$2,100 a month of subscriptions plus roughly $3,000 a month of onboarding and migration work that i do for new customers. the services money is real, repeatable and has a waiting list, but no individual customer pays it twice. when a potential partner asked what my mrr was i genuinely did not know what the honest answer was. how do you present a business shaped like this without either lying or underselling it?
mrr is recurring revenue only, so your mrr is $2,100 and the setup work is services revenue. that is not a smaller answer, it is a more precise one, and the correct way to say it is that you do $2,100 mrr plus around $3,000 a month of services with a pipeline. anyone who matters will respect the distinction and be suspicious of anyone who blurs it.
saying both numbers in one sentence is obvious in hindsight and i have been treating it as a single question with a single answer.
separate the margins too, because they will not be alike. my software line runs at a margin dominated by hosting and support, and my services line is essentially my hourly rate minus overhead, so a month with lots of services looks great on revenue and is much worse on profit per hour worked. i track revenue per hour worked on the services side specifically, and it changed which customers i said yes to.
two lines, always. mrr $2,100, services $3,000 a month with an attach rate. never one blended number.
i would push harder on presenting the services line rather than treating it as the embarrassing half. a repeatable onboarding service with a waiting list is a real business with real margins and it is currently sixty percent of your revenue. what buyers discount is unpredictable project work, not a productised service that every new customer buys, and the fix for the discount is showing that it attaches to a predictable percentage of signups.
no argument with presenting it well. the thing i would not do is call it mrr, because the moment someone does diligence and finds it does not repeat, every other number you gave them gets re examined.
attach rate as a percentage of signups is a genuinely useful way to frame it. i can calculate that today.
worth thinking about which one you want to be in three years, because the answer changes what you build. services fund the software beautifully and they also eat exactly the hours you would need to make the software good enough that nobody needs onboarding.
@tabula_rasa_dev · 7mo ago
i folded services into a single revenue number in a pitch once and got asked one follow up question about renewal rates that took the whole thing apart in about ninety seconds. it was not even hostile, it was just an obvious question that i had made impossible to answer well. two lines from the start would have cost me nothing.
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