August Summary
A very delayed August update for Pico because September 1st was a Friday. By the numbers:
MRR: $5283 (-5.5%)
New subscribers: 55 (+14.5%)
Visitors: 21.2K (+48%)
Net, it’s pretty much more of the same of what happened in July: high churn, lots of new users.
My two high level goals continue to be:
Make Pico more powerful
Grow revenue
For goal #1: I launched an alpha version of custom backend generation. Someone built a really great app to turn images into tattoos with it 🙂. But I didn’t turn custom backend generation into a full feature. It’s trickier than anticipated. But the knowledge turned out to be super helpful to first support some “built-in” backends/APIs in Pico. Pico now supports emailing yourself, image generation, image background removal, image upscaling. And soon, will support other AI models, website scraping and Google Search result retrieval, etc.
In terms of revenue growth, the things I tried — tweet to get more iterations for free users, affiliate marketing, additional pricing tiers — didn’t yield much fruit. But the learnings from the last 2 in particular have been super helpful towards things I’m working on in September.
A couple of big wins in August were this large travel company deploying a chatbot built with Pico to lots of users, and this fun app going viral.
September promises to be an interesting month. Exciting stuff ahead.