April Recap – Burnout and Declining Growth

April was the most difficult month yet. I Launched Version 5.0 with some large new features, and the release went fairly smoothly. However, 5.0 introduced a major compatibility problem for subset of Linux and OSX versions. This unexpected headache piled on a lot of stressful work, leading to a dark spiral of burnout. I ended taking the second half of the month off (for the most part) to recover.

If you like this post, be sure to check out the other recaps. There's one every month!

April Metrics Overview

Since inception, the rate of growth of Insomnia's user base has been steadily decreasing every month, from +30% to +10%. This decrease is to be expected as Insomnia outgrows the early adopter market. However, if this number drops below 10% I'll be worried. Revenue growth is still very healthy though, which is awesome to see.

The following chart does a great job of visualizing the user growth decline. If you connect the peaks with a straight line you'll see that growth has been roughly linear since January. This is likely due to low word-of-mouth referral traffic, which is perplexing because Insomnia users are consistently fanatical.

MRR growth has also been declining steadily over the last few months, although it's still in a healthy place at +35%.

Wrap Up

I've mentioned in previous posts that I want to spend more time on content and marketing but have yet to have the motivation to do so. Now that growth is a problem, I have no choice. Everyone knows that building a great product does not guarantee success and I'm beginning to live that reality. It's time to make some changes.

As always, let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts, and enjoy the app!