November 2023 wrap-up

jasonleow • 30 Nov 2023 •
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Monthly goals

For November, my intentions were simply to adapt, and try to stay in the game.

I did. I’m still here.

So that’s a good month.

Focusing on the 20% effort that brought 80% of opportunities—like networking for consulting, and building more products—had been effective. At least in keeping momentum going.

My Github commit streak is still going strong.
My next product Lists Kit is almost ready to launch.
I gave a talk at a conference which was energizing.

In fact, doing this review had been educational. I clearly did so much more compared to the past months. I’m still not in the clear yet with my finances. But if I don’t get the money, I’ll make do with the momentum. For now.

Onwards to December!

P.S. - Thanks to time hop, I re-read my Nov wrap-up last year. Damn, I was already struggling financially then. But was saved by a project. This was how long I’ve been fighting. No wonder I feel tired…

NOVEMBER 2023 METRICS

– Revenue:

Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $119 (↑$9)
One-off revenue: $1218 (↑$280)
Total revenue: $1337 (↑$290)
Total costs = $231 (↑$30)
Total profit: $1106 (↑$260) (excl. consulting revenue) 🎉🎉🎉
Profit margin: 82.7% (↑1.9%)

– Costs:

Domains (33): $50/m
Heroku: $7/m + $16/m = $23/m
Carrd: $17/m ($209/y)
Blogstatic: $1.60/m ($19/y)
Twitter Blue: $11/m
Sidebird: $7/m (US$84/y)
Telegram: $4/m ($50/y)
IFTTT: $2/m
Table2site: $8/m
Chatfuel: $15/m
Reinvestments: $92 (ad sponsorships)

– Plugins For Carrd

Total revenue: $1217.97 (↑$279.45)
Sold 23 (↑12) plugins at $565.17 (↑$330.45) revenue. Sold 3 mobile navbars, 4 testimonial sliders, 5 mega navbars, 5 listing with filters, 1 dark mode pro, 3 randomizer, 1 video button, 1 floating button welcome video plugins.
$652.80 (↓$51) in affiliate income from Carrd. Affiliate income = Referral ($552.90) and Seller ($99.90) program. Steady growth.
Sales jumped due to Black Friday of course! But the pattern is clear - we’re in recession, and people aren’t consuming as much.
Continuing to have at least 1 new plugin launch every month (as I’d done for the past 11 months) to keep some momentum going. Going to hit 12 plugins in 12 months in Dec!
Officially launched timeline diagram plugin on 21 (↓8) channels, got 30 downloads so far. The number of channels went down this time because I also launched another Carrd product this month (the Blacck Friday info directory).
Collected all the Black Friday deals and discounts that’s related to Carrd, add affiliate links, picked Template #215, designed, and launched Blacck Friday Carrd info directory, all in 2h! Then distributed it to 32 (↑3) channels.
Launched 40% Black Friday 2023 sale on website, Payhip, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, and created another Black Friday discount code for 50% off if you RT. Marketed this deal to 15 channels.
Launched Carrd Mega Pack bundle deal in partnership with Gregor from Zite Design! First time ever doing a collab bundle. Goes with my tradition of trying a new marketing stunt/doing a new bundle every Black Friday.
Pinned Black Friday sale tweet to Twitter profile page, to milk it.
Used the Carrd discount code and upgraded Carrd plan from Pro Plus 100 to Pro Plus 250 for $209 (after 40% discount) - now I can build even more sites! All 250 of them!
Continued experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
- Continued with $19/m sponsorship ad on @markbowley’s deckof.carrd.co site.
- 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.
- Continued with sponsorship at US$25 with Carrd influencer @lovjbini (11k following on Twitter, 20.7k Youtube subscribers). Got my mention and link in their Carrd, and my 3rd mention on their Youtube video this month. Vid published on 27 Nov, right smack in Black Friday. Next month, will change the message and offer a promo code/tracking URL instead for better tracking.
- Sponsored a $19/m (£15) ad on yet another prominent Carrd templates site - templates.carrd.co by @alxandrws!
- Google Ads account suspended for now as needed to verify business details.
- Got a great SEO/domain authority audit of plugins.carrd.co by @philkellr, and via @HeyImYossi’s seo-stuff.com! Learned a lot about my DR and what to bite onto next (basically, more backlinks).
- Renewed plugemoji.com, also bought new domains pluginsforccard.com, pluginsforcardco.com, pluginsforcard.co for redirecting, from Namecheap 50% BF offer!
- Found new platforms to market to: Deviantart and Dribbble! Next month to create profiles there.
- Created a Carrd tutorial on “How to create rounded corner columns within a Container”.
Fixed bugs and issues:
- From the SEO audits, realised I got to add “carrd templates” copy to all my plugins. SEO copy fixes to come!
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 99 (↑3) members.
Substack subscribers at 107 (↑18). Published 1 Substack newsletter this month (open rate 62%), to launch the Blacck Friday info directory Carrd site and the timeline diagram plugin.

