We thought the questions asked in the discussions area in our Crowdfunding Raise were superb so we wanted to replicate them here. Please let’s keep the discussions going and put forward your ideas to keep growing Crunch (and therefore your investment!)
Investor query (originally posted on Seedrs):
I am a Crunch customer (and now an investor) and have enjoyed your service and platform. The UX is very intuitive and the human-service is always professional and helpful. The company is correct in that a seamless digital + service experience is not easy to build. Which leads me to the question of whether the company’s expansion opportunities might be throttled by this type of model. In a typical SaaS solution the marginal cost of an additional subscriber tends to continually trend downward. With a service component you likely need to build a new accountant network that can serve that country/region and its accounting & tax laws, not to mention consideration of language, timezone, culture/tone of voice. How does the company factor this into the expansion strategy and would you consider using the digital platform as an entry offering into certain markets, before (or completely skip) the service side of the equation? A point of feedback: I was looking at Crunch’s public website and believe it currently does not drive the message of the freemium model well enough. For example just right below the fold it still says “Get your first month FREE” - which implies there is a cost straight after. A message like “Free Crunch forever”, maybe a bit over the top, but will probably get more people to try it out. Afterwards introduce additional services and add-ons (at the appropriate time in the journey) after users have a chance to experience the product.
Our response:
Firstly my thanks for being a crunch customer and huge thanks also for investing.
You’ve hit upon a superb question and something we have considerable experience.
As you can see from Friday’s update, ‘Crunch gets ready to go international’ we know exactly how to do this architecturally. We abstract the tax components and we can literally drop Crunch Free into locations. For foreign speaking ones we add localisation functionality.
As I’ve described in the ‘Founded in 2007’ discussion piece we’ve mastered a super scalable infrastructure, with a super powerful tech stack that costs literally pence to run per user. This is the foundation of a rollout. To your point on the marginal costs of SAAS trending downwards, ordinarily they do but in most SAAS businesses the customer acquisition cost (CAC) is prohibitively high and normally kills it. With Crunch’s strategy we have seen our CAC reduce significantly.
We believe with many years building a specially curated accountancy network, we can do the same across other countries and without revealing our secret sauce, Crunch will operate in a much faster rollout methodology than the UK.
With regards your feedback, you’ve hit the nail on the head. In July we moved from our own ‘react powered’ web serving front end to a powerful CMS that could be run by the marketing team. We had needed a whole scrum team to run the website before which in reality was a waste - the intention had been to share components with our react application but some plans don’t always deliver. The new website was designed to get us through and now we’re going page by page, banner by banner, to really deliver. We’re just working on the Crunch Free page right now, it’s in the sandbox and almost ready to go live.
The one thing we appreciate at Crunch is that we have been so busy building and continually tuning the software and service solution we haven’t had enough time to convey how good our solution is. This funding allows us to put in a talented marketer in place and build out the marketing team. Our solution is so differentiated that we’ll very soon be conveying how powerful it is and the signups will go into the next level.
Of course we are community centric and we listen (and act) so we welcome feedback and pointers in selling the Crunch solution as well as any other feedback.
Thank you!
Darren. CEO & Founder
