How we got our first $1M

by Andrea Barrica - Step-founder, inDinero

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT6quEaTJSA

Dinner with Steve Blank

Dear inDinero User,

I hope this finds you well - I’m writing to you to let you know about some business model changes we have to make. First off, it’s been amazing to have your patience and support over the past two years. Without your help and feedback, our product wouldn’t be where it is today.

inDinero has been trying to support a free customer base since launching 2010, but the costs associated with doing so have gone up considerably since. The company pays a very hefty fee to aggregate financial data, and we lose money on every non-paying user. Because of these unaffordably high costs, I’ve made the very difficult decision to discontinue our free plan. Many of you have told us that you’d prefer a premium/paid service that can better support a growing product. We agree that this is the direction we need to make, and we hope we have your support during this transition period.

The free product will be discontinued on July 31 2012, and real-time data from financial institutions will be limited to our paying customers. As a safety measure, we’ll be deleting all transactional data that belongs to non-paying users after this July 31 cutoff date. We’ve made it very easy to download a copy of your data: simply go to the Transactions Page and press the “Export” link on the bottom of the page… To thank you for being supportive through this transition, we’re offering three months of free service on our paid plan. Just shoot us an email and we’ll give you the discount code.

It has been difficult for us to come to this decision, but we’re certain that you’ll prefer an inDinero that can properly invest in improving its service. On another note, if you’re looking for an inDinero-friendly bookkeeper/accountant, please shoot us a reply. We’d love to see how we can help.

Breakup email

Mission: Not die.

1. I serviced the first ~60 companies personally.

2. I experimented with price, service for 2 mo.

3. I created relationships, no hard closing.

4. We didn’t care about scale or ROI, at first.

5. I didn’t prospect or market. (I didn’t have to.)

Journey to $1M is NOT like journey to $10M.

1. Customer happiness is key.

2. Don’t be afraid to pivot or add human elements. Don’t wait until you’re about to die. Act now.

Q&A / Activities

1. What are you doing to WOW your customers? Have you made any relationships? Are you creating a painkiller or a vitamin?

2. Do you have non-ideal clients? What’s your plan to deal with them? How are you going after your dream customers?

3. Are you ready for PR/launch? What do you have to do to be ready?