– Outsprint design consultancy

LinkedIn metrics: 1939 (↑35, ↑2.2%) followers, 13,999 (↓20%) impressions + 208 (↓38%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 489 (↑58) profile views (based on past 90 days), 63 (↓4) search appearances.
Impression and engagement down as I stopped posting everyday. Need a break due to Black Friday busyness, and also to rethink my approach as my posts are getting stale. But what’s interesting is how my tech for good posts are getting more attention and follows.
Will use my Lists Kit boilerplate to refresh the site.
1 new coaching project coming up with non-profit client in start-2024.
Applied for 11 (last month=14, total=45) fulltime jobs so far - HCD researcher, Senior/Principal/Lead Consultant (Product Development), Consultant/Principal Consultant (Research & Insights), Head of Design and Strategy, Human Centred Designer, UX Researcher, Product Designer, Senior User Experience Designer. And guess what? Not. A. Single. Reply. This is how bad the job market is right now. I spoke to another consultant friend who’s younger, not consulting as long as me. He’s been job-hunting since August and not found a job neither.
Continued to send job applications to recruiters as an indirect way to get consulting jobs as they also place people for freelance positions. Will formalize this as a regular workflow for Outsprint.
Sent out 2 rounds of additional clarifications to potential gov client in a S$90k project bid on Gebiz. At this point they seem to be repeating their questions, and red flags are appearing… 🚩
Still awaiting discussion for a potential S$6k project doing design research for gov-related project.
Rejected for the S$47500 RFQ proposal to commercial media company for audience research project. But at least my CV is with them for future projects.
Sent portfolio to fellow entrepreneur/consultant to bid for a futures+design project for her client! Also sent $999/$2999 website design quotation to this same person for her company website.
Agreed to work as freelance consultant for SP UXC on an adhoc basis for training workshops. In process of onboarding with their HR.
Networking coffee with design industry peer might lead to some freelance opportunities for a tertiary educational institute.
Set rough proposal valued at ~S$20k for a 2-day training workshop on design thinking for public policy/services to a government ministry.
I should really submit a proposal to my non-profit client to discuss new work in 2024!
Wow got 2 emails signups for a nocode class waitlist from my talk at the better.sg conference. Totally unexpected. Goes to show - always leave a link for folks to follow/signup/buy.

– Lifelog

Got a +$9 increase in MRR, now at $118/month (↑$9). Thanks @drodol!
3 (↑2) new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month - what’s happening?! Thanks @thecatstickler, @kerryanne, @Tayloranne!
Little progress on Side Project Weekend for Lifelog as got busy with Black Friday. Want to get back to it this weekend!
Deployed zero features this month, but worked on the related posts feature, to increase discoverability, and show back more content that users had generated:
- Finished up related posts feature by fixing the HTML rendering.
- Added one more search condition as a last layer of search for related posts - search using the first 10 words of the title, in case all else before fails. But now thinking that pulling in some AI summarizer API might work well for this feature - AI summarize whole post into 4-5 keywords, then search contains said key words.
Renewed writingemoji.com, writinghandemoji.com.
Lifelog chat group at 26 (•0) 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.
After being inspired by Twitter account @PoemHeaven last month, got to thinking about marketing revival for Lifelog using Substack.

– Indie solopreneur build in public journey

9th month in a row where my revenue is above $1k! And first time it stayed above $1k even after subtracting costs! 🎉🎉🎉
Started a new streak on Github to make sure I ship code daily, even if it’s one embarrassingly small commit at a time. Actually I started shipping daily since 12 Oct for PSI.SG, but after I was done with the app on 3 Nov, I decided to extend it till end-2023. Made it past 1 month already!
Hit ONE year with my indie journey Substack newsletter!. 65 posts and 366 subscribers. Zero monetization but not interested.
Twitter stats for Nov vs Oct:
- Followers: 9277 vs 8821 (↑456)
- Emails: 378 vs 347 (↑31) subscribers
- Tweet impressions: 764k vs 1.2M (↓436k)
- Profile visits: ???
- Mentions: ???
- Engagement rate: 2.3% vs 2.0%
- Link clicks: 1.1k vs 934 (↓127)
- RTs: 165 vs 292 (↓26)
- Likes: 3.8k vs 4.9k (↓1.1k)
- Replies: 1.2k vs 1.6k (↓0.4k)
Impressions are down as I eased off Twitter after being shadowbanned in Oct and search suggestion banned in Nov (8 - 12 Nov), and stopped posting video memes, kept to just 1 tweet most days. Losing faith in the reach.
Cancelled my blue checkmark as no longer see the value. No boost in reach, we still see ads, span/bot accounts are still rife (and have blue checkmarks themselves!), plus all the random bans without any support or answers just made me lose faith in paying Twitter.
Bought @marc_louvion’s ByeDispute and applied it to all my stripe products - LOVE it! Now I can sleep with peace of mind.
At the end of the runway in terms of finances. There’s some opportunities in progress but nothing confirmed yet…

