Thread by @joelgascoigne

Here are the @Buffer financials / metrics for October 2019.

- We crossed a key milestone of $22m in ARR 👌
- Our highest monthly growth rate in around 1.5 years 🚀

Thread with more thoughts ⬇️

We had great growth due to a couple of factors in particular:

- We launched Instagram Stories scheduling, which drove around $33k in MRR growth.
- We transitioned some customers from legacy to current pricing, which brought around $15k MRR growth.

(this isn't a typical month)

In the table, you can see we separate out the MRR numbers for each of our 3 products. This is something we've been doing for a while now.

We are truly a multi-product company now, and each product is at a different stage of the product lifecycle, with varying growth (% and $).

I'm especially proud of the Analyze and Reply teams as these products are both fast approaching $1m in ARR individually.

It's a huge company milestone, and personally very reassuring, that we have significant separate revenue streams.

One of the most important parts of our strategy right now is driving an increase in value to customers, leading to higher Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC, though I prefer the acronym ARPU as in User).

With that in mind, we saw a very nice uptick in ARPU of almost $1.

Also, based on our strategy to drive an increase in ARPU, we are not expecting our customer number to grow, and again have seen a decrease there (as planned).

We're a SaaS co with 75,000 paying customers, more than almost any public SaaS co. But we can do much better on revenue.

With our increase in ARPU, we've also seen LTV hit a new milestone of $500. In fact, LTV is up $90 from $410 a year ago. This is some great and healthy growth that enables us to invest more in marketing for customer acquisition.

Customer Acquisition Cost is still very low at $50 and our LTV/CAC ratio is 10, far higher than it needs to be.

We're experimenting on ways to spend to grow faster, but haven't yet found predictable and repeatable ways to do that. Once we do, we'll likely reduce the ratio.

Another metric I'm proud of is Revenue per Employee. With our great growth in October, and as a lean team of 89, we're almost at $250k in Revenue per Employee.

Combined with our EBITDA margin of ~20%, this is a powerful indication of the efficiency and health of our business.

Customer and MRR churn rates are higher than I'd like, and we're working hard right now on reducing those. Interestingly, I have recently realized that this is as much about our pricing and packaging, as it is about working on the reasons customers leave.

For example, we don't have great cohort MRR growth over time, but we also don't do a good job of providing more value and charging for the continued value Buffer provides to our most successful customers. These are things we're working on to reduce churn (especially MRR churn).

That's all for this month! I hope the metrics and my reflections are useful. I'll try my best to reply to any questions 👍