We’ve had another fantastic year at 6Q, and want to thank you for your part in our journey. In this inaugural wrap up post, we cover what worked and what didn’t, and set some goals for the year ahead.
Social media following
We’ve had mixed success with our social media. Something we did differently this year, was to start using our You Tube channel to share support videos, and curate some of our favourite leadership and culture talks.
We continue to post daily on our LinkedIn page, Facebook page and our Twitter account. The latter being our most effective platform to attract visitors to our blog.
Our social media audience grew marginally, from 13,037 people at the start of 2017 to 14,518 people at the end. More than 98% of this audience is concentrated on Twitter.
A special highlight on social media only occurred last month, when US Entrepreneur and personality, Mark Cuban, shared an article I wrote for Startup Daily about our startup story on his social media.
Mark has an audience of 3.8 million followers on LinkedIn and 7.6 million followers on Twitter, so you can imagine how busy we have been answering comments and feedback. Thanks, Mark!
Mark Cuban share
Website traffic
We’ve had a massive improvement in website traffic, thanks to the ongoing hard efforts we put into our weekly articles here on this blog. We started the year with 18,414 unique monthly readers in January, and finished the year with 83,400 monthly readers.
Thank you to each and every one of you, for validating that we are sharing great value in our blog!
This graph, taken straight out of Google Analytics, illustrates this traffic growth over the calendar year. As expected, the last 10 days or so of 2017 was a lot quieter in traffic; something which we would expect with the festive celebrations in many countries across the globe.
The end result is a 452% increase in traffic to our website and blog. Exciting!
Website traffic, Jan – Dec 2017
Customer happiness
The social audience and website traffic aside, one of the more important statistics for us, is how we are rated with customer happiness. We use Help Scout for handling support and sales enquiries, and their reports make it easy for us to pull out some key statistics.
We had an increase of 178% on the volume of support tickets and sales enquiries.
We answered and resolved 6% of our incoming support requests within 30 minutes. The majority of support tickets received were handled and resolved in less than 8.5 hours, which is still pretty good.
In comparison, our average support resolution time in 2016 was within 23 hours.
These improved support resolution times has made a big impact n customer satisfaction, with the vast majority of customers saying our support is good or great. Sadly, we had our first ‘Not good’ ratings from support responses, with a total of 3 customers stating they were not happy with our first responses.
We answered and resolved 6% of our incoming support requests within 30 minutes.
Product
Our startup story wouldn’t be complete without discussing our actual product.
We continued to develop the product across a number of areas. The most significant was an overhaul of the My Polls section, with a total revamp of the scheduling system and interface.
We also changed from a fixed six questions per poll to 1-10 questions per poll, as well as launched our Slack integration.
One of the other changes was to start publishing our Release Notes publicly, so both customers and the wider community can see our latest product updates and changes.
Startup story: 6Q product release notes
Revenue
The most positive part of our startup story last year was that our monthly revenue has increased by an amazing 473% since the start of the year. This is a result of a steadily growing customer base, and low cancel rates (churn).
Our average customer is larger now too, which means higher revenue per account.
This is fantastic news for us, of course, and helps us continue to invest in developing our product further and ensure we continue to build a sustainable business.
Team changes
We were pleased to announce our first two remote hires this year. Customer Success team member, Victor, who is based in Mexico, and content writer, Gerald, who writes for us from Uganda.
Whilst most of the team are in the same city, we plan to make all future hires as remote positions, and are now thinking of ourselves as a ‘remote first’ team.
The 6Q Team
Managing and participating in a remote team has a number of rewards and challenges, some of which we have covered in our own articles, such as;
- Ultimate List of 90+ Tools for Managing a Remote Team
- Building Culture in a Remote Team
- How to Grow a Positive Company Culture with a Remote Team
We look forward to extending our awesome team further in the near future.
Goals for 2018
This annual wrap wouldn’t be right, without setting some goals for the year ahead.
Over 2018, I am committed to us doing everything we can, to continue to create a sustainable business that is focussed on improving the relationships and cultures of teams across the world.
To achieve this, our goals for 2018 are;
- Further develop our product to meet future needs of our customers;
- Continue to add value to our readers through this blog;
- Engage further with our customers and understand how we can be of most benefit;
- Grow our team further, particularly in the timezones where our customers are, and;
- Continue to grow our customer base, and set a stretch goal of five times our current MRR.
I look forward to reporting back on how we’ve gone with these goals in our next wrap-up article.
In Summary
I want to thank the team I work with in creating 6Q, as well as our customers, who provide us with meaningful feedback and suggestions – you really are co-creators in our startup story and journey.
Lastly to you, our readers, who we enjoy researching and writing our articles for. I hope we provide great value to you. If there is ever a topic you feel we should be covering, suggest it to us via social media or using our support email – we would be keen to hear it!
In closing, I would personally like to wish you, your family and your teams the very best for a great 2018!
