August 2023 wrap-up
jasonleow • 30 Aug 2023 •
I started August feeling ready to get started on building and shipping. Something. Anything.
I guess that intention helped. I started working on my personal website + daily task logger. Bought a new domain keyboard.sg to experiment with. Started on an animated chart generator but got stuck.
Nothing launched. But at least I’m no longer at a standstill like I was in June and July.
Something I’m looking forward to: With my current consulting projects coming to a close by end August and new ones possibly in December, the next months are looking open with opportunity!
Onwards to September!
AUGUST 2023 METRICS
– Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $119 (•$0)
- One-off revenue: $1126 (↑$46)
- Total revenue: $1245 (↑$46) 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
- Total costs = $256
- Total profit: $989 (↓$40) (excl. consulting revenue)
- Profit margin: 79%
– Costs:
- Domains (25): $40/m
- Heroku: $7/m + $16/m = $23/m
- Carrd: $13/m ($159/y)
- Blogstatic: $1.60/m ($19/y)
- Twitter Blue: $8/m
- Sidebird: $7/m (US$84/y)
- Telegram: $4/m ($50/y)
- IFTTT: $2/m
- Table2site: $8/m
- Chatfuel: $15/m
- Reinvestments: $74.50 (ad sponsorships)
- Quantum Upgrade: $60/m
- Total revenue: $833.85
- Sold 9 (↓9) plugins at $266.85 (↓$123.90) revenue. Sold 3 mobile navbars, 2 testimonial sliders, 2 mega navbars, 1 listings with filters & search, 1 startup bundle.
- $567 (↓$121.80) in affiliate income from Carrd. Affiliate income = Referral ($492.30) and Seller ($74.70) program. Steady growth usually, but first dip in months.
- Sales was slow through the month.
- First time someone used the –$3 upgrade discount on Payhip!
- Updated social proof on home page - change main testimonial, added 2 more testimonials to testimonial tweets section.
- Wrote tutorials for logo carousel, carousel slider and background image sections plugins.
- Even though I made a decision to stop pushing for growth, I’ll continue to have at least 1 new plugin launch every month (as I’d done for many months) to keep some momentum going.
- Added custom plugin dev service to filter tags, moved up CTA banner so that not hidden too low in site. But still ZERO enquiries on custom plugin development $999 service, after 2 months. Time to shut it down?
- Officially launched typewriter text plugin on 22 channels, got 34 downloads so far! Pretty happy with the reception.
- Made zero new plugins this month, but made a nifty chart to show progress in 2023:
- Continued experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
- Continued with $19/m sponsorship ad on @markbowley’s deckof.carrd.co site.
- Continued with sponsored ad US$19/m on @markbowley’s Starrt.co.
- Continued with $10/m sponsored ad spot in Zite Design’s popular Carrd course page on Gumroad.
- Got new sponsorship at US$26.50 with Carrd influencer @lovjbini (11k following on Twitter, 20.7k Youtube subscribers). Got a mention and link in their Carrd, and a sponsored tweet.
- Google Ads account suspended for now as needed to verify business details.
- Created new marketing channels on YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads.
- finally set up an account on Google Search Console, added sitemap. No major errors to correct.
- Fixed bugs and issues:
- Fixed bug for background image sections plugin.
- Fixed bugs in video button plugin on prompting by potential customer - replaced demo Vimeo video with one that has sound, and replaced broken Facebook video link.
- Plan to use my $19/y blogstatic.io subscription – use it with a meta refresh of the blogpost URL with a query string, e.g. plugins.carrd.co/?post=my-blog-post.
- Telegram Carrd group at 84 (↑2) members.
- Substack subscribers at 76 (↑5). Published 1 Substack newsletter, to launch the typewriter text plugin.
– Outsprint design consultancy
- LinkedIn metrics: 1850 (↓4, ↓0.2%) followers, 13008 (↓0.3%) impressions + 265 (↑18.9%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 206 (↓74) profile views (based on past 90 days), 58 (↑18) search appearances.
