Two weeks ago, together with my INBS.Software team we released MetricsCube – a data analytics tool providing a completely new approach for web hosting companies to help them keep better track of their venture. Starting with comprehensive WHMCS integration, our mission is to deliver a new level of reporting and monitoring tool in sync with the most widely respected web applications. A must-have solution for anyone who strives to grow their company and need extra supplies of data to make significant business decisions.

It is super easy to access at a glance your most important reports!

Why did I decide to create MetricsCube?

I have been using WHMCS on a few businesses myself, but throughout my entire professional journey, I was never able to get quick access to the important metrics and have a clear vision of what is currently happening. Things tend to get more and more complicated when your business is growing, and you can easily lose track of what is actually going on. As a business owner you want to focus on crucial operations, and finding spare time to build a complex reporting tool is always a tough task. You’d rather spend this time on something else, wouldn’t you?

In the meantime, we had lots of inquiries from our clients who shared the same burning need for a more advanced data analysis tool. The default WHMCS reporting is good for starters, but eventually becomes a pain for any subscription business because of the lack of more complex reports like MRR, LTV or Churn.

Having that in mind, we’ve decided to develop a SaaS platform that will serve both us and our clients at once!

What makes MetricsCube so valuable for web hosting companies?

Similar solutions like Chartmogul or Baremetrics offer very poor or no connection with WHMCS whatsoever. They often don’t provide well crafted integration with any of the popular web applications at all. Our unique approach lies in having strong, dedicated integration with different systems, starting with WHMCS. Given our 10-year experience in the web hosting industry, we are determined to expand this list through building integrations with cPanel and Plesk – driven by the goal not to limit our reports to just financial data analysis.

We know what reports are the most valuable for web hosting companies and we aim to deliver them!

MetricsCube includes more reports directed towards a web hosting company than any other solution on the market!

Is MetricsCube useful for a small company?

Absolutely! This might be one of the biggest mistakes that small businesses make – they assume that because they are not a huge enterprise yet, those complex, and often intimidating reports don’t really matter. Wrong! Small companies are expected to grow more than any other businesses. And if you want to thrive, you need to know what’s going on!

In terms of pricing, we have tried to make the model as much flexible as possible. If you feel that $24.95 per month amounts to overkill, and your business is just starting up, do not hesitate to drop us an email at contact@metricscube.io. At one time we too were in the “start-up” phase, and we know very well how important it is to keep the costs low in the outset. We want to help small companies to evolve and succeed!

What if you’re not that much into numbers?

We are aware that many reports are not entirely clear to everyone. Considering that the data analysis itself is not quite popular in the web hosting industry, especially among the small companies, we want to educate! My goal is to prepare a series of Blog articles explaining the most valuable metrics for any subscription business. If you are looking for more resources, and want to extend your knowledge in this domain, go visit our Blog at: https://www.metricscube.io/blog/ where I’ll be posting new articles every 1-2 weeks.

Not sure what the report is about? A single peek at the extra comment and you get the hang of it!

What is our next move?

The official launch is merely the first on the long list of milestones we want to reach in the next couple of months. Before we move on to integration with other systems, however, we focus on further extending the connection with WHMCS:

• At least 70 built-in reports for WHMCS – We plan to introduce around 5 new reports every few weeks.
• Multibrand functionality – Having more than one system? No problem, you can monitor all your brands under a single account.
• Subaccounts – You can invite your employees and choose what reports or brands they have access to.
• Extra comparing tool – With Multibrand support, you will be able to easily compare data from all your businesses.
• Expenses tracking – YES, the system will let you define expenses as well as calculate NET revenues and extra reports to monitor your spendings!
• … and lots more:
  • Two-factor authentication
  • PDF export
  • Forecasting
  • Trendlines
  • Favourite reports
  • Custom dashboards
  • Goals
  • Comments on graphs

Not only as a founder, but mostly as an active enjoyer of MetricsCube, I send out an open invitation to give this very practical tool a try. Make a lightning-fast analysis of your business and discover its strengths you never knew even existed!

Learn More!

First of all, you have to realize that monitoring of your regular income on a month-to-month basis will not give you a full picture.

Taking this into account, if you want your web hosting company to grow and succeed, you need to:

• Increase your MRR – it does not always mean immediate growth of the NET income!
• Increase the value of your users – in both the short and long run,
• Reduce churn – not only the revenue churn, but also the subscription and customer churn.

In order to make proper decisions about the above factors, you need to keep track of multiple metrics. It is also extremely important to compare the results in custom time intervals (e.g. quarter to quarter), as well as be able to filter them by products or customer groups. Below you will find the key measures, which, in my opinion, you should trace on a daily basis.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is a report that indicates how much money you can expect from your active subscriptions. Typically, if your client base increases, or the value of an individual customer does, the MRR metric strongly and steadily grows. However, generating new sales is not the only method to increase MRR. Acquiring new clients is thought to be more expensive than maintaining the existing ones, so you may consider increasing the income of your current customers instead!

An example of a steady and stable growth of MRR. The higher it is, the better condition of a company and the higher its value.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

ARPU defines how much revenue you get from one active client on average. Customers having only free trial, one-time or free products do not impact ARPU, so it’s related to the subscription model only. Usually, ARPU increases if your clients buy new services or make upgrades. Furthermore, ARPU can be used to figure out if the new changes in your offer turned out to be right. For instance, when you introduce a new service for your customers or modify the pricing scheme, ARPU will increase if your clients liked it!

An example of successful VAS introduced in June! ARPU grew, which means that the existing client base pays you more on average.

Lifetime Value

LTV is used to define a total profit from one customer through your entire business relationship with them. In other words, it is an indicator of how much money a single client brings to your company on average. It is very often applied to calculate the profitability of marketing campaigns by comparing it to Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). Obviously, you need to get more money from a user than it costs you to acquire them. It is not just a metric, it also gives a business owner the general impression about the quality of their services – the longer your clients stay and the more money they spend, the better your service quality!

An example of decline in customer loyalty for the company. As you can see on the trendline (the grey line), the value slowly decreases. This company needs to find the reason behind it, and then, perhaps consider extra discounts for existing clients?

Churn – Three reports on how your business is losing

“Churn” is an ominous word that makes every owner of a subscription-based business shake in their boots. Putting it simply, the higher the churn, the more revenue you lose from the already acquired client base. There are, however, three churn reports that you can monitor to gain the full view:

• Subscription Churn – it doesn’t necessarily translate into the loss of a customer, as they can still have other active subscriptions with you,
• Revenue Churn – it is the value of all lost subscriptions and downgrades,
• Customer Churn – it means that a cancelled customer has no more active subscriptions.

If your customers have multiple services, the Customer Churn will be slightly different and smaller than the Subscription Churn. In the above example, you can notice the huge churn increase in May. It was probably due to some major network problems with the hosting services.

The Revenue Churn may also have a different shape than the Customer/Subscription Churn, because, typically, pricing of services varies. In addition, the Revenue Churn includes downgrades that are not considered by the Subscription Churn report.

Where can I learn more? Where can I get these reports for my company?

If you would like to have a tool that allows you to browse all discussed reports or if you’re simply interested in these topics, I strongly suggest that you subscribe to the MetricsCube Newsletter. I will be providing much more detailed materials about them on the MetricsCube Blog, starting on July, and everyone subscribed will be up to date with new publications.

Subscribe!

For more details about my MetricsCube project, please visit the website: www.metricscube.io