August wrap-up

My August goal was to focus on what pulls me forward. Specifically, my 2 projects:

• Outsprint design consultancy
• Plugins For Carrd

And indeed, looking back at my logs (below), I can say I’ve achieved that.

My consulting gig triggered a timely change, got me out of my funk. That’s the benefit of having diverse portfolio - sometimes you get stuck in your own head, and don’t know how to get out. But with some external accountability required for a consulting gig, I had to take baby steps out, and soon I felt better. All I really want now is to do well for my consulting gig, finish it up by end September, and then come back to indie hacking in Oct.

My Carrd plugins business continue to be driven by itself. And I enjoy answering questions, helping people with their Carrd issues, and from that, create more content, templates or plugins. It’s a virtuous loop that emerged on its own. Love it. It’s pulling me forward. I want to honour that and put in more of myself into it and see what happens.

For the rest of my products that’s not pulling me forward, I won’t abandon them just yet. I know they are going to need more time, more building, more marketing before it can stand on its own. It’s okay. I’m in for the long game now.

Thankful for a productive August pointing towards a new season of work.

Twitter stats - Aug vs Jul vs Jun

– Tweets: 1402 vs 1293 vs 1376
– Tweet impressions: 254k vs 183k vs 304k
– Likes: 3.1k vs 2.8k vs 3.2k
– Engagement rate: 4.2% vs 4.9% vs 4.4%
– Profile visits: 43.1k vs 38.2k vs 69.9k
– Mentions: 1726 vs 1441 vs 1537
– New followers: 254 vs 141 vs 217
– Link clicks: 361 vs 203 vs 528
– Retweets: 258 vs 249 vs 252
– Replies: 1.3k vs 1.1k vs 1.2k
– Followers: 4214
– Emails: 32 subscribers

What’s interesting:

• Overall I started to pick back up on tweeting and replying more because rest months were over, hence the main metrics expectedly went up slightly - impressions, likes, followers.
• Link clicks picked up a bit this month. I wonder if it’s due to sharing my writings from Lifelog?
• The top performing tweets were mostly questions. It’s a new format that I only recently started tweeting weekly in the past 2 months, and it’s definitely working. Also helps with engagement, building relationships. My top tweet which had 24.5k impressions, was a question:

Let’s settle the debate:

Many small bets, or one big bet?

What are the factors and context that helped you decide which to choose?

• Interesting observation: my other performant tweets were jokes/shitposts with over 10k impressions: 1, 2
• Updated my Twitter bio - think that boosted my follower count and email subscribers a bit! More importantly, it’s more congruent now.
• Passed 4k followers!

Other Aug metrics

– Revenue:

• Current MRR: US$109 (all from Lifelog)
• One-off revenue: ~US$345↑ (vs ~US$281 in Jul)
• Total revenue: ~US$454↑ (vs ~US$390 in Jul)
• Total profit (excl. salary): ~US$414↑ (vs ~US$350 in Jul)

– Costs:

• Heroku: $9/m (soon to increase by extra $14 in Nov with free tier stopping)
• Table2site: $8/m
• Carrd: $7.40/m (US$89/y)
• Domains: ~$16/m (~US$200/y)

– Lifelog

• No new features nor fixes.
• 1 subscriber paused, but another 1 activated, so it balanced out… thanks Reece!
• Got 2 new free trial sign-ups this month
• Started experiment (5 Jul) of adding atomic essay screenshots into my writing tweets where I share the link to a Lifelog post. New trials suggests it might be working!
• Got payout of $0.01 from Medium
• Received $10 one-time fee when customer cancelled after subscription charge kicked in (offered to refund via email but no reply)… thanks Rudi!
• Hit 600 days writing streak on Lifelog!
• Don’t think I’ll hit my goal of $200 MRR by end 2022.

– Plugins For Carrd

• Sold 14↑ plugins at US$230↓ revenue. Sold 4 mobile navbars, 2 mega navbar, 8 testimonial sliders. (In July, sold 8 plugins at US$265 revenue. Sold 6 mobile navbars, 1 mega navbar, 1 testimonial sliders)
• Made (not launched yet) a new Carrd template for auto playing Youtube videos with some code
• Bought pluginsforcarrd.com. Redirected it to plugins.carrd.co 😱 Crazy right? Who does that?! Nobody redirects the root domain you own to a subdomain you don’t own.
• Not gotten round to updating the files for mega navbar plugin
• Testimonial plugin desperately needs an update to prevent style bugs due to dictatorial Bootstrap stylesheet.
• Answered a few queries over email
• Sporadic marketing replies helping others on Reddit, Facebook groups, Telegram group
• Telegram Carrd group at 35 members

– Sheet2Bio

• Integrated Tailwind CSS into Sheet2Bio landing page. Having fun using Hyperui.dev for Tailwind components.

– Cohort-based writing course for introverts

• Put on hold to rest in June-July, and consulting gig in Aug-Sep.

– 5am creators

• 186↓ total members now (189 in Jul, 192 in Jun)
• Not re-started any tweeting or marketing for this group yet. Happy to let the daily engagement and organic chat continue for a bit.

– Keto List Singapore

• S$60↑ / ~US$43↑ banner ad revenue this month (Zero last month).
• This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site.

– Outsprint consultancy

• Continued with 1 post a day about design on LinkedIn (since Mar)
• Grew to 897↑ followers (from 856 in Jul). Passed lucky number 888 followers!
• Started on a S$30k consulting project with non-profit!
• Signed 3-year agreement for training workshops for nonprofit governance institute. 1-day and 2-day workshops for more regular income, with an interesting opportunity for travel. Interested to explore longer term collab due to mutual trust.

– Sweet Jam Sites

• Total refresh needed - website, pricing, marketing

– Tech for good

• Lost 1 monthly subscriber - understandable since I’m not doing much now in the tech for good space.
• 2 monthly coffees ($5.45 each) = $10.90↓
• Received a US$51.75↑ annual Buy Me A Coffee membership for my social impact work
• Got my first payment dispute from Stripe due to an annual membership (user probably forgot). Had to pay dispute fee of $15!

– Sleep goals

• Set 8h sleep goals, started going to bed at 8.30pm and getting more 90% scores, feel more rested
• Started using new nasal device Mute to help with snoring, to improve sleep

– Health

• Health had been baaaad in Jun and July. Lots of minor ailments every week. Definitely stress-related, because the ailments disappeared after I felt less stressed (cash runway extended by consulting gig helped).
• Back to daily morning walk and exercise again. Less shoulder/neck aches. Those push-ups work!

– Money

• Posted 1 resource on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group

Onwards to September!