I've been feeling quite sentimental recently. Time often does that to you. Tomorrow it will mark one year since I did something most would consider crazy - left a pretty great job at Automattic to build my own product from scratch. In that moment I felt doubt, fear, and excitement. Now, a year later, that doubt and fear is fading away, the excitement remains, and as I start to think about the future, it's hard not to recognise the past.
As of today, there are over a 100 paying customers for FoodBevBiz. To some, that's an insignificant number, but to me, it's validation on both a personal and customer level. Personally, it means that the risk I took paid off. For customers, it means that FoodBevBiz is valuable enough for them to budget money for it each month.
Additionally, FoodBevBiz's annual revenue is now higher than my previous salary! This is a small but important achievement for any one bootstrapping their own company, and one I'm very proud to share.
Being a solo founder is hard in that you don't really have anyone to celebrate these kinds of milestones with. So thank you to all of you reading this!
Over the past year, the idea in my head for what FoodBevBiz is and should be has shifted greatly, as can be seen in previous blog posts. The initial concept for FoodBevBiz was an analytics/reporting tool for WooCommerce. It would be fast. It would be pretty. And it would be easy to easy to use. Today, while it still is an analytics/reporting tool for WooCommerce, it's several other things too. I went from trying to build a product to trying to build a solution.
Going forward, I have a very clear direction and understanding of what success means for FoodBevBiz and its customers.
The future of FoodBevBiz, at least the foreseeable future, can be split into 3 areas:
Analyse
Manage
Tools
Analyse encompasses the parts of FoodBevBiz that have been in there and slowly maturing since day one: Reports, KPIs, Charts, etc. There's more work to do there, but it's come along way and continues to be one of the main draws for new FoodBevBiz users.
Manage is something I never planned to offer but almost immediately added to FoodBevBiz during development when I realised how useful it would be to users. It includes current features like resource (order, customers, subscription, product, etc.) management, viewing, filtering, sorting, and more. Some things to look forward to there include custom table columns, suggested filters, and a better UX on mobile.
Tools is where things get pretty exciting. FoodBevBiz already has a few tools inside of it that stores have been relying on for months. That includes digests, exports, and integrations (like the FoodBevBiz Zendesk app). But there's (a lot) more to come.
Over the past couple weeks, I've been working on a new tool that can only be described as a 'game changer' (don't cringe!) for every store using FoodBevBiz. It's called Engage, and I can't wait to share it with you.
The idea behind it is very simple: Allow stores to automatically email customers, orders, and subscriptions, when they meet certain rules. It uses the same features that FoodBevBiz has right now:
Customer profiles
Real-time data syncing
Advanced filtering
I'm so excited to see how this new tool helps FoodBevBiz users. I can already imagine the uses for it:
Automatically email customers that have a high lifetime value but haven't ordered in a while.
When a subscription is cancelled, automatically email the user who cancelled it to try recover them.
Whenever an order is made for a certain product, automatically send a follow-up email to the customer 1 week later.
I'll be sharing more about it over the next month.
Since day one, FoodBevBiz's been focused on helping customers succeed. It's coming up on day three hundred and sixty six and that focus hasn't changed one bit.