$74,223 Revenue in May 2025 Despite SEO Dip and Google Ads Troubles

Quick reminder if you’re new here: I’m Bo, and I’m building SavvyNomad, a SaaS tax-tech startup helping Americans who live abroad reduce their U.S. taxes through domicile service in states with no income tax.

May was surprisingly even slightly better in terms of revenue than April. I expected lower results because April benefited significantly from the tax filing deadline, driving an all-time high in organic traffic and demand.

Instead, we managed to add almost the same number of new customers as in previous months. Revenue increased mainly because more subscribers opted for our new premium-priced plan, boosting our average revenue per user (ARPU).

However, not everything went smoothly this month. While we are still riding the residual wave of tax season interest, we saw a significant drop in organic traffic in May. Additionally, we faced nearly two weeks of subscription and marketing attribution issues. Although we managed to fix these issues, we lost some valuable data during this period.

In addition, we also received a substantial amount of low-quality traffic from the Philippines and Indonesia due to a Google Ads bug, which inflates some of our non-revenue metrics.

On a brighter note, May marked the launch of our first YouTube video, and we plan to continue pushing into this promising new channel.

Here’s the detailed breakdown:

Key metrics

We made progress across most metrics this month, but our website visits and conversion rates were inflated due to low-quality traffic from a Google Ads bug. I’ll provide more context about this in the Google Ads section below.

Additionally, our churn rate has slightly increased. I’ve started thinking about how we can tackle this issue—I’ll share more about these ideas in the Plans for June chapter.