Here’s what I got up to last week.
Becoming a Xero App Partner I had a look at building a Xero integration for Bank Statement Converter. I created an account, poked around and looked at the API documentation. It seemed like a feasible idea. Then I looked at the approval process. It seems like I would have to build a custom app for two customers, and then would be eligible to create an app store app that anyone could purchase.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the most important metric when running a SaaS company. You want your MRR to be as plump as possible. On February 13th MRR was at $1000. Last week MRR exceeded $4000.
What happened across the past seven months? Why did MRR increase so much in the last week?
Letting Time Pass A big part of it was just letting time pass and steadily getting more users.
I don’t know when this started, but at some point in my life some jerk has gone and renamed “Customer Support” to “Customer Success”. It’s a pretty crappy name because it doesn’t really mean anything when you read it. You have to be in the know. You have to know that “Customer Success” means “Customer Support”, which in turn means replying to messages, emails and phone calls from customers who have some problem or question.
I usually work on this app from a shared office that I’ve been renting since January 2021. The rule is, everyone is supposed to check in at the reception desk in the lobby before going up to the higher floors.
After a while I decided to skip checking in at reception. This, as you can imagine, was really great. Walk into a building, walk into the lift, go up the lift, sit down at your desk.
Since I started this website in April 2021, I knew users would upload PDF files that were password protected. I figured it would be too annoying to do the work to support these PDFs so I put it off. Recently a user asked me to support password protected PDFs, so I did it.
It’s a simple feature, and it works pretty well. I spent all of yesterday working on it and pushed it into production at 2:32 AM this morning.
Postman Collection Download 1. Get the Authorization Token Go to https://bankstatementconverter.com/ in Google Chrome Login Hit F12 to open up the developer tools Click on the “Application” tab On the left panel click on “Storage” -> “Local Storage” -> “https://bankstatementconverter.com/" You should see a key called “bsc-authToken” and a corresponding value. The value is the Authorization Token. Copy the value. 2. Upload PDF API Method: POST URL: https://api2.
Last week a customer asked me to help him process a few hundred of his documents. He had PDFs for several bank accounts going back to 2018. I had a look a documents arranged a price and then got to work processing his documents. My idea was to run it through Bank Statement Converter’s (BSC) PDF to CSV processor. However a few errors occurred. BSC has a generic algorithm for detecting transaction records in a PDF file.
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of complaints that the year is wrong in Bank Statement Converter’s resulting CSV. At first when I got these complaints I thought “What the hell you talking about? All we do is find the transaction data and then write it out to a CSV file. How can the year be wrong?”. Let’s walk through an what’s going on with one of my HSBC bank statements.
The other day I had a bit of revelation about what problem Bank Statement Converter solves. The obvious answer seems to be “it solves the problem of extracting transaction data from PDF bank statements”. That’s true, but you could also say it solves a more general problem. “It gives user access to their bank transaction data”. However, it’s a bit of a pain to use. To get your 2021 transaction data you need to:
A few weeks ago the BankStatementConverter (BSC) exceed $1000 in Monthly Recurring Revneue (MRR). I figured you lot would be interested to hear the story
$0 MRR, March to July 2021 I got the idea to build BSC to help users process PDFs. I spent about a week playing around in Kotlin to see if my idea was feasible, it was. Soon after I meet up with a friend for beers and tell him my idea.
