Update: How We've Generated 2x Revenue In Our SaaS For Novel Writers Over The Past Year
This is a follow up story for Novel Factory. 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.
I’m Katja Kaine, and I’m a writer and creator of the Novel Factory, which is a purpose-built software for novel writers.
Here’s the link to my original story.
The software has now helped thousands of writers make leaps forward and get closer to, or even achieve, their writing goals.
The app includes resources to help writers develop characters, create bulletproof plots, keep track of multiple subplots and so much more. There’s even an integrated guide to writing a novel, for those who are quite new to writing.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
The business has been growing at an incredible rate and we have doubled our revenue over the past year, from around $5k per month to around $10k per month!
This was expected, as the latest version of our software is rtarting to take the lead in the writing software marketplace, offering the most sophisticated tools for writers out there.
We’ve also made some great connections with big players in the industry - people who would have given us the brush-off when we were a tiny start-up are now going out of their way to contact us and ask for collaboration.
We’ve started working with a new marketing company, and they have been a large part of the high growth rates we’re experiencing, working hard to make sure our product is getting in front of the people it needs to.
The marketing company actually approached us, and while we usually dismiss that sort of email, they mentioned a writer in their footer which I had noticed had suddenly appeared all over the writing google results and I had been wondering who was doing their Google-Fu.
So I agreed to a chat, and we agreed to work in partnership, so they receive a portion of our profits based on results. As a small company with a limited budget, this worked well for us, getting us access to a level of resources that we wouldn’t have been able to afford. And it works for the marketing company too, as there is the potential for them to reap great rewards when they do things well.
As well as SEO, they help us with customer flow - working out where people who are interested drop off before purchasing and ensuring we are mminimizingthose reasons.
On the other side of the coin, they help us analyze why people leave the product and try to find ways to make it worth their while to stay - for example both of these rates have been improved by adding a lot more guidance to the software and a ‘manual’ or knowledge base, to help people understand how it works and explain any areas they might find confusing.
Tiny increments in these areas can have big payoffs in the long term.
We are looking for more ways to work together moving forward, including with them assisting us with social media and leveraging Youtube.
One of our biggest initiatives was to get in touch with users who had had the free trial of our software at any point since it launched, but then not continued. We offered all those writers a free writing course via email, and tempt them back to try the software again.
We were genuinely taken aback by how many people emailed us to thank us for reaching out to them with this free resource, and to tell us we had helped them get back into writing when they had been struggling with their creativity.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The biggest challenge is always the fact that we have so much we want to do but we don’t have the resources to do it. We aren’t in a position to hire a whole team of developers, and even if we were, there’s evidence to show that the bigger your dev team, the less efficient your process - and we pride ourselves on how responsive and lean we are.
Technologically, it’s always a challenge to keep the software running smoothly and intuitively, it takes so much work to make something look simple.
To that end, we’ve had to spend a lot of time working on the mechanics behind the scenes, spending time on complicated and time-consuming work - none of which resulted in anything the user could see. But if we hadn’t done it, the software wouldn’t work as well. It’s one of those things the user only notices when things go wrong, but has no idea how much work it takes to keep it going right!
And of course, I much prefer working on shiny new features that make people go oooh and aaaah. But at the end of the day, the basics have to be spot on, and we’d much rather have that than have all the bells and whistles but most of them half-baked.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Over the next 12 months, we’d love to double our revenue again and grow the Novel Factory community even more.
We’d love to get more visibility of the people who have become published and attribute it to the Novel Factory - we do get contact from some people who are in that position and want to thank us, but we’re sure there’s more out there.
Over the next five years, we’d rike to become established as one of the leaders in the field, so that when people discuss which writing software they use, we are mentioned as a matter of course.
And most of all, we want to keep improving the software, and adding all the features we’re excited about, such as the timeline, character relationship map, commenting, more worldbuilding features - and so much more.
To achieve those aims, we plan to continue in a very similar vein waboutour marketing, with more of a focus on the things that have worked well for us, and spending less time on those that didn’t bear fruit.
For example, we’ve made a lot of good connections within the writing community over the past few years and found that sharing products across our audiences via direct mailouts or social media can be very beneficial, both for the products of both companies but also for the audiences who get to benefit from useful resources and special discounts.
We’d like to do more on youtube, as we believe a lot of our resources will translate well into video format and will help us reach a wider audience. The barrier here is time because it takes quite a lot of time investment to create a decent quality video, but we’re hoping once we get a good flow, we’ll be able to produce the videos quite efficiently.
