October 2023 wrap-up

My intentions for October were simple: Survive.

I’ve done a lot since discovering this crisis in mid-September. And many opportunities that I kickstarted then are getting close to closing the deal. But I’m still not in the clear yet with my finances. Not until money gets deposited in the bank.

But a few changes gives me some hope:

• There’s warm signals for a consulting project in November to tide me through.
• I realised I’ve been operating from a scarcity mindset, and in my desperation to grasp on to every little thing, I had made some poor decisions, small and big. I’m practising on letting go, and going back to focusing on my assets and skills to manifest the abundance I need now.
• After applying for more than 30 jobs, I can say for sure now – my heart’s not in it. I can’t kid myself and waste more time sending my CVs out. So I’m going to mostly stop applying. Only if the opportunity is too good to pass, or if the hirer is a recruitment agency (as they have freelance/consulting opportunities sometimes). I’ll focus on the 20% effort that brought 80% of the opportunities so far – consulting jobs, and building products.
• I shipped and completed a product this month – PSI.SG. That momentum is addictive. I decided to keep my Github contribution streak till the end of this year. So I’ll have to ship at least 1 task every day till 31 Dec. I’m done now with PSI.SG so I’m not starting with my next for-profit project – Lists Kit.

The crisis isn’t averted yet, but my head and heart’s in a much better place.

For now.

Onwards to November!
 

OCTOBER 2023 METRICS

– Revenue:

• Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (•$0)
• One-off revenue: $938 (↓$61)
• Total revenue: $1047 (↓$61)
• Total costs = $201 (↓$59)
• Total profit: $846 (↓$2) (excl. consulting revenue)
• Profit margin: 80.8% (↑4.3%)

– Costs:

• Domains (27): $47/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: $73 (ad sponsorships)
   

– Plugins For Carrd

• Total revenue: $938.52 (↓$28.68)
• Sold 11 (↓4) plugins at $234.72 (↓$161.88) revenue. Sold 3 mobile navbars, 4 testimonial sliders, 4 mega navbars plugins.
• $703.80 (↑$133.20) in affiliate income from Carrd. Affiliate income = Referral ($647.10) and Seller ($56.70) program. Steady growth.
• Sales halved compared to past month, and past month was already not the best. I’m really hoping this is because people holding back on consumption due to Black Friday coming up…?
• Continuing to have at least 1 new plugin launch every month (as I’d done for many months) to keep some momentum going.
• Officially launched copy to clipboard plugin on 29 (↑6) channels, got 6 downloads so far.
• Made only 1 new plugin this month – the copy to clipboard plugin.
• Added a new button in my confetti button 2 plugin to celebrate Halloween! It shoots bursts of pumpkin man and ghost ‘confetti’!
• 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 2nd mention on their Youtube video this month. Vid published on 22 Oct, but no purchases on that day or few days after. Coincidence, or…? Next month, will change the message and offer a promo code/tracking URL instead for better tracking.
  • Google Ads account suspended for now as needed to verify business details.
  • Want to get more serious with SEO. Signed up for Semrush last month but not had the time to dive into it yet. Might sub for 1 month first to try cos free plan limit of 10 requests a day is urgh.
  • Created account on Imgur to experiment with marketing and distribution there!
  • Created a Company Page on Linkedin!
  • Added platform-specific url query strings to my plugin launch links to identify which channel is referring more views.
• Fixed bugs and issues:
  • Fixed a bunch of confusing copy on website re: Pro standard vs Pro Plus requirements for templates, all thanks to feedback from an enthusiastic customer!
• Plotting something with Gregor from Zite Design to co-sell a bundle on Zylvie during upcoming Black Friday!
• 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 96 (↑7) members.
• Substack subscribers at 89 (↑7). Published 1 Substack newsletter this month (open rate 57%), to launch the copy to clipboard plugin.
   

– Outsprint design consultancy

• LinkedIn metrics: 1904 (↑35, ↑1.8%) followers, 18,068 (↓14.1%) impressions + 334 (↓10.5%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 431 (↑152) profile views (based on past 90 days), 67 (↓36) search appearances.
• Decided on site refresh, using Carrd + plugins, but download files to host on Netlify.
• Created a Company Page on Linkedin for Outsprint Design.
• 1 new coaching project coming up with non-profit client in start-2024.
• Still awaiting news on bid for huge government project at S$90k.
• Applied for 14 (total=34) fulltime jobs so far - UX Researcher, Centre Head, Adjunct Lecturer, Design Lead, Design Director, Entrepreneur-in-residence roles.
• Had 2 calls with recruiters but no jobs. Interestingly, sending applications to recruiters could be a good way to get consulting jobs as they also place people for freelance positions. Will definitely try this regularly for Outsprint.
• Still in discussion for a potential S$6k project doing design research for gov-related project.
• Submitted S$47500 RFQ proposal to commercial media company for audience research project.
• Coffee with fellow entrepreneur and consultant to co-design a futures project for her client – a new gig opportunity!
• Agreed to work as freelance consultant for SP UXC on an adhoc basis for training workshops. Might also have a consulting project in Nov!
• Got to submit a proposal to non-profit client to discuss new work in 2024!
   

