance. We also assessed areas that once were considered funnel blockers. Adding a payout method (via Stripe) was always a pain point for our users, so we spent time integrating services like; PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App to provide more optionality to the couples who already use these in their day-to-day life.
On top of that, our conversion rate (paying users) is continually increasing, topping out at around an ~18% high. So for us, the next major goal for 2022 is to continue to widen the top of the funnel.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Our biggest lesson has been that with product development, you can never rest on your laurels. People's needs change, especially in a fast-evolving industry. An example of this can be seen in our 'create a gift' feature. This is the core of the Hitchd product since a registry is never truly complete without a gift for guests to contribute towards.
Back in 2016, we originally started with a blank gift form, which was flexible but required a couple to know exactly what they want. Over time, this evolved to something more useable and captivating, but the fundamental problem of being 'too flexible' persisted. Sometimes, users need boundaries, or inspiration, to keep momentum.
Fast forward to today, we now provide a range of our most popular gift templates (similar to how Canva provides pre-made design templates), as well as the ability to customize any template or create a gift from scratch. Compared to what we started with, this is one of those true, 10x improvements, which we see with the average number of gifts created and the reduction in user churn.
We also focused a lot of time and energy on sourcing and building partnerships with like-minded platforms in the wedding space. While some of these relationships have been invaluable, others haven't lived up to what we had imagined. Going into the new year, we'll re-focus that energy into outcomes that we can fully manage and maintain.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
This year we hope to see much more growth as we slowly shed our title of the newcomer to one of the veterans in the space. We also plan to expand our service to include complementary features such as a smart RSVP, guest list, and end-to-end cross-matching of gifts and guests - which will eliminate the need for spreadsheets by the couple.
For people who aren't lucky enough to have a big social media following (like us), it's important to get in the rhythm of creating content and sticking with it.
A lot of competitors and wedding platforms offer some of these services, but they feel very disjointed and clunky. We aim to replicate the ease of use seen in the Hitchd registry today, across these new features to make a truly seamless experience.
Looking beyond 2022, we plan to keep evolving the product and staying ahead of the current travel needs and requirements of the pandemic, and hopefully, we continue to achieve our roadmap and growth goals.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
I enjoyed Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup as a reminder to not take everything at face value.
Some of our go-to podcasts have included; This week in start-ups, How I built this, and Acquired.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
If we were starting another business, we'd focus on marketing from the very beginning. For people who aren't lucky enough to have a big social media following (like us), it's important to get in the rhythm of creating content and sticking with it.
Much like everyone says, the key is consistency. It's a game of tiny compound investments. One hour per day spent on your business could lead to something life-changing over time - so don't give up!
Where can we go to learn more?
If you're interested in using Hitchd for your honeymoon registry, you can find us at our website.
Also, check out our blog for tips and interesting articles.
Reach out to say hello at [email protected], or find us on Twitter as @rozdarz and @fonsekaisuru.
We'll be happy to answer questions in the comments below!
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