Emilio - 2024-03 Update
Every month you will get an update on what we are working on, what we have achieved, and what we have failed at.
TL;DR:
Press Launch: After getting attention from the press, Emilio got 500 new users and now has 13 paying customers, making $100 every month.
New Features: The team is working on making the app better based on what users said they want, such as leveraging the Gmail sidebar and others. We're also planning more marketing to get even more users.
Low conversion rate: The challenge is that not many users are paying yet (about 2% do), so we’re working on making the app easier to use.
Highlights
Emilio launched to the public 🚀: Emilio had great press coverage with news in Eco, SicNotícias, and TheObjective (amongst others), which brought the total number of users to 500 (!!!) over the following 2 weeks. It humbles us to know that this is a pain people are suffering and that Emilio generated enough interest to lead to many sign-ups.
First paying customers: we have now a total of 13 paying customers, 2 of them paid for the full year - leaving us at $100 MRR.
Solid backend: the launch exposed all the infrastructure scaling issues, which were not a lot (for the techies: we needed to scale workers and handle rate-limiting from OpenAI). After the launch week, we are pretty confident about the robustness of the backend (it runs mostly on autopilot now).
Great user feedback: if you remember the previous digest, the feedback from beta testers was scarce (Daniel even ranted about it!). The number of users made the feedback skyrocket, which in turn made our roadmap much clearer (check our Feature Requests page).
Marketing:
SEO: we continue to focus on ramping up our content creation (mostly AI-generated for now) in our Guides and Blog sections, together with building a good foundation of backlinks that can boost our rankings.
Directories: Next month we will focus on a second launch on Product Hunt and AppSumo (which are known to drive great traffic)
Clarity on next features: with a clearer roadmap, we will ship the following features:
(still this month) Moving to a Google add-on: some of the users felt the thread summaries inserted in the thread cause some OCD and/or intrusiveness, so we are moving it to the sidebar of the Gmail interface (works on both desktop and mobile);
Follow-up Digest: in short we want to create a digest that covers all the follow-ups users need to do to those who haven't responded to you (requested here);
Email auto-drafts: this is where the gold mine is - having AI draft the replies for the user (requested here).
Challenges
Low user-to-customer conversion rate (~2%): we decided to ship Emilio as soon as the product was good enough, but we knew the UX was still not there. The next 30 days are being spent on that!
North Star Metric
Paying customers: 13
Sign-ups (incl. trial expired): 488
Finances
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): $98
Monthly recurring costs (MRC): $179
Costs mostly of software (GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, X Premium) and accounting firm
Leveraging $25,000 in AWS credits, Microsoft for Startup’s $2,500 OpenAI credits, and Google for Startups productivity software
Founders without salary
Looking forward to updating you next month, until then spread the Emilio word!
Other (ad)ventures from the Founders: AI Blog Articles and Meeting Reminders