– Lifelog

• MRR stagnant at $109/month (•$0).
• 1 new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month… thanks @drodol!
• Happy with progress on this Side Project Weekend thing for Lifelog. Despite working on it only on weekends, I got a lot done!
• Deployed 3 features this month, plus other smaller fixes:
  • Made another Time Hop feature on home page, to hop any X number of months. Kinda like rudimentary search.
  • Added a randomized series of different ways to state “No post found” for Time Hop X. Also added CSS animation to fade out tooltip to explain how to use Time Hop X.
  • Added Cloudflare WAF rules to block bots from crawling/testing for these URIs - /wp-login.php, /xmlrpc.php, /.env - if this doesn’t work, will try go Pro to get access to Managed Rulesets.
  • Work-in-progress using on related posts - show 3 posts from other authors below every post. To increase discoverability, and show back more content that users had generated.
  • Added several fixes to UX and functionality:
    • Fixed row of badges on /profile page, to center and wrap to next line (using is-narrow is-centered is-multiline), so that in future can accommodate more badges over more rows.
• Lifelog chat group at 26 (•0) members.
• Removed paywall to ALL my Medium posts as payouts are zero anyway and I can use Medium profile page as a potential portfolio showcase for any freelance writing jobs.
• 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

• 8th month in a row where my revenue is above $1k!
• Removed my $10k/m ramen profitability number. Don’t want it to become a limiter.
• Twitter stats for Oct vs Sep:
  • Followers: 8821 vs 8579 (↑242)
  • Emails: 347 vs 327 (↑20) subscribers
  • Tweet impressions: 1.2M vs 1.42M (↓220k)
  • Profile visits: ???
  • Mentions: ???
  • Engagement rate: 2.0% vs 1.9%
  • Link clicks: 934 vs 592 (↑342)
  • RTs: 292 vs 318 (↓26)
  • Likes: 4.9k vs 5.7k (↓0.8k)
  • Replies: 1.6k vs 1.2k (↑0.4k)
• Impressions are back up again as I’m experimenting on Twitter again. As always, video memes with a good resonant inside joke just works. Still tweeting 3 per day—from 1-2 to 3-4 per day—using varied formats to get more shots on goal, and it works. Often the total combined impressions would hit 10k.
• Got shadowbanned for a few days!. Could be due to going viral with a quote tweet, but still unsure why, but got spooked. Twitter isn’t the most reliable of platforms to build a distribution channel on now.
• Finances not in the clear yet! I’m getting more opportunities and discussions. But nothing confirmed yet where I can sit easy and say I got past the crisis.
   

– Sheet2Bio

• I had a change of heart for this project. Maybe it can be a project where it can’t be rushed. 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 hackers club Telegram chat group

• 124 (↓4) total members this month.
• New low on engagement. Just me posting my wake times now.
• Thinking of a rebrand. Eventually will morph 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.
   

– Keto List Singapore

• Zero ad revenue (•$0) this month!
• Keto chat group at 123 (↑1) members.
• This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site and save the $8/m. I’m building my own listings diretory HTML boilerplate for all such kinds of projects.
• Considering using ChatGPT for content generation like 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!
   

– Tech for good

• Launched PSI.SG this month, got 3 coffees (US$15) from it.
• Interesting chat with NHB rep about volunteering on a tech advisory board.
• Inclusive Design SG directory still in progress.
   

– 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.
• Could start as a listing directory. I’m building my own listings diretory HTML boilerplate for all such kinds of projects.
   

– Sleep biohacking

• Slowly getting back to sleep routine - 9.30pm bedtime, and no phones before bed.
• How I plan to fix my sleep in the next 3 months.
• Passed 1 month since going pillowless. It really works!
   

– Health

• Back to intermittent fasting and more strict keto to lose some visceral fat.
• Daily morning exercise of body weight exercises—push-up, pull-ups, squats, crunches—continue to help with my neck. I also feel better energy levels!
   

– Money

• Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
   

Onwards!