2021 Year in review

Team Morningscore salutes you

Updated: January 23, 2024 Published: January 3, 2022

Karsten Madsen CEO

Karsten Madsen

Co-founder & CEO @ Morningscore.io

This is the post where I look back at 2021 for our software startup Morningscore.

The 2021 goal was to triple the revenue of 2020. We were supposed to scale a smooth machine. The idea was to do that through more direct sales and cold calling. And then reach the promised land of “cash flow positive” which means we would make more money than we spend and therefore no longer need investments.

This is not what actually happened.

Journey highlights

2021 was a big learning year for, I believe, all of the crew. It was a U year. Let me explain. We went into the year with a lot of confidence and assumptions that got smashed around spring. It was quite painful at times. Our new direct sales efforts proved to be a wrong strategy, at least at this time. And version 3 got delayed more than 6 months! The U shape represents our roller coaster ride. The U shape goes down but then goes up again. This happened to us. All the pain led to action and a way deeper understanding of where to take this business. Since June we learned so many things that finally just made everything click. We released version 3 with a huge bang. Read about the version 3 launch here. The excitement was real. We found the perfect model for sales and marketing. and I could go on and on.

The whole team is so pumped on energy to take on 2022 because we deeply believe that we have it in us to take this company so much further now. Epic plans! 👩‍🚀

This also means we no longer are aiming for cash flow positive. We are instead aiming for the even more promised land of hyper growth 🚀

What we achieved in 2021

Morningscore went from version 2.9 to version 3.0. Yes, just 1 release. But it was huuuge.
We almost doubled our customer base from roughly 400 to 700 monthly paying customers.
Subscription revenue roughly increased 220%

In the next chapters, I will dive into these results and tell you what happened in more detail.

The Product in 2021

From October 2020 to October 2021 we worked on version 3. This video (which doesn’t show the product lol) is our proud launch event:

Since v3 was such a big change in our code we had to migrate customers from v2. The remaining part of 2021 was dedicated to that and polishing the v3 rocket.

Polish continues in Q1 2022 with the relase of v3.1. But then after that we are back to releasing a lot of new cool things again. And with 2-3 months interval. So excited about releasing new features quick again 📦️

2021 Financials (money talk)

Below are the key metrics of our results in 2021 compared to 2020 and 2019

METRIC	2021	2020	2019
Revenue	$0.53 million	$0.24 million	$0.10 million
Expenses	$1.14 million	$0.55 million	$0.30 million
Employees**	13	8,5	5
MRR	$45.000	$23.000	$10.000
CAC*	$700	$500	$400
LTV	$2000	$1500	$1300
Customers	709	421	212

*In 2020 and 2019 the CAC was not measured properly. Estimations have been given. **Measured in full-time employees.

Looking ahead

Here is a super short overview of our 2022 goals.

Product milestones are shown on a timeline in our roadmap.

And these are the business goals:

Go from a revenue of $0.5 million in 2021 to $1.1 million in 2022
Go from roughly 700 customers to 1500 customers
Go from Morningscore version 3.0 to version 3.4
But as always the most important goal is: Be an awesome team and enjoy this wild ride 👽️

P.S. 🌳

We dream of a world where doing good equals healthy business.

That is our company vision. But talk is cheap. Action counts.

Last year I said we would plant 1 tree per month per customer as of January 2021.

Now we have planted a total of 4753 trees in 2021. And of course we continue in 2022.

Can we reach a total of 20.000 trees? Game on 😎

Follow us on LinkedIn to get in on the action 👩‍🚀

The story of Morningscore version 3

Is Morningscore's data quality good?

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