- Decided on site refresh, using Carrd + plugins, but download files to host on Netlify.
- Coffee chat with Exec Dir of non-profit client I’ve been working with all this year. Post-mortem: Got new ideas and proposals to pitch for new work!
- Finishing up the last workshop for 2nd client team on the last day of Aug. Another invoice coming up!
- 1 new coaching project coming up with non-profit client in end-2023.
- Received S$9500 in bank account from client, 2 weeks after invoice sent.
- Really need new gigs. Cold outreached out to a contact in government to try my luck.
– Lifelog
- MRR stayed at $119/month (•$0).
- Zero new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month.
- Started manually sending pre-payment notice emails to customers to offer free trial extension for the undecided. The aim is to:
- remind customer to use app cos people forget
- offer goodwill cos nobody likes surprise charges
- opportunity to engage for feedback
- reduce potential cc disputes
- Happy with progress on this Side Project Weekend thing for Lifelog. Despite working on it only on weekends, I got way more done than any of my other projects! Wild!
- Deployed 5 big features this month, plus other smaller fixes:
- Added image upload functionality to rich text editor on compose page.
- Added download JSON as file feature on
/accountpage. Added loading modal for JSON download on/accountpage (as those with years of posts might need to wait a long time). - Added time hop feature on home page - “Last year today…”
- Added markdown rendering to announcement banner on home page, but Bulma keeps overriding my CSS to underline links! Found a workaround by adding inline styles directly on my Google Sheet which update directly on announcement banner , e.g. to underline use
- Added a way to download an archive of all your posts, via Google Sheets! Approach:
- click a link of existing Google Sheet document (with embedded script in Apps Script) to make a force copy it to user’s Google Drive
- copy and paste a import JSON formula into cell of Sheet
- all posts load into Sheet
- Added several fixes to UX and functionality for recent text editors:
- Added copy paste online image feature to rich text editor.
- Added auth to image upload option to prevent non-authenticated users from uploading images.
- Moved close button of image upload modal at top-right corner of modal, and added close modal clickability to modal background.
- Fixed minor issues of mobile responsiveness for
/composeand/writepage. - Fixed bug where toggle state is messed up if one accesses /write or /compose URLs directly.
- Moved close button of welcome modal at topright of screen to topright of content box on compose page.
- Removed expiration=600 param in imgbb api endpoint url as causing images to expire.
- Fixed bug when md editor inserts
instead of the placeholder url.
- Fixed bug where hover on the light bulb tag isn’t refreshing the writing prompt on both
/composeand/writepages. - Fixed time hop bug where no post displayed due to ISO date format of post saved in database.
- Updated postgres version on Snapshooter as that’s causing the backup errors.
- Fixed issues with Heroku login in Git… thanks to ChatGPT!
- Lifelog chat group at 26 (↑1) members.
- Cohort-based writing course for introverts – Planned for 2023 as a top of funnel, lead generating FREE product for Lifelog. Could be an automated email drip campaign/ course on Convertkit, or a Gumroad standalone product. Subsuming this under Lifelog now.
- Inspired by Twitter account @PoemHeaven’s approach to Twitter. 3.6M followers just posting poems, writings, quotes from other people. Crazy! Could I borrow something from this for Lifelog’s Twitter account? 🤔
– Indie solopreneur build in public journey
- Sixth month in a row where my revenue is above $1k (at $1245)! 🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞 But revenue from products were below $1k actually, just that the number got propped up by winning a random giveaway.
- Won a random US$292 giveaway from helping with a product name crowdsource by @Timb03! But also got my first impersonator on twitter due to that – fun times.
- Hit 1700 day streak on Makerlog! Probably the last time I’ll talk about my Makerlog streak as the streak is going to be deprecated
- Finally moved passed months of hacker’s block. Eased back to exploration mode this month, started making stuff too even though nothing launched.
- Started working on jasonleow.com, my personal website & task log!. This will be the single source of truth for my indie journey once launched.
