September 2023 wrap-up
jasonleow • 30 Sept 2023 •
I started September feeling like I am finally freed from consultancy to finally be able to build in public again. I went in with these intentions:
- Follow my curiosity for new ideas, and follow my intuition for pacing
- Keep going with the exploratory builds that I’ve started last month
- Start taking analog days again for recharge and recap
But looks like the Universe had other plans. A third into the month, I realised my finances are in trouble, decided to get back into the job market as a backup measure, got anxious about going back to fulltime, then decided to act, just one thing a day, and felt better after. I wanted to have a chance to recharge and recap, but looks like that’s been postponed indefinitely.
As you can see from the linked posts, I literally wrote myself out of that funk. The crisis isn’t averted yet, but my head’s in a much better place.
For now.
Shit’s hit the fan now. But gotta stay strong.
Onwards to October!
SEPTEMBER 2023 METRICS
– Revenue:
- Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (↓$10)
- One-off revenue: $999 (↓$127)
- Total revenue: $1108 (↓$137)
- Total costs = $260
- Total profit: $848 (↓$141) (excl. consulting revenue)
- Profit margin: 76.5%
– Costs:
- Domains (26): $45/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)
- Quantum Upgrade: $60/m
- Total revenue: $967.20 (↑$133.35)
- Sold 15 (↑6) plugins at $396.60 (↑$129.75) revenue. Sold 3 mobile navbars, 3 testimonial sliders, 5 mega navbars, 1 video button, 2 listings with filters & search, 1 randomizer plugin.
- $570.60 (↑$3.60) in affiliate income from Carrd. Affiliate income = Referral ($514.80) and Seller ($55.80) program. Steady growth.
- Sales felt slow through the month, but upon consolidation, it seems fine. Anxiety over less effort perhaps?
- Sold my very first randomizer plugin!
- Wrote a tutorial for typewriter text plugin.
- 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 roll up text animation plugin on 23 channels, got 19 downloads so far.
- Made only 1 new plugin this month – the roll up text animation plugin.
- 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.
- Got new sponsorship at US$25 with Carrd influencer @lovjbini (11k following on Twitter, 20.7k Youtube subscribers). Got a mention and link in their Carrd, and my very first mention on their Youtube video this month. Vid published on 24 Sep, and I got 3 purchases on that day. Coincidence, or…? Next month, will change the message and offer a promo code 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. Might end up subbing for 1 month first to try cos free plan limit of 10 requests a day is urgh
- Fixed bugs and issues:
- Removed Pro Plus elements from 2 templates (roll up text animation, dark mode free) so that people on lower Pro Standard plan on Carrd can download them.
- Fixed missing download link on dark mode free template. No wonder no one downloaded it since April! 😩
- Plotting something with Gregor from Zite Design to co-sell a bundle 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.
- Got approved for fee-free discount on Stripe! Stripe will refund all processing fees on the next $50k I process on the platform. But can be only applied to one account/product within Stripe so I applied it to Carrd Plugins. This fee-free discount will be eligible for 12 months from the time you activate it or until you exceed the total amount of the discount, whatever comes first.
- ‘Realised’ that some things can’t be rushed and that product-market fit can take years, so will keep going growing Plugins though not at such a hurried pace.
- Telegram Carrd group at 89 (↑5) members.
- Substack subscribers at 82 (↑6). Published 1 Substack newsletter this month (open rate 65%), to launch the roll up text animation plugin.
– Outsprint design consultancy
- LinkedIn metrics: 1869 (↑19, ↑1.5%) followers, 18,747 (↑50.9%) impressions + 371 (↑49.6%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 279 (↑73) profile views (based on past 90 days), 103 (↑45) search appearances.
- Decided on site refresh, using Carrd + plugins, but download files to host on Netlify.
- 1 new coaching project coming up with non-profit client in end-2023.
- Received S$9500 in bank account from client, 2 weeks after invoice sent.
- Bid for a huge government project at S$90k.
- Applied for 20 UX Designer, UX Researcher fulltime jobs so far.
