Finally starting up Qeryz is one of the things in my life that has long been overdue. I’ve always wanted to get into SaaS and there were some stats that Moz published way back May of 2012 that validated that. Take a look at this chart:
Did you notice how much revenue their consulting business was doing on a monthly basis? That’s huge! However, their SaaS/product revenue took over – and took over big time. They had a product/market fit that did incredibly well in taking them from a SEO services company to a SaaS company.
Comparing the revenue is like comparing apples and oranges. It’s just not there. The revenue from SaaS is sky high. And so, by 2010, Moz decided to pivot the company 100% to a SaaS business and grew it from there.
I’m simply following a roadmap that’s been proven effective. However Qeryz is a very different product from Moz Analytics. Qeryz is not an SEO product at all. It’s more of a data-gathering tool that you can use for vastly different purposes. It can help improve your CRO, your marketing strategy, your website design, and so on and so forth.
Moz pretty much laid out what I need to do from a business perspective. Here’s an interesting chart telling us their product performance during 2011:
Kind of makes it easy for me and my partner to be able to see where we’re going, where Qeryz will be someday, and whether we should keep on or not. I know the Moz numbers are colossal and we are probably not going to get to that – probably ever. But hey, not trying means we miss 100%. I’m not going to let myself miss by that huge a margin.
Moz has a limited days for their free trial account. It doesn’t mean that we have to follow that model. We can go freemium and it could work. From this chart, we could see how much they are able to convert from those free subscribers on a monthly basis. Our freemium chart will look very different. This, however, gives us a good idea about the goals we could set for free user conversions to Pro.
As always, there are takeaways for each Moz post. Their vision for the future outlines what they should and should not do. Right now we haven’t outlined what we shouldn’t do or shouldn’t be. We’ll get there perhaps when a lot of user requests for more features to be built. As of now, we’re as lean as a lean SaaS startup can be.
Moz is a funded company so naturally they have funded revenue estimates. This isn’t really relevant to what we’re doing since we have no real funding. Again, we’re as lean as lean can be. Our start up funds came from my personal savings. This may be a diversification strategy or a pivotal strategy altogether depending on how Qeryz goes.
Some recent development with Qeryz:
We’re rolling out our freemium account with 200 responses per month. This will be in tune with launching our pro account which amounts to $15 a month for 1,000 responses. It’s an extremely cheap beta account but any account enrolled this time will be grandfathered to when we roll it out officially.
So people who are subscribing as a pro account will pay $15/mo forever even if we increase prices. That’s just the way it is.
We’ve also finally been able to preserve the quality and purity of data. Whenever a user visits other pages or goes out of your website and back in, he will still be able to continue off with the last question he was asked with your Qeryz survey. This is a huge development! Data will no longer be skewed in any way. Yes it can be paused but it will not be skewed.
We’ve also been able to make sure that when you minimize a Qeryz survey, it stays minimized. As a webmaster, I respect my user’s experience and hold it in high esteem. We assume our users will be the same. So we made sure that when users minimize a Qeryz survey, it stays that way even if they visit other pages in the website or even if they go out of the site and revisit it within the day.
We’ve also made sure that people will be able to track the clicks of every link our thank you message box delivers. This way, you’ll know whether your thank you message is effective in bringing your users to the page or action you want to bring them to.
These are just some developments. There are tons more in our Icebox that we’ll deliver and test in the coming months. I’ll keep you posted.
Image Source: http://moz.com/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future