Unicorn Platform — the 2020 Recap

Hi! This is Alex.

2020 was the weirdest and toughest year in my life. And I suppose in yours too.

People around the whole globe were forced to change. We got new lifestyles, new habits, new jobs, new opportunities, new priorities, new wishes. And masks stashed everywhere at home 😂

Many businesses and projects closed because of the world crisis. But Unicorn Platform survived. And it is thriving!

Let's see this quick recap of what happened to us in 2020.

Team

As you may know, at the beginning Unicorn Platform was a company of one. But this simply could not last any longer as our user count was growing.

If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far go together.

Unicorn Platform team has expanded from 1 person to 4 folks. Today we have a COO (Asad), a frontend developer (Artem), and a marketer (Ruslan).

We rented a house outdoors had spent an amazing time together.

Everybody agreed this will be our new tradition 🙂

I could not be happier meeting these amazing folks. I believe together we will make Unicorn Platform shine like a diamond and earn many amazing skills.

Numbers

The project monthly recurring revenue (MRR) went up ~x5 times for the last year.

We had a -33% MRR drop in April, when corona striked
Churn went down from 23% to 11%.
The user base has grown from ~1,000 to ~7,000 people.

Our main income of fresh blood is traditionally Product Hunt. But Unicorn Platform also gets new visitors from these websites:

The growth is very slow and I'm not satisfied with it. We need more cash to hire experts and deliver a better product.

This is why I'm negotiating with a couple of passionate investors who could throw in some fuel for us to move forward not as a turtle but at least as an athletic turtle.

Product updates

According to our changelog, we released quite a few new features including:

Google Sheet form integration.
Realistic devices mockups.
Custom fonts.
Stripe Checkout integration.
Form builder.
Custom colors.

It could be more, but there was one big problem that dramatically slowed down our delivery rate...

Biggest fail

Blogs 😣

We made and released it, but it took too much time. And the most frustrating part is that it is still not finished yet. Blogs are still in βeta because of one huge problem: a bad WYSIWYG choice (SlateJS - not recommended). WYSIWYG (or rich text editor) is what you use to write a blog post body. It is the most important part of any blogging platform.

We are switching to a more robust WYSIWYG solution. It will be a combination of Medium and Notion styles editor. You will love it. I promise.

Lesson learned: a big feature will take much time (6 months in our case). Ask yourself: does it worth it? Would not you better spend this time on 100 smaller features?

Future

We will launch the final version of blogs in February 2021 on Product Hunt. Do not miss out 😎

The next product updates in 2021 will include:

Multi-user access.
+10 new form integrations.
More powerful form builder.
Predesigned templates.
Widgets and banners.

Unicorn Platform will continue being the product-driven team. It means we care the most about the product and the custom service, not about growth, KPI and other stuff big boys use to play with.