Storemapper: raising $5 to $20 did not cost signups

As of August 2014, Storemapper was running about $54,000 in annual recurring revenue, roughly $4,500 a month. Tyler Tringas ran the business for five years and sold it to SureSwift Capital in 2017. The price has never been published. The tempting explanations for a business this size growing are “he shipped more features” and “he found more customers,” and the numbers he left behind point at neither. Free trial signups stayed flat at roughly 30 a month, and he spent literally zero dollars on growth through 2013. What he did instead was take the monthly price from $5 to $20 inside four months. Signups kept climbing anyway.

Two years of numbers

He published live figures on a public Baremetrics dashboard at the time, with a caveat in the post that only about 70% of payments ran through Stripe, so real top line was 1.5 times what the dashboard showed. Few people who publish their numbers also publish which part of them is missing.

Four months, four times the price

On the original $5, he writes that it was “an arbitrary number that I picked initially reflecting how incredibly crappy the first version of Storemapper looked and felt.” Six months and change later, with the product improved, he raised new-customer pricing by 80% to $9. Month-over-month signup growth held, so three months after that he went to $20, a 300% increase across four months. His conclusion is “always test higher prices,” arrived at without any A/B machinery. He raised the price and watched.

Bluntly, his own summary should not be taken at face value here. What worked was not the act of raising prices but the correction of a price that had been wrong from the start. He says himself the $5 had no reasoning behind it. A store locator, once installed and loaded with addresses, has no reason to be removed for as long as the merchant stays in business. That matches his own line about “exceptionally low churn,” and $5 for a product like that is too cheap. What decided the outcome was where the product sat, not how brave the founder was.

The doubling after February 2014 looks less like the new features and more like the correction of an allocation he had never made. For the first eighteen months he ran Storemapper with a hard ceiling of 10 to 15 hours a month as his top metric, support email included.

Four clean misses, all on the record

The value of his write-up is that the failures survived in it.

He spent a full day building a referral program: unique links per user, social and email share buttons, cookie-based attribution, incentives escalating from one month free to three months free to a perpetual revenue share. The result, in his words: “total new signups through this channel to date: zero, zilch, nada, not a single click or share.” He adds that he has no idea why.

A performance-based deal with a growth marketer never reached the first milestone and dissolved after about four months. Twelve contractors hired on Odesk to find websites that needed a store locator cost about $100 before he shut the experiment down, and he blames the lack of a master list to work through rather than the idea. A partnership to take over product and marketing also came apart in four months. Equity would have stepped up to 66%, but scheduling and reaching agreement ate so much time that development slowed.

The three things that did work cost nothing. The “powered by Storemapper” link at the bottom of every locator sent thousands of click-throughs a month to the landing page. Follow-up interviews with trials that never converted showed people leaving because they assumed a feature was missing when it existed, so he embedded screencasts across the interface. And on a day in 2013 when he was nearly out of cash, he built an email in an hour offering $9-a-month customers an annual plan at $99. Eleven switched that day, ten more the next, and $2,000 landed in two days.

The top of the funnel never moved. Conversion and price did

By his own account, free trial signups were “relatively flat at around 30/month.” The top of the funnel did not move. Revenue still went from a few hundred dollars a month in spring 2013 to $54,000 ARR by August 2014. Between those two points sit two jobs only: lifting the share of trials that convert, and multiplying the price by four.

That structure is unusually reproducible for a one-person business with weak acquisition, because the top of the funnel depends on variables outside you while conversion and price are yours. It does need low churn to hold. His line about a customer staying “as long as they stay in business” is the foundation that let him raise prices without the base eroding.

Pricing cuts the other way in other businesses. SuperLemon, a two-person Shopify app, grew faster once it stopped raising prices and reached $25,000 MRR. BoltAI took a one-time license from $19 to $79 and recorded more money kept rather than more revenue. The same move lands on signups, retention or margin depending on the business.

The $40,000 he turned down in 2013

In August 2013 he put Storemapper up for sale once. A single email to his network and the NYC Ruby community brought nearly 50 replies, and the highest cash offer was twice annualized revenue of $20,000, so $40,000. He would have sold at around $80,000, and nothing closed.

Writing about the eventual sale four years later, he notes it was a “good thing too since the business grew by more than 20x in the next four years.” The 2017 price is not disclosed, described only as “a life-changing amount of money” for someone who grew up middle class in Florida. We have left the sale price out of this article’s data for that reason. The only figures available for comparison are the $40,000 offered in 2013 and the $80,000 he privately valued it at.

The sale went direct, with no broker. He met Kevin from SureSwift Capital at MicroConf in March 2017 and closed about five months later, keeping several buyer conversations moving in parallel. The structure was an asset purchase rather than a sale of the entity. The buyer wires funds to an escrow agent, the domain and servers change hands, the buyer confirms, and the escrow agent releases the money. His reason for skipping a broker is plain. A brokerage earns more by closing deals faster and more often, which makes it a poor agent for a seller who does not have to sell.

Exits in the same size band

Does a SaaS doing $50,000 a year find a buyer? Air HR closed a sale at $40,000 of annual revenue, almost exactly where Storemapper stood in 2014. From the buyer’s side, the Shopify apps of Plug in Useful went to the same SureSwift Capital. Across the three cases you can see the buyer archetype that formed in the late 2010s, a fund assembling micro-SaaS businesses in bulk.

His stated reasons for choosing SureSwift go past price. They raised a fund on the premise of repeat acquisitions, which makes reputational damage expensive for them, and he could call founders who had sold to them before. A one-time individual buyer offers no such guarantee.

An empty seat in the 2012 app store, and a price that never surfaces

This business started in the Shopify app store of 2012, a competitive environment that no longer exists. He spent an hour looking for an existing store locator, found nothing good, and built one. There is no guarantee the same hour of research in 2026 turns up an empty seat. The 10 to 15 hours a month also came at a cost, since batching support replies every few days lost him a few customers by his own account.

By the 2017 sale a small remote team ran daily operations, so the five years were not solo throughout. And with the price undisclosed, a reader never learns what those five years were finally worth. The only yardsticks left are the $40,000 he turned down in 2013 and his own statement that the business grew more than twentyfold afterward.

Related reading

• Air HR: even a $40K-a-year HR tool found a buyer
• Plug in Useful, a set of Shopify apps sold to SureSwift
• SuperLemon grew faster once it stopped raising prices