Hi friends,
Let’s have a look at what the shortest month of the year brought to the Beavers.
Platform addict
The single biggest source of revenue for Beaver Codes is the portfolio of our Wix apps.
The risk is that we are heavily dependent on the Wix platform. At any point, core Wix could offer the functionality that we supplement with our apps. Or they could just make technical changes that make things break in a non-fixable way for us.
On top of that, our best performing app Google Reviews App is also dependent on Google. I built the app with ease of use in mind. That means the big focus is on the user not connecting their business account or any extra steps. That however means we need to work extra hard to get the reviews from Google.
And yes, that in some cases means scraping public data for those businesses.
This month we were again faced with these dependencies:
Google continues to evolve their anti bot strategy.
That broke our scraper. After a week or two of trying, I got it working again, but I suspect it was partly because Google rolled back some of the restrictions.
This whole situation only reinforces my decision to focus more on the other apps to decrease this specific risk.
Wix introduced AI editor
Wix new Harmony editor is very cool tool. Kinda blends the traditional CMS experience with the likes of Lovable. However, due to the internal Wix technology limitations sites on this editor can’t use some of the Wix apps based on which tools were used to build them. (Wix has several ways you can build an app for their ecosystem)
For us it means that, Career and Job Board (our number 3) doesn’t work for the sites built on the Harmony editor.
We also had issues with upgrade flows for Easy From and QR Code Generator, but that was luckily quickly solved with help from the Wix team.
That being said, where there is risk, there is a reward! February was our best month to date in terms of revenue from the apps.
It is a mix of many factors, including halving our trial periods, continued work on marketing and the good old recurring SaaS model \o/
Server costs
Building software would be extremely boring if there were not these hurdles that one needs to overcome:) In addition to the platform fun above, we also got nearly double the cost for our servers.
All our cloud infrastructure is hosted by none other than Google, which makes it quite easy to track. Their tooling is very mature and they have all the budget alerts and tools to drill down.
I spent some time with these tools to find out that it’s because the new Shoptet addon for Aukro is reading too many Firestore documents.
The fact that the costs related to that project grow is not a surprise as we are growing the user base there really quickly.
However, now it seems the costs are outpacing the revenue, which is less fun 🙂
I am still digging into the specific Firestore insights to track down what specific function or place in the app is responsible. It seems a bit tricky because even though the Firestore usage did go up a lot, there seems to be no noticeable increase in query insights. Luckily, I reached out to Google support, and they are looking into it as well.
ArbTask pricing
To end on a positive note, I’ve finally pushed out the first version of pricing for ArbTask.
I’ve had a lot of conversations where the words affiliate and referrals were mentioned. That pushed me to actually put together pricing so we can start rewarding affiliates in some way.
We are still ironing out the affiliate program, but if you are interested, please reach out. The deal will most likely be for 30% of the first year of customer spend.
Refer a local business. Earn 30%. Everyone wins.