- Researching and playing with tech to build an animated chart gif generator product. Placeholder name “ChartPics”, and started a project page on Makerlog. Took days to squeeze blood from rocks to get a wonky gif render. More research on screen recording API - something that can convert html/canvas to mp4.
- Twitter stats for Aug vs Jul:
- Followers: 8131 vs 7317 (↑814)
- Emails: 309 vs 308 (↑1) subscriber
- Tweet impressions: 655k vs 1.84M
- Profile visits: ??? vs 26.6k
- Mentions: ??? vs 870
- Engagement rate: 2.1% vs 1.6%
- Link clicks: 596 vs 995
- RTs: 190 vs 992
- Likes: 3.4k vs 7.8k
- Replies: 1.0k vs 1.2k
- Impressions are back to a more normal level after the fluke viral tweet last month. Less RTs this month, which makes sense as I didn’t share as much long posts but was making jokes more. But had double the number of new followers! How did that happen? I suspect the algo is optimizing for follower growth than engagement.
- Sidebird stopped working suddenly. Founder disappeared. No longer able to auto-RTs/auto-unRTs tweets. I had to manually RT now. Not cool. 😡
- Wrote about the latest Twitter / X algorithm updates.
- Reviewed finances to calculate runway. Not in the clear yet! 😅
- Practised some gratitude through this question: “Remember when you wanted what you currently have?”, and reminded myself to ship calmly.
- Experiment: Subscribed to US$60/m Quantum Upgrade (quantumupgrade.io) to support business, home and myself.
- 309 (↑9) subscribers on my weekly Substack newsletter.
- To be pivoted to something else entirely (a chart2site to show revenue and charts?), perhaps for B2B, and create an onboarding flow where they can be like Carrd where user can set up a Sheet2Bio site immediately and play around with the Google Sheets. Payment can be prompted later.
- Maybe this could be pivoted to my new idea ChartPics. Google Sheets data → animated chart → gif showing animated chart and data visualization.
– 5am creators club Telegram chat group
- 133 (↓1) total members for Aug. Churn stabilising.
- Low engagement continued. Just 2 of us posting our wake times. To get more people posting their wake times, considering a social challenge like 5for5 (5am for 5 weeks) or use ChatGPT to make a Telegram bot to track our sleep stats/streaks. Of course, there’s many sleep tracking apps already, but few are anchored to a community.
- Planning to make a dedicated micro web app for sleep cycle calculator for myself and the community.
- An info product for sleep could be another top-of-funnel resource for the community.
- Zero ad revenue (•$0) this month.
- Keto chat group at 122 (↑1) members.
- This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site. Considering using Spreadsimple/Softr + Carrd for it, or create my own listings diretory HTML boilerplate for all such kinds of projects.
- Considering using ChatGPT for content generation like blog posts, Facebook posts…1
- Single item ecomm store upcoming.
- Might use Payhip as payment processor for ecomm physical goods.
- Marketing channels to be SEO/organic search, ads and word of mouth (locally amongst career coaches).
- New idea: Build this digital card sort site for career conversation cards, like Frog’s Cards for Humanity!
- Inclusive Design SG directory still in progress.
- Snapped up keyboard.sg domain as a domaining investment because previous owner lapsed on it. Was thinking something about mechanical keyboards, or an affiliate site.
– Sleep biohacking
- Slowly getting back to sleep routine - 9.30pm bedtime, and no phones before bed.
- But sleep score’s off for sure. Many night I had almost 8h sleep, sleep chart shows much deep sleep, wake up feeling fine, but yet only 58%?! App is wonky.
- Reflected on how sleeping well is easy if it’s prioritised.
– Health
- Re-started on snack/no dinners, and cutting away more carbs.
- Fell sick this month, re-learned that my body is the harshest teacher, and how the body teaches rest.
- Experiment: Subscribed to Quantum Upgrade (quantumupgrade.io) US$60/m to support business, home and myself.
– Money
- Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!