– Lists Kit

Thought through about the opportunity, problem, solution and business model of Lists Kit.
Researched daisyUI, Tailwind, found a really awesome Nuxt 3 template (Nuxtwind Daisy) but still unsure. In the end, gravitated towards just plain CSS. Thus the vanilla stack was born.
Created all the responsive section components - navbar, hero, features, carousel, filter tags, search bar, listing cards, card modals, image-text, testimonials, FAQ accordion, centered CTA, side CTA, contact form, footer, logo. In 4 weeks.
Decided to have a version of Lists Kit as an embeddable widget/plugin (for Carrd, or any other website). Another sell your sawdust opportunity!
Bought listskit.co, infodirectory.app, infodirectory.dev for redirecting and future SEO, at 50% discount on Namecheap.
Managed to test boilerplate on one of my info directory Keto List SG. Migrate most of it over in 2h… it works!
Got to create a dark mode SaaS version, and build the actual landing page for Lists Kit using Lists Kit boilerplate instead of showing the boilerplate and placeholder copy.
I think it’s now ready for beta test!
This is the progress when you ship 1 small commit a day for 1 month – Day 1 on 30 Oct, till the present on 30 Nov:

– Sheet2Bio

I had a change of heart for this project. I probably misjudged the business potential as this isn’t a product I can validate using my Twitter audience. The idea of a link-in-bio is mostly validated by the market. It’s not a new market or novel product, just a spin of using Google Sheets on the conventional link-in-bio page. I just need to build it out, and use SEO to slowly move my presence up. Inspiration from Pallyy.

– ~~5am creators~~ Sleep hackers club Telegram chat group

122 (↓2) total members this month. Stabilising it seems.
New low on engagement. Just me posting my wake times now.
Rebranding in progress. After an opportunity to bring it up and discuss in the chat. I quickly morphed the name to “sleep hackers” to focus on sleep hacking part instead of 5am.
Get people in by making free tools for sleep hacking, like sleep cycle calculator, sleep directory ala Nomadlist, Telegram bot to track sleep stats/streaks, maybe even a sleep hacking 101 ebook.
Will use my Lists Kit boilerplate to start the sleep resources directory.

– Keto List Singapore

Zero ad revenue (•$0) this month.
Keto chat group at 123 (•0) members. Getting more spam accounts trying to sign up again
Site refresh is underway, using Lists Kit boilerplate. Staging site here - ketolistsingapore.netlify.app. Looks great!
Looking forward to cancelling my $8/m Table2site subscription!
With AI content generation tools being so powerful these days, considering it for blog posts, Facebook posts…

– Career Conversation Cards

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).
New idea: Build this digital card sort site for career conversation cards, like Frog’s Cards for Humanity! And then after that build a SaaS for allowing designers to build card sort ‘games’/sites!

– Tech for good

Got my first app downtime on PSI.SG due to the data.gov.sg API going down. Had to raise my first ever issue on the data.gov.sg Github.
Also made new features/fixes for PSI.SG - downtime alerts, empty states, removed national PSI reading. Could not find a fix for background color changing to muted state/grey when browser is idle.
Spoke about the indie hacker way for building tech for good products, at better.sg’s BEACON conference.
Got invited to chat at a podcast by the Institute of Policy Studies on caregiving by sandwich class.
Got appointed on the Digital Advisory Panel for the National Heritage Board for 2 years. Pro bono role, but might be an interesting volunteering experience to give back.
Will use my Lists Kit boilerplate to start the Inclusive Design SG directory.
Planning to sign up for ChatGPT Plus to create a custom GPT for Grant Hunt bot, and cancel my $15/m Chatfuel subscription.

– KeyboardSG

Snapped up keyboard.sg domain as a domaining investment because previous owner lapsed on it. Was thinking something about mechanical keyboards, or an affiliate site.
Will use my Lists Kit boilerplate to start it as a listing directory.

– Sleep biohacking

Working late, and end up sleeping late most of the month. Average bedtime in 10-11pm now.
One of those phases where emotional state guarantees sleep state. Can’t be helped. Will just flow with it.
Stopped using Mute anti-snoring device and the sleep scores don’t seem much affected. I feel like I breathe fine too, no dry mouth too often. I wonder if after using for a year, my nasal constriction at night is fixed? Or is it due to going pillowless? 🤔

– Health

Unlike Oct where I got back to intermittent fasting and more strict keto, Nov had been a downward slide to normal SAD diet. Still trying to portion control, eat the proteins before the carbs. One of those phases where emotional state guarantees sleep state. Can’t be helped. Will just flow with it.
Little to zero neck issues in Nov. The daily morning exercise of body weight exercises—push-up, pull-ups, squats, crunches—is taking root.

– Money