January wrap-up
jasonleow • 31 Jan 2023 •
The first month of 2023 has passed.
In the flurry of year-end reviews and new year intentions-setting, I realised I forgot to write my intentions for Jan haha.
January had been a good month. Good because I survived yet again. Scoring a substantial consulting gig laid much financial anxiety to rest. All I need to do is to score another one and I’ll be truly safe for the year (after which thriving can start).
Now that all the major festivities (Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year) are over, it feels like I can finally get back into the flow again.
Overall, a promising January. Onwards to a prosperous 2023!
Jan metrics
– Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (•$0)
- One-off revenue: $816 (↑$72)
- Total revenue: $925 (↑$72)
- Total costs = $216
- Total profit: $709 (↓$68) (excl. salary, consulting)
- Profit margin: 76%
– Costs:
- Heroku: $9/m + $14/m = $23/m
- Table2site: $8/m
- IFTTT: $1.99/m
- Carrd: $13.25/m ($159/y)
- Domains (23): $30/m ($350/y) + $70 in new domains
- Reinvestments: $70 (ad sponsorships)
- Sold 26 (↑1) plugins at $525 (↑$117.70) revenue. Sold 12 mobile navbars, 5 mega navbars, 5 testimonial sliders, 4 listings with filters & search plugins.
- $237.60 (↓$83.10) in affiliate income from Carrd in Jan. Affiliate income = Referral and Seller program. This is becoming pretty significant! Adding this to the total revenue numbers.
- Made 1 new plugin!
- Updated confetti plugin to work with a native Carrd button, on request of user over DM. Also added star burst confetti.
- Started a Twitter List of Carrd heads to track my own list of Carrd peers.
- Early experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
- Paid for my first $20 sponsorship ad in Jannis’ Tools For Creators website (toolsforcreators.co). Ad went live on 17 Jan.
- Signed up to be on @markbowley’s waitlist for $19/m sponsorship ad on deckof.carrd.co (400+ visits/mth)
- Bought my 2nd sponsorshop ad - a US$50 one-time sponsorship slot on @ayushtweetshere’s Superframeworks newsletter/blog article!
- Bought and redirected 8 new domains via Namecheap (US$61.10) for potential passive referral traffic via redirects (e.g. pluginsforcaard.com, pluginsforcardd.com, pluginsforcarrdd.com)
- Started answering Carrd questions on Twitter using my @pluginsforcarrd account - expanding distribution even more!
- Telegram Carrd group at 55 (↑7) members in Jan. Carrd’s co-founder Doni Ronquillo even joined us! Somewhat star-struck. 🤩
- Revue had shut down, email newsletter now moved to Substack completely – pluginsforcarrd.substack.com. Trying to find a way to integrate Substack with Carrd (as Substack has no API)!
– Outsprint design consultancy
- Signed $52k (+ additional $20k of optional work items) purchase order for consulting gig with non-profit for whole of 2023 - I survived!
- LinkedIn metrics: 1037 (↑25) followers, 13680 (↓32.5%) impressions + 225 (↓43.1%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 305 (↓8) profile views (based on past 90 days), 39 (↓34) search appearances. Most metrics are down from last month. Could it be due to New Year and Chinese New Year festivities and vacation?
- Couldn’t engage as much via replies this month.
- Continued to curate my feed for more focus on design and Singaporeans.
- Completed main design workshop of freelance gov gig - $15200 for 9 days worth of facilitation, ideation and prototyping work for service design for local public service centres.
- Awaiting tender results of a $64k tender bid for a potential project with a government Ministry. 🤞
– Lifelog
- MRR stagnant at $109/month.
- Got 2 new Lifelog trial sign-ups, 2 of whom cancelled weeks later. Zero net increase for paid users.
- Deployed markdown preview feature! Finally… after more a year without new features (since 21 Nov 2021)!!
- Wrote accountability confession to Lifeloggers about how I’m not proud I’ve not deployed new features for more than 1 year.
- Fixed bugs in markdown preview.
- Work-in-progress for the rich text editor - got italics, strikethrough, Header 3, block quote, insert link buttons working. Next, making the rich text editor a tooltip.
- Lifelog chat group at 26 (•0) members.
- Completed setting intentions for 2023, thinking of my word for the year, the 8 forms of capital I would like to build this year, and open questions I have for 2023.
– Indie solopreneur build in public journey
- Started a new project on Makerlog to document my audience-building efforts on Twitter and Substack. I think it’s time this is considered a project on it’s own.
- Twitter stats - Jan vs Dec
- Tweets: 826 vs 1135
- Tweet impressions: 334k vs 347k
- Likes: 3.2k vs 3.0 k
- Engagement rate: 2.9% vs 3.2%
- Profile visits: 12k vs 48.3k
- Mentions: 1106 vs 1780
- New followers: 311 vs 340
- Link clicks: 185 vs 145
- Retweets: 164 vs 169
- Replies: 1.2k vs 1.1k
- Followers: 5807
- Emails: 92 (↑13) subscribers
- Listed out ideas for reinvesting revenue back into products to grow them.
- Continued publishing weekly newsletters on Saturday.
- Hit 1500 day streak on Makerlog! 🔥
- Zero sales/enquiries in Jan.
- Next steps: Either pivot Sheet2Bio to something else entirely, or create an onboarding flow where they can
pay immediately and then get updated over email laterset up a Sheet2Bio site immediately and play around with the Google Sheets. Payment can be prompted later.
– 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 , or a Gumroad standalone product.
– 5am creators club Telegram chat group
- 164 (↓3) total members for Jan.
- Low engagement, just 2-3 of us posting our wake times. Unsure how to revive it…
- Planning to make a dedicated micro web app for sleep cycle calculator for myself and the community.
- Zero ad revenue (•$0) this month.
- Keto chat group at 118 (↓4) members.
- Received 3 coffees (US$15.76) on Buy Me A Coffee from a supporter of Keto List.
- This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site.
- Finally bought careerconversationcards.com domain for this project - single item ecomm store coming!
- Wrote about the back story, business model and tech stack of my new old side project: careerconversationcards.com.
- Marketing channels to be SEO/organic search, ads and word of mouth (locally).
- A small bet that didn’t work out. Lost the JAMstack sparkle. All work stopped.
- Decided to not close it down (yet) but will be on hiatus indefinitely.
- 2 monthly subscription coffees and 5 one-off coffees ($5.45 each) = $38.15
- Going to offer the option to followers to cancel their subscription since I’m not doing much social impact projects now.
- But still passionate about social impact indie hacking and looking for a good project to do for 2023!
– Sleep biohacking
- Switched my sleep to sleeping enough sleep cycles and waking upon 5 sleep cycles instead of waking up at same time every day.
- Wrote about my latest sleep stack that’s consistently giving 80%s sleep scores! Feel much more rested now.
- Considering making a dedicated micro web app for sleep cycle calculator for myself and the community.
– Health
- With better regular sleep, less stress and more exercise, chronic health ailments are gone.
– Money
- Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!