What I've Learned Since Releasing Uncover

Uncover launched publicly on May 8, 2013. Roughly three months ago. I wanted to share with you what I've learned since Uncover's release that I haven't touched on in the recent articles I've published: Just Launch, Sales or Die, Building for the Enterprise, and others. Three months is both a long time to be out in the market and also incredibly short. You can learn a lot in ninety days, and we sure have.

What I've Learned Since Releasing Uncover

How's Uncover doing by the numbers?

Everyone on our team is in agreement that we're doing really well. In just under two months, we've already done over $10,000 in revenue and climbing. I'm really excited about this, as many startups never see $1,000 in revenue let alone $10,000. It's a sign that we're building something people want and are willing to pay for. Our customers wouldn't have collectively spent $10,000 in the first two months if that weren't the case.

I was a bit worried at first that our customers would all be friends of my team, or my personal friends, but as it turns out only about one-third of our customers are companies that I know. The rest have been organic leads. In fact, our largest customer by employee size has come through an organic lead and responded to a drip marketing email that we set up after the first few weeks. I'm particularly happy about that, as drip marketing has always been something I've believed in and encouraged companies to do.

Not only is our revenue high and our customer base made up of more than two-thirds organic leads, but our customer and employee satisfaction is also unbelievably high. We've yet to lose a customer, our customers are telling us how happy their employees are with their Uncover perks, and employees are redeeming their perks at an astonishing 85% rate. I think we can even push that percentage higher as we improve the product over time.

Of all the numbers I can tell you about, the 85% adoption is the one I'm most proud of. When we started Uncover, we knew that we didn't want to offer discounts. On the front page of our website we clearly state, in "What we believe," that "Discounts aren't effective. There's a difference between ‘here's a discount' and offering something special." I know from talking to partners of perks companies that only offer discounts to their users that the adoption rate is far lower than 10%. That's a difference of 75% between our service and theirs. I'm happy to know that the employees of our customers have validated our assumption.

We're also converting visitors to our website at a high rate for SaaS businesses. MixPanel has been great for tracking that. It's a service that I recommend in my Just Launch article from a few months ago.

What's next for Uncover?

While our numbers have been fantastic to date, we could always grow more quickly. We've noticed a few bottlenecks in our product development and have addressed them with Jake Przespo joining the team. He's going to be helping us shore up our design, as well as work with us on the product side of things. We have lots that we want to build, and have been building, but having Jake on our team will help us build substantially more quickly.

We are also working to attract more visitors to Uncover. The size of the top of our funnel is small compared to what we'd like it to be. While we've been doing some content marketing and sales outreach, we haven't spent as much time as we'd like on figuring out how to get more people to our homepage. We know that if we can get more of the right people to see Uncover, we'll grow a lot faster.

This is something we're hoping to address with a new update that we've been working on for the past six weeks. It's something that we've been thinking about for almost a year now and feel as if now is the right time for. Sorry to be vague, but we will release more details on what we're building as soon as we're a little bit closer. Our hope is to release this update by the end of August or early September. We believe that it'll address our top of the funnel needs and truly improve the Uncover product for all of our current and future customers. Please follow us on Twitter or sign up for Uncover for more details.

We continue to grow every week and it's our hope that we continue to increase the happiness of the employees of our customers. We're working hard to make the best perks and rewards product on the Web, with a lot more coming soon.

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