Birthday Alarm Price Boost

A story about how Shaan Puri's company Birthday Alarm made massive profit improvements through two simple changes rather than complex feature development.

"We had this business called Birthday Alarm - it was a reminder service that would send people a cheesy ecard on their friend's birthday if you paid $9 a year. The business had been printing cash, millions of dollars every year since 2001.

We spent a year rewriting the whole thing, redesigning it, making it cleaner and more minimalist. But after all that work, only two things actually made a difference:

First, we raised prices by 30% because prices hadn't gone up in 15 years. Second, we implemented Stripe instead of the old payments platform. Stripe had this feature where if somebody's credit card expires and they get a new one, for 25 cents they would automatically update it without the user having to type anything in.

That one feature alone was worth seven figures - we made an extra million dollars a year of profit just from that. It was a big lesson learned that the link between effort and result is so much more disconnected than you think. We just had to check a box on Stripe to enable it and pay a quarter each time they did that update."