March is over, and it’s time to review what I would call my first real month as a SaaS founder of Kleio. I’ll share everything:

• The Numbers

• Feedback so far

• Some of my learning this far

• What’s next?

The Numbers

Let’s go full transparency mode and start with the numbers:

MRR: $1026
Operating costs: ~$110 ($60 Railway, $31 Trigger.dev, $19 Supahub)
Profit: $916
Paying customers: 24
Orders processed: 4,615,767
Line items processed: 8,830,610 🤯

Generally, I’m happy. I think the costs are too high. It shouldn’t be that expensive to run. But I’m new to this, and I’ve been learning as I went by. I expect it to decrease from here, both relative to MRR and in real costs.

I would lie if I said that I didn’t wish more stores had signed up. But then again; I’ve only invited the waiting list (79). So, I should probably be happy with a ~30% conversion rate of the waiting list?

Feedback so far

Generally, it’s been a “this is exactly what we needed”-response, both in terms of the pricing and the platform.

I’ve had one of the biggest online stores in Denmark praise it to the skies because of the functionalities. It felt like they “got it” than I anticipated. I think they understand the small nuances I’ve made different than other platforms because they face some of the same challenges that I’ve faced as a store operator. Also, they told me they’ll save around $11,000/year 🤯

I’ve had smaller stores praising the platform simply because it’s much cheaper than the alternatives. They just wanted a good dashboard and the “standard” marketing analytics at a fair price. Which they get.

But, I’ve had negative feedback, too, of course. And we’re transparent here! I’ve had a few smaller stores uninstall because they didn’t see the need. 100% fair. I think they weren’t “there yet” when in comes to analyzing their data.

I’ve also had one giant customer say the platform is slow. Again, fair. The platform was slow — for their store. I currently calculate everything on-the-fly, and they’ve had ~1M orders in the last year (crazy!!). So, while it feels slow to wait ~12 seconds for the platform to get around 2M rows of data (orders and line items) and crunch the lifetime-value numbers, which is a heavy calculations, it’s actually quite fast. But, it’s still a bad user experience relative to stores with less orders. So, again, 100% fair.

Three short learnings/observations

It’s fun!

I decided to build Kleio partly because I was looking for a career change, and partly because I saw some needs for my own stores that I didn’t get fulfilled by the alternatives in the market.

So far, it’s a lot more me than running a clothing eCommerce store. I think I’m going in the right direction. If you walk around thinking about building something or changing your career. Do it!

All SaaS founders should be their own customer

While I haven’t built a SaaS before, it feels like every SaaS founder should be a customer on their own platform. After 7 years as an eCommerce founder and operator, I know exactly what I’d find useful in a tool like Kleio. And if find out that I need something, or learn something new, I can just build it into the tool.

There’s no substitute for building and getting feedback

My initial focus was wrong. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to price Kleio for the smaller companies. My idea was to target the free users of Triple Whale, which only includes a dashboard, and give them the full marketing analytics suite for something like $9.

In hindsight, that’s probably a mistake. But not for obvious reasons. It’s not because of “too much support for the price” or “it’s not worth the effort.” But because the bigger stores seem to “get” Kleio a lot better. It makes sense, though. When you’re just starting out with a new store, you’re probably not thinking long and hard about lifetime-value or return rates. You’re thinking about sales.

What’s my point? That it would never have guessed this without actually building something, putting it in the market, and getting data (feedback).

So, what’s the plan from here?

I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the lifetime-value calculations to be as fast as possible. Probably too much time, to be honest. Partly because it’s the crown jewel, and partly because I think it’s an interesting challenge to make it as fast as possible. I don’t think it’ll get any faster without switching to a different type of database or pre-calculating the reports (which comes with over trade-offs).

Therefore, it’s probably about time I start focusing on optimizing the other features as well as adding new ones. I recently added Google Ads to the platform, so we both integrate with Meta and Google. Next up, I think I want to expand on the product analyses and create a financial statement of some kind. I have a few good ideas.

Want to try for yourself?

Kleio is the analytics toolbox I wish I had when I launched my first online store 7 years ago. My goal is simple: give you everything you need to grow confidently—without the fluff you don’t.

Find the app on the Shopify store here. The plans starts at $19 and ends at $99, so no more insane pricing. And all plans comes with a free trial.