July 2023 wrap-up
jasonleow • 31 Jul 2023 •
To overcome my chronic overthinking, I started July with the intention to say “F**k it I’m doing it” at least once a week. I think myself out of a business, basically. Instead I wanted to be hungrier, on an instinctual level.
Ship more, think less.
But I got way ahead of myself. I had hacker’s block. I needed to get out of exploitation mode and back into exploration mode first, before I can ship fast.
Which was what I did.
I explored ideas, browsed idea newsletters, bookmarked articles. Now I got a few nice ones I want to bite into.
Maybe that intention for July was really meant for August. Glad I went with what I needed intuitively rather than forcing myself into something I wasn’t ready for.
Onwards to August!
JULY 2023 METRICS
– Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $119 (•$0)
- One-off revenue: $1080 (↑$152)
- Total revenue: $1199 (↑$152) 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
- Total costs = $170
- Total profit: $1029 (↑$152) (excl. consulting revenue)
- Profit margin: 86%
– 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: $48 (ad sponsorships)
- Total revenue: $1079.55
- Sold 18 (↑1) plugins at $390.75 (↓$34.80) revenue. Sold 4 mobile navbars, 5 testimonial sliders, 7 mega navbars, 1 dark mode pro, 1 video button plugin.
- $688.80 (↑$186) in affiliate income from Carrd in Jul. Affiliate income = Referral ($615.90) and Seller ($72.90) program. Slow and steady growth.
- Sales was slow in early July, but seems to have picked up in 2nd half.
- Big decision to stop pushing for growth for this project due to market realities sinking in. I’ll still be actively contributing and doing customer support. Just spending less time building new plugins and pushing growth.
- Sold my very first dark mode pro plugin! Looks like it’s not as in demand as I thought.
- No enquiries on custom plugin development $999 service, after 1 month. Might confirm the finding that people on Carrd are price sensitive and don’t usually buy such services. Unsure about future demand.
- Officially launched logo carousel plugin.
- Made only 1 new plugin this month:
- Made a free typewriter text plugin – typewritertext.carrd.co
- Continued experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
- Continued with $19/m sponsorship ad on @markbowley’s deckof.carrd.co site (400+ visits/mth, top Reddit post in r/Carrd subreddit group).
- 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. So far this is giving the most hits. Nothing like qualified warm leads from a relevant site.
- Google Ads account suspended for now as needed to verify business details.
- Conversion experiment: Added customer sites (that use said plugin) to mega navbar plugin landing page for more social proof.
- 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 82 (↑1) members.
- Substack subscribers at 71 (↑8). Published 1 Substack newsletter, to launch the logo carousel plugin.
– Outsprint design consultancy
- LinkedIn metrics: 1854 (↑5, ↑0.2%) followers, 12870 (↓44%) impressions + 205 (↓33.3%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 280 (↓99) profile views (based on past 90 days), 40 (↓54) search appearances.
- Decided on site refresh, using Carrd + plugins, but download files to host on Netlify.
- Completed 1 coaching project (with good >8 NPS scores), in the final round for another for a non-profit client. Sending a $9500 invoice was nice!
- 1 new coaching project coming up with non-profit client in Q3.
- Attended STACKx, a data & AI conference by Govtech, and super inspired about the Singapore government’s efforts in data and AI!
- Started an informal mentoring thing with a LinkedIn acquaintance. Not sure how it’ll pan out but something new to try out.
- Random aside: Shared about my work with designers/innovators at Dell Computer.
– Lifelog
- MRR stayed at $119/month (•$0).
- Got 3 new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month, and one pair is a father-daugther duo! Thanks Schalk and Jade!
- Happy with progress on this Side Project Weekend thing for Lifelog. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s funny how constraining myself to only work on it on weekends actually make me want to jump out of bed for it!
- Deployed 3 important features this month, plus other smaller features/fixes:
- Shipped rich text editor with typing sounds! FINALLY. The feature was requested by @therealbrandonwilson in Jan 2021, so this took a while, but feels great to finally deliver it.
- Added toggle switch for rich text editor and saving preference for markdown vs rich text editor.
- Added image upload feature (using ImgBB API) to markdown editor.
- Removed images in screenshot as a temporary measure since html2canvas can’t render external images. Also changed screenshot file name to mirror the post title, to reduce friction naming files.
- Experimenting with countdown timer on
/writepage. - Deployed new section about free writing tools in right sidebar of home page.
- 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.
– Indie solopreneur build in public journey
- Fifth month in a row where my revenue is above $1k (at $. )! 🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞
- Been having hacker’s block for some months but figured out why, because was in exploitation mode for so long. Working on easing back to exploration mode!
- Plans in place to build an animated chart gif generator product. Placeholder name “ChartPix”.
- First time ever my tweet got 1M impressions! Looks like commentary about social class/stratification gets engagement? Wrote a post-mortem here.
- The stats for Jul vs Jun:
- Followers: 7317 vs 7789 (↑472)
- Emails: 308 vs 278 (↑30) subscribers
- Tweet impressions: 1.84M vs 924k
- Profile visits: 26.6k vs 27k
- Mentions: 870 vs 1138
- Engagement rate: 1.6% vs 2.1%
- Link clicks: 995 vs 503
- RTs: 992 vs 184
- Likes: 7.8k vs 3.2k
- Replies: 1.2k vs 1.2k
- Tweeted less this month as went back to one tweet a day: 602 in Jul vs 905 in Jun, and 1k+ tweets/month usually in the past. But impressions was still doing well.
- Did a quick review of being on Twitter Blue:
- engagement definitely picked up after Blue
- most of viral tweets were long form tweets
- shared more raw & real stories, which I suspect lent itself to long form format
- used For You and Discover feeds more for serendipity
- continued building in public, so no huge difference in approach
I think it works for engagement/impressions but not same rate of increase in followers. So my working hypothesis why it worked: Having Blue helped but not due to the small boost but the long form tweet format which worked well for my ‘style’. Plus some blind luck on how it got RTed by big accounts (which I have no control). Will continue to observe if the uptrend is consistent.
- Switched on Sidebird auto-RTs/auto-unRTs for tweets published on Twitter itself. Now even my long form tweets get autoRTed, which is a great convenience! Before this I had to manually RT. Also super helpful when I’m out and tweeting from mobile (instead of from Sidebird).
- Twitter rebranded to 𝕏… sigh. End of an era.
- Upated Stripe payouts on all my products to monthly for better accounting.
- Passed 300 subscribers on my weekly Substack newsletters!
- 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 ChartPix. Google Sheets data → animated chart → gif showing animated chart and data visualization.
– 5am creators club Telegram chat group
- 134 (↓5) total members for July.
- Low engagement continued. Just 2-3 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 121 (•0) members.
- Updated listings, removed broken links.
- 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.
- 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).
- Inclusive Design SG directory still in progress.
– Sleep biohacking
- Sleep routine’s still not back. Need to get back to 9.30pm bedtime, and no phones before bed!
– Health
- Consulting season always means my health and diet routines are less than optimal. Now with some slack in between projects, will re-start intermittent fasting in the morning, and snack/no dinners.
– Money
- Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!