July wrap-up

July went by in a blink. Many days, just making it through the day felt like the most productive thing I could do. It was hard getting motivated to do anything. Most days, I scraped by.

I planned to build fun and creative projects to kickstart my momentum in July. But looks like I still needed more rest, so my break continued. And I did the bare minimum.

But the nice thing about doing monthly recaps is that I often realised I did more than I assumed.

Lots are happening for my design consultancy business Outsprint. New opportunities coming my way. Emails, phone calls, coffees, meetings. I attribute a substantial part of this to my content distribution on LinkedIn. It definitely is bringing me more visibility. If anything, it’s a reminder that I exist, and people who might have thought about working with me are getting reminded. It’s also timely that many of my clients (governments and nonprofits) are slowly emerging out of crisis mode and starting to re-think about improvement and innovation. Grateful for this business in my portfolio of businesses, that it’s still the sole breadwinner after all these years.

Plugins For Carrd continue to do well on it’s own momentum. Getting more enquiries, interest and feature suggestions. It sells. It continues to give me energy working on it.

These 2 products are pulling me forward, while for the rest, I find I’m having to push hard on them, without much progress. These are the signals from reality. Am I listening? Or am I still trying to bang my head on a brick wall chasing what I thought I wanted?

Much to ponder over.

Twitter stats - Jul vs Jun

– Tweets: 1293 vs 1376
– Tweet impressions: 183k vs 304k
– Likes: 2.8k vs 3.2k
– Engagement rate: 4.9% vs 4.4%
– Profile visits: 38.2k vs 69.9k
– Mentions: 1441 vs 1537
– New followers: 141 vs 217
– Link clicks: 203 vs 528
– Retweets: 249 vs 252
– Replies: 1.1k vs 1.2k

What’s interesting:

• Overall I tweeted and replied less because I was resting in July, hence the main metrics expectedly went down - impressions, likes, followers.
• Engagement rate climbed even higher to 4.9%! And my most engaged tweet was 16.5%! My engagement rate had been climbing over the months recently. I have less building in public tweets this month, but I started tweeting question tweets, which don’t get much likes but disproportionately more replies. I think that’s the main driver of the higher engagement.
• Link clicks fell waaay down this month. Is this due to the summer lull?
• I started batch writing my tweets and not overthinking or over-editing it from early June onwards. I wrote last month that I expected stats across the board to drop somewhat in the coming months, and it did. Not sure if it’s due to this or the summer 🤔
• Also started replying to mentions via Zlappo in the past week, as an experiment to not have to go active on Twitter itself. Let’s see if this affects any metrics.
• Also started engaging with new accounts - If someone RTs/QTs my tweet, go to his/her profile and like/reply. Make friends.
• Interesting observation: my best tweet this month had a typo/math error in it. I guess the cognitive dissonance of it makes people engage with it more?

Other Jul metrics

– Revenue:

• Current MRR: US$109 (all from Lifelog)
• One-off revenue: ~US$281
• Total revenue: ~US$390
• Total profit (excl. salary): ~US$350

– Costs:

• Heroku: $9/m
• Table2site: $8/m
• Carrd: $7.40/m (US$89/y)
• Domains: ~$16/m (~US$200/y)

– Lifelog

• No new features nor fixes.
• One subscriber cancelled to manage finances, but another reactivated, so it balanced out
• Got 4 new free trial sign-ups this month, after 1-2 months of drought!
• Started experiment (5 Jul) of adding atomic essay screenshots into my writing tweets where I share the link to a Lifelog post. I think this might be the reason why my trial sign-ups increased.
• Got payout of $0.13 from Medium
• Don’t think I’ll hit my goal of $200 MRR by end 2022.

– Plugins For Carrd

• Sold 8 plugins at US$265 revenue. Sold 6 mobile navbars, 1 mega navbar, 1 testimonial sliders.
• Made (not launched yet) a new plugin called simple accordion
• Updated carouselslider plugin on inspiration of a question asked on Carrd FB group - images can click through via a link
• Updated mega navbar plugin to highlight active menu item when clicked, due to email enquiry
• Testimonial plugin needs an update to prevent style bugs
• User asked if the filter tags in listings plugin can work together as AND instead of OR right now. Yet another enquiry turning into a feature idea! This adds on to the new idea for v2 of listings with filters & search plugin - to link the JSON data to Google Sheets, because people keep asking if it can handle large numbers of items.
• NEW: Started work on plugins spin-off Plugins For Webflow!
  Plugins For Webflow. All thanks to this random conversation on Twitter!
• Sporadic marketing posts on Reddit, Facebook groups, Telegram group

– Sheet2Bio

• ENTIRE PLATFORM CRASHED - Had to update Google Scripts web app URL for all 26 users. But nobody noticed. I guess it’s a good thing.
• Posted Sheet2Bio on micro-SaaS directory site MicroStartups.co

– Cohort-based writing course for introverts

• Put on hold to rest in June-July.

– 5am creators

• 189 (from 192 in Jun) total members now
• Daily engagement and chatting is back!
• I tweeted my wake time just once this month because I hot 93% sleep score, and got 6 new members from it. Proof that tweeting works.

– Keto List Singapore

• Reshared some posts on Facebook… slooowly reviving social media
• No ad revenue this month.
• 2 customers emailed me to buy ads, but I didn’t reply. Why?! It’s free money!
• This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site.

– Outsprint consultancy

• Continued with daily posts about design on LinkedIn (since Mar)
• Switched from Hootsuite to Publer.io for writing and scheduling 1 week’s worth of LinkedIn posts
• Grew to 856 followers (from 811 in Jun)
• Got 1 warm lead this month via LinkedIn. Confirmed with nonprofit institute for adjunct opportunities for consulting and training at $2k+ per workshop.
• Confirmed new $30k consulting project with nonprofit , to start in Aug!
• Gave a nocode presentation in person to nonprofits! This might be spinning off to another new offering - nocode training workshops for social good. First, to prototype it through a free class.

– Sweet Jam Sites

• Total refresh needed - website, pricing, marketing

– Tech for good

• 3 monthly coffees ($5.45 each) = $16.35
• Had to say no to continuing with community project KidsPlaySafer as it was dragging on.

– Sleep goals

• Sleep getting better in last week of July… more 80%s scores.
• Did a sleep audit
• Bought a new nasal device to help with snoring, to improve sleep

– Health

• Health had been baaaad. Lots of minor ailments every week. Might be stress-related. Started to track them:
  • 6 Jul - bad stomach pain
  • 10 Jul - flu
  • 13 Jul - strained lower back from carrying kid
  • 18 Jul - strained left achilles tendon
  • 23 Jul - right knee pain
  • 27 Jul - strained left achilles tendon
• after my spate of injuries, slowly getting back to exercise again.

– Money

• Posted a few resources on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group
• Wrote about how inflation is 19% not 9% and how to prepare

Onwards to August!