We also find offering training to be a good way to build credibility and reach audiences. I often put together webinars on topics such as plot structure or character development, and then people can sign up to view them live.
It means I can go into even more depth than I do in the software, and also people can ask specific questions. This is useful for them, to get the answers they need, and it’s useful for me to understand what issues are facing our target audience, so I can better provide a solution.
We’re excited about how much extra reach the latest version can give us, due to it being a progressive web app (PWA), which means it can be used directly in a browser, but you can also download an app version to both Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as Chromebooks.
In the past, in versions one and two, we felt hamstrung by the technology. The first version we built as an app for Windows, but didn’t have the resources or expertise to achieve the same in Mac, even though we wanted to and users asked for it… a lot.
To make the software accessible to Mac users as well as Windows users, we built the second version as a browser app, because the technology had come along far enough to support the kind of features and functions we wanted. We thought this would solve all our problems… and it did help a lot, but we still got requests from people who prefer to have an app on their desktop and who wanted to be able to use the software offline.
So, that’s why Version 3.0 is a Progressive Web App. This wouldn’t have been possible before because the technology wasn’t there - and it’s still very early days now. Being on the cutting edge means we can offer features and functionality (such as seamless cross-platform integration) that some of our competitors can’t - but it does have its downsides, in that there can be less support because fewer people have ever attempted to do what you’re doing.
Pricing-wise, we plan to continue with our three-tier subscription rate. Our original desktop version was sold on a single payment lifetime license, and while we’d love to keep offering that, we soon discovered it simply wasn’t viable, and if we kept selling the software so cheaply, we would not have a sustainable business and would not be able to maintain the software moving forward.
Naturally, some people would rather have a one-off payment and are wary of subscription services, but we believe that for software, the subscription-based service is the only sustainable solution.
This is because software isn’t a static product that you just make and then don’t think about again. It requires constant updates just to remain working as the technological environment shifts around it, plus there are always ways to improve it and create even better features - and of course, customers often need support.
Luckily, a growing majority of users understand this and are happy to pay a small amount on an ongoing basis to ensure the product they love goes from strength to strength. In the long run, this may even work out cheaper than if we sold the license on a one-off basis because itosustain our business, we’d have to set that lifetime license price very high - too high for most people.
(A good example of this is Photoshop, where the one-off license used to be in the thousands of dollars, making it far too expensive for ‘normal’ people, whereas now it is sold at a very reasonable monthly fee, and it would take many years of paying the monthly fee before you had paid as much as you would have paid upfront on the lifetime license)
On that note, we have done our best to ensure nobody is priced out of the software and the basic level should be cheap enough for anybody. And if there is anyone in hardship who genuinely can’t afford it but feels they could benefit from it, we encourage them to get in touch so we can try to help out.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
I’m partway through reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman, which I’m finding fascinating. In general, it’s a popular belief in our culture that the world is dog-eat-dog, and that if you want to get ahead you have to be ruthless, and that’s just a sad fact of life.
However, Bregman puts forward an argument, supported by plenty of evidence, that actually ‘reality’ isn’t like that, and that it isn’t naively unrealistic to believe that actually, most people behave with genuine kindness and altruism, even if they’ve got nothing to gain from it.
Of course, with the state of the world, it would be impossible to say that we’re living in a utopia, but I like the way he challenges the ‘received wisdom’ of a selfish, individualistic society being the norm.
In business, we’ve always tried to be ethical, and focus on providing a product that helps people, being good employers to our employees, and not pursuing profit at the expense of being honest or anything else.
It’s nice to have a scholar provide evidence that running a business that way is not at odds with success.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
I’m not the person to come to for advice on rocket speed growth, as we’ve always focussed on building slowly, one customer at a time, and simply trying to create the best product we can, so it speaks for itself, rather than trying to find clever ways to market it to people.
So I guess that would be my advice - simply focus on creating the best product you can, and the rest will follow. It may not be as fast as you might want, and you may not make millions overnight, but you will have a more robust, sustainable business, and be able to take pride in what you’ve created and what you’re contributing to the world.
Where can we go to learn more?
To find out more about the Novel Factory app and how it can help you write your novel, go to the website.
If you’re interested in writing and want to check out our step-by-step guide to writing a novel, go here.
Or you can follow us on social media:
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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