March wrap-up
jasonleow • 31 Mar 2023 •
The nice momentum in February for building didn’t last through March. Fact is, I got busy with consulting and coaching. Public speaking always takes a lot out of me, so with that meant I had limited energy for indie hacking.
All good though. The consulting was necessary. Funds are running low again and that helped eased the anxiety.
Ultimately, there is no hurry. It’s a marathon. Even if I thought I was a charging elephant.
Mar metrics
– Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (•$0)
- One-off revenue: $896 (↑$141)
- Total revenue: $1005 (↑$141)
- Total costs = $323
- Total profit: $682 (↑$203) (excl. consulting revenue)
- Profit margin: 68%
– Costs:
- Heroku: $7/m + $16/m = $23/m
- Table2site: $8/m
- IFTTT: $2/m
- Telegram: $4/m ($50/y)
- Carrd: $13/m ($159/y)
- Chatfuel: $15/m
- Domains (25): $40/m
- Reinvestments: $218 (ad sponsorships)
- Sold 21 (↑7) plugins at $466.15 (↑$87.45) revenue. Sold 7 mobile navbars, 8 mega navbars, 5 testimonial sliders, 1 listings with filters & search plugins.
- $427.80 (↑$58.20) in affiliate income from Carrd in Mar. Affiliate income = Referral and Seller program. This is growing slowly and steadily, the more I release free plugins and paid templates.
- First ever platform risk event on Carrd. One of my best selling plugins—the mobile navbar plugin—became obsolete because recent new features on Carrd meant people can now make their own mobile responsive navbar using available Carrd components. That’s why I went and made the mobilenavbarpro plugin.
- Wrote first ever tutorial guest post for Mark Bowley’s starrt.co blog.
- Wrote tutorial for user for free textpopup.carrd.co plugin. Don’t write tutorials for free plugins until someone requests. Demand-driven tutorials ftw.
- Made 4 new plugins – some from Feb still aren’t launched yet!
- Launched mobile navbar pro Carrd plugin, with free and paid versions! A new freemium business model moving forward, similar to the dark mode plugin.
- Free scroll-to-top floating button plugin using native Carrd elements and some custom CSS.
- Free animated gradient buttons plugin.
- Free image change on image hover demo for someone on r/Carrd.
- Continued experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
- Subscribed (finally!) to $19/m sponsorship ad on @markbowley’s deckof.carrd.co site (400+ visits/mth, top Reddit post in r/Carrd subreddit group)
- Paid $150 for sponsorship slot in @MeetKevon’s Public Lab newsletter in 11 May! Probably my single biggest sponsorship for a single article.
- 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.
- Continued with the $20 sponsorship ad in Jannis’ Tools For Creators website (toolsforcreators.co), since 17 Jan. Jannis said he will continue working on it.
- Continued with 4 ads (US$204) on Katt’s No Node Exits newsletter, will be shown once every 4 wks over 4 months (Feb - May).
- Updated template and fixed more style bugs (that conflicted with rest of site) in animatedaccordionfaqs.carrd.co.
- Bought $19/y subscription on blogstatic.io, but realised it wouldn’t work on my carrd subdomain… What do I do with the subscription? I want to keep it at this grandfathered price, but unsure what else to use it for 🤔
- Added animated gradient to all buy buttons and to “power up” in hero tagline to align with buy buttons. This ended up inspiring me to build an animated gradient buttons plugin template.
- Telegram Carrd group at 69 (↑10) members in Mar.
- Substack subscribers at 46. Published my 2nd Substack newsletter, to release the mobile navbar pro plugin – open rate was 51%!!
– Outsprint design consultancy
- LinkedIn metrics: 1775 (↑715) followers, 407282 (↑2153%) impressions + 5984 (↑1304%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 1045 (↑752) profile views (based on past 90 days), 109 (↑31) search appearances.
- Went super viral with one post about inclusive design, but also got haters which were toxic which got me down a bit. Wrote a letter to future haters to use as template reply.
- Had coffee with MD of a global IT professional services company to discuss possible design gigs. Might have something in July!
- Need a site refresh!
- Completed delivering the 4 design thinking training workshops for non-profit. Invoicing for around $11k for this tranche.
- Starting the next series of coaching projects for non-profit. First to come in early May.
- Signed contract to be appointed design facilitator for Design Singapore Council’s School Of X programme
– Lifelog
- Hit 800 days of daily writing!
- MRR stagnant at $109/month.
- Got 2 new Lifelog trial sign-ups, 1 who cancelled immediately. Zero net increase for paid users.
- Considering backing up the Lifelog stack offsite using Snapshooter / Backblaze / Simplebackups.
- Also considering upgrading Heroku Postgres plan from Basic ($9/m) to Standard 0 ($50/m) in order to have rollback feature - used to be included in Basic.
- Decided to do side projects weekends – set aside time to build Lifelog on weekends.
- Added 100% width & height to textarea preview to fix overflow text bug. Removed hover preview, replaced with preview button.
- Lifelog chat group at 26 (•0) members.
– Indie solopreneur build in public journey
- First time my revenue went past $1k, without any promos or marketing campaigns!
- Twitter stats - Mar vs Feb
- Tweets: 1613 vs 1409
- Tweet impressions: 551k vs 609k
- Likes: 4.6k vs 3.9k
- Engagement rate: 2.5% vs 2.5%
- Profile visits: 28.8k vs 27.1k
- Mentions: 1983 vs 1687
- New followers: 367 vs 396
- Link clicks: 337 vs 351
- Retweets: 240 vs 171
- Replies: 1.6k vs 1.4k
- Followers: 6554
- Emails: 151 (↑42) subscribers
- Going back to building in public and tweeting on the day itself about what I worked on had been fun! And also better engagement. Getting bored af of content creators and been following and engaging more builders now.
- Continued publishing weekly newsletters on Saturday.
- Either pivot Sheet2Bio to something else entirely (a chart2site to show revenue and charts?), or 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.
– 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.
– 5am creators club Telegram chat group
- 150 (↓8) total members for Mar.
- Low engagement, just 2-3 of us posting our wake times. To get more people posting their wake times, I wonder if we need a social challenge (like ship30for30) or an app like a Telegram bot to track our sleep stats/streaks. Many apps can already do that, but the small differentiator here is the social aspect.
- 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 120 (•0) members.
- This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site.
- 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).
- Collected some resources for Inclusive Design SG directory.
- Hesitant about venturing into inclusive design after unpleasant experience with haters (who work in disability) on LinkedIn.
– Sleep biohacking
- Realised that stress is the hidden sleep killer. Getting better sleep now that stress is lowered.
- Learned that rest ≠ rejuvenation.
– Health
- Since the mental pivot in Feb, health haven’t been the same. It’s gotten way better! No more chronic ailments. It really was psycho-somatic. Especially from stress.
– Money
- Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!