Some time ago I had set a goal to get Snip to $1000/mo in revenue by March 31st, 2015. Today is 3/31 and my revenue is still about $380/mo, which is actually even less than it was when I set the goal ($430ish).
It kinda hurts to not only not achieve a goal but to slip further away from it. It may or may not be productive to ask why I didn’t hit my goal. Actually, the question to ask would be why my revenue didn’t go up a single dollar. What I think needs to happen is that I need to move down to a metric I can influence more directly. Revenue is a result, and specifying a desired result goal doesn’t necessarily say anything about how that result might be achieved.
I was thinking about these things today along with the fact that now that this goal has expired I need new goals. I was thinking about how my website is so appallingly terrible. Maybe my goal could be to have a website I’m proud of and that I consider good. But that’s not very measurable, plus it’s the effectiveness of the site that matters, not how good it looks (not that it shouldn’t be both effective and good-looking). So maybe it would make sense to set goals around certain conversion rates.
That’s what I decided. I said why don’t I set a goal to get visitor-to-trial conversions to 1% and trial-to-customer conversions to 10%. So for every 1000 uniques per month, I can expect one paying customer.
Then I checked my numbers and realized my visitor-to-trial conversion is already about 1%. In March I got about 900 uniques and 11 trial sign-ups, obviously better than 1%. So I guess I’m good there, although 11 trials per month doesn’t feel like enough to work with. If my trial-to-customer rate is anything less than 10%, I wouldn’t nexessarily get any customers at all that month.
So I figured traffic should probably play into the goal too. Maybe let’s roughly 2X the traffic to 2000 uniques a month.