June 2023 wrap-up
jasonleow • 30 Jun 2023 •
At the start of my birthday month, I talked about how I missed that calm and centered self-assuredness, how I want to come back to myself. No more feeling disembodied. Back to mindful presence. Mind and body aligned. To truly live, and to celebrate this gift of yet another year of being alive and well.
I had a super busy month juggling consulting and indie hacking, but I think I lived out the month aligned to those broad intentions.
I felt more centered for sure. None of the anxiety and stress that plagued me for the past few months. It’s wild that it could be all due to a chemical imbalance!! Sometimes I don’t want to believe it’s just so simple, but more and more I’m convinced it is, and could be the hidden cause of all my past depressive episodes. It could all just be conjecture, but it feels relieving to know. That all along maybe my mind’s not as broken as I thought.
If anything, the possibility offered through that realisation is probably the best birthday gift I could get.
Onwards to July!
Jun metrics
– Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $119 (↑$10)
- One-off revenue: $928 (↓$46)
- Total revenue: $1047 (↓$36) 🎉🎉🎉🎉
- Total costs = $170
- Total profit: $877 (↓$16) (excl. consulting revenue)
- Profit margin: 84%
– 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)
- Sold 17 (↑2) plugins at $425.55 (↑$14.70) revenue. Sold 6 mobile navbars, 3 testimonial sliders, 5 mega navbars, 2 listings with filters & search plugin, 1 startup bundle.
- $502.80 $563.70 (↓$60.90) in affiliate income from Carrd in Jun. Affiliate income = Referral and Seller program. Slow and steady growth.
- Prelaunch experiment: Added banner for custom plugin development service. $999 for simple plugins.
- Got from my first ever PPP purchase from Argentina, via Gumroad! Customer paid $12 for a $30 plugin.
- Officially launched text popup modal and randomizer plugins.
- Made 2 new plugins:
- Made a paid randomizer plugin – randomizerplugin.carrd.co. Enhanced it to work in pure Javascript only (no Vue.js), and to work across 2 separate Embeds (for holding more data in listing array)
- Made a free copy button plugin – copybutton.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).
- Subscribed to 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.
- Discontinued with the $20 sponsorship ad in Jannis’ Tools For Creators website (toolsforcreators.co) as Jannis shut it down.
- So far no sales via Gumroad Discover at 50% commission (+20% more of the minimum 30%). Even treating it as paying for ads on Gumroad didn’t work.
- Affiliate revenue experiment: Joined and added Senja affiliate link to the free Carrd plugin landing page testimonialtweets.carrd.co
- Created accounts in and started on more distribution channels - Tumblr, Instagram and Tiktok. Officially in 12 different channels now!
- Created Google Ads account and campaign, and had some drama around suspension!
- Updates and bug fixes:
- Fixed emoji img src bug on plugemoji.com - How do I leverage this site for some traffic?
- Found a use for my $19/y blogstatic.io subscription – realised it can work with a meta refresh of the blogpost URL with a query string, e.g. plugins.carrd.co/?post=my-blog-post.
- Tested Dropinblog (dropinblog.com) for Carrd - love that it can now create a blog post that’s on a subdirectory path! Great for SEO. But pricing is $39/m - pricey. Example: https://writingemoji.com/#blog
- Telegram Carrd group at 81 (↑2) members.
- Substack subscribers at 63 (↑7). Published 2 Substack newsletters, to launch the text popup modal and randomizer plugin – open rate was 69%/90 views and 64%/82 views respectively.
– Outsprint design consultancy
- LinkedIn metrics: 1849 1831 (↑18, ↑1.2%) followers, 22398 (↓13.7%) impressions + 323 (↓8%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 379 (↓762) profile views (based on past 90 days), 94 (↑13) search appearances.
- Need a site refresh! Carrd + plugins? Or HTML website with Tailwind?
- Finishing up on 2 coaching projects for non-profit client. Ran workshops 2-3 times per week all of June! Tiring. But the good news? Payment upon completion!
- New 1 coaching project coming up with non-profit client in July/Aug. I think my whole 2023 will be about working with this one non-profit client, and I love it!
- Dropped opportunities to be design facilitator for Design Singapore Council’s School Of X programme in Oct as schedule clashed, and wasn’t selected for Aug run.
– Lifelog
- MRR up by $10 at $119/month (↑$10)… thanks Dawn!
- Got 0 new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month.
- Refunded $10 payment since customer never wrote a word on Lifelog.
- Hit 888 and 900 day streak of daily writing on Lifelog!
- Did a recap of Side Project Weekend, and concluded: More can be done, better features can be built, but maintaining the momentum is key at this stage.
- Deployed many new features this month:
- Created and sent out a Google Form to onboard users for daily email reminders to write on Lifelog, but no takers.
- Used randomizer Carrd plugin to make a What To Write writing prompts SEO side project for Lifelog. Two birds!
- Made a screenshot feature using html2canvas.js (but it can’t capture externally loaded images yet)
- Added auto-scroll down 30px when line break created in textarea, to keep typing input at vertical center of screen. Then removed it next week because bad UX idea. It was super distracting to have the screen shift up everytime I hit enter.
- Fixed bug where window jumped to caret at bottom when typing in autoresizing textarea.
- Fixed position of snackbar editor blocking typing input of textarea (by shifting to left)
- Improved performance of typing sounds. There sound be less of a lag now.
- Fixed emoji img src bug on writingemoji.com
- Lifelog chat group at 25 (↓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
- Fourth month in a row where my revenue is above $1k (at $1047)! 🤞🤞🤞🤞
- There’s gaps in twitter analytics as Twitter is remaking its analytics engine. The stats for Jun vs May:
- Tweet impressions: 847.5k vs 982k
- Followers: 7317 vs 7066 (↑251)
- Emails: 278 216 (↑62) subscribers
- Engagement rate: 2.1%
- Link clicks: 503
- RTs: 184
- Likes: 3.2k
- Replies: 1.2k
- Since subscribing to Twitter Blue on Apr 1st (getting verified till Apr 6th), tweet impressions seems to be up, though that didn’t translate to a similar increase in new followers (compared to last 3 months).
- Had a new idea for a web archive as a service, but the tweet didn’t get much interest, so I dropped it.
- Switched on auto-RTs and auto-unRTs for Sidebird even for tweets published on Twitter desktop, so that my long form tweets still get autoRTed.
- Continued publishing weekly Substack newsletters on Saturday. Had a bump this month in new subscribers, not sure why!
- Acted on new custom Carrd plugin development idea to earn an extra $1000 per month.
- Did a Twitter Space with Christin Chong about indie hacking and spirituality - was a fun sidebar adventure on Twitter!
- 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.
– 5am creators club Telegram chat group
- 139 (•0) total members for June. Got a few new members from sharing it on Twitter.
- 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 (↓1) members.
- This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site. Consider using Spreadsimple + Carrd for it?
- 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
- Decided on a sleep makeover at the start of Jun. Sleep’s now getting better, because I fixed my magnesium deficiency. Now feel more motivated to keep to my 9:20pm bedtime.
– Health
- Seems to have dialled in on daily exercise habit.
– Money
- Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!