Reinvesting revenue: 1 year on

Right around the same time last year (thanks to Time Hop feature here on Lifelog – I LOVE this feature!), I decided to start reinvesting in my products:

With a new year approaching, I’m leaning towards setting a new rule in the new year that I don’t keep anything for any product till it hits a revenue target, say $1k. Spending up to $1k per month on growing the product sounds pretty significant. I can regroup and adjust again when I do hit that milestone (if ever!).

New product practice in 2023: Reinvest every dollar into the product until it hits $1k.

I wanted 2023 to be the year where I reinvest profits back to product.

I brainstormed ideas for reinvestment, like these for my Carrd plugins project (I’ve only reinvested back to my plugins project so will just talk about it here):

• Ads in maker newsletters, e.g. Jannis, Mark Bowley
• Domaining traffic-generating domains
• Starting affillate programmes in Gumroad, Flurly or Rewardful
• SaaS subscriptions for conversion funnels like Thrivecart, Converkit
• SaaS subscriptions for SEO blog content like feather.so, blogtstatic
• SaaS subscription for documentation site like Helpkit

And I started the first of reinvesting on a sponsorship ad through a now-defunct site Tools For Creators, on 17 Jan. And now, after almost 1 year, stuff I did to reinvest:

• Sponsoring 5 ads in Carrd maker sites or Carrd influencers. Cost = ~$100 per month now.
• Bought 13 domains, mostly typo domains like pluginsforccard.com. Cost = ~$130 per year.
• Started affiliate programmes on Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy and got a few affiliates
• Bought subscription for blogstatic to start a blog, but not used it yet
• Tried Google Ads, got suspended and not got back in yet

What’s the results?

• Out of 16.6k new visitors, only 590 are referral traffic of which 99 came from starrt.co. So most traffic came via direct, search, or social.
• Premium plugin sales increased by about 1.6x
• Total revenue went up by at least 3x!!! (And that’s not including Dec revenue!)

So I tripled revenue again! But I can’t attribute the results to reinvestments…

Because other things I did had a bigger part to play I believe - being on ~30 distribution channels, releasing a plugin a month to a total of 12 for 2023, and continuing to contribute to the Carrd community. Even the relatively dead indiehackers.com Carrd group is bringing in more traffic than the sponsorships… and these are free at that.

Conclusion

Maybe it’s time to try other reinvestments. Sponsorship ads aren’t pulling as much weight as they should for their costs. Ads on Google, Reddit, Youtube could be possibilities. Free tools marketing continue to work well so I should reinvest more in that (more time investment, not profits).