- Updated Superpeer profile to offer micro-consulting sessions at US$150 a pop (30min) for govdesign and US$99/30min for indie hacking/nocode dev.
- Created profile on Remote Ok to find and apply for remote design/dev work.
- Just got a potential S$6k project doing design research for gov-related project.
- Meeting with potential non-profit client to discuss possible projects.
- Opportunity to freelance on a 3-4 month (Nov-Jan) user research project related to news consumption habits.
- Contacted past contacts in tertiary institutions for training opportunities.
– Lifelog
- MRR dropped to $109/month (↓$10) after 1 subscriber (who no longer uses the site) exited.
- Zero new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month.
- Happy with progress on this Side Project Weekend thing for Lifelog. Despite working on it only on weekends, I got way more done than any of my other projects! Wild!
- Deployed 6 features this month, plus other smaller fixes:
- Added the “Archive to Wayback Machine” publish feature.
- Added fancy checkbox styles for goals checklist before publishing.
- Added time hop feature on home page - “One month ago…”
- Added rain and forest sounds to both /write and /compose pages.
- Prettified input sliders with emoji for writing settings.
- Made a profile badge and a celebration modal with badge and confetti just for folks in the 1000 day club!
- Added a link to the 1000 day streak profile badge, to trigger the gold badge + confetti modal, so that the user can look at it time and again.
- Added more celebration modals for various streak milestones - 365, 100, 30, 7 days. Visual design needs more work but good first step to celebrating writer’s efforts!
- Added browser-based spell check setting to rich text editor - but caveat is spell check needs to be switched on in browser.
- Added several fixes to UX and functionality:
- Fixed bug due to calendar month crossovers like 31st to 1st (getting wrong dates like 32nd or 0th)… Damn these time bugs are tricky af!
- Work-in-progress using the new Nuxt UI by NuxtLabs via CDN to create an avatar group component but it didn’t work. Decided to try plain CSS instead!
- 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
- 7th month in a row where my revenue is above $1k!
- Hit 1000 day streak on Lifelog!
- Revised my ramen profitability number to $10k/m.
- Some progress on jasonleow.com, my personal website & task log.
- Added more features to personal site & tasklog - URL links to projects, different colored states, hover classes, click through to project pages, more projects, if-else for years.
- Added log icon at bottomright to click through to tasks ‘page’, and work-in-progress for tasks log.
- Launched the rough MVP on jasonleow.com!
- No progress on animated chart gif generator ChartPics.
- Twitter stats for Sep vs Aug:
- Followers: 8579 vs 8131 (↑448)
- Emails: 327 vs 309 (↑19) subscribers
- Tweet impressions: 1.42M vs 655k (↑765k)
- Profile visits: ???
- Mentions: ???
- Engagement rate: 1.9% vs 2.1%
- Link clicks: 592 vs 596 (↓4)
- RTs: 318 vs 190 (↑128)
- Likes: 5.7k vs 3.4k (↑2.3k)
- Replies: 1.2k vs 1.0k (↑0.2k)
- Impressions are back up again as I’m experimenting on Twitter again. As always, memes work as expected. This time I’m using videos, which apparently gets more boost by the algo. Also trying to tweet more per day—from 1-2 to 3-4 per day—using varied formats to get more shots on goal, and it’s working. Memes win oftentimes, then sometimes a long form tweet wins.
- I had to manually RT now. Turns out, it’s more flexible and strategic that way, though more effort. Maybe I don’t need Sidebird or any Twitter scheduler anymore…
- Finances not in the clear yet! Still trying many things to find more work—even applying for jobs. My CV is definitely floating around out there, and getting more opportunities since. But nothing confirmed yet where I can sit easy and say I got past the crisis.
- Scheduled to have an informal talk at the Schalk Neethling’s next indie founders support group meetup on Fri 13 Oct 4pm. To talk about what I learned as an indie creator working on Lifelog, Carrd plugins, and Outsprint etc.
- Experiment: Subscribed to US$60/m Quantum Upgrade (quantumupgrade.io) to support business, home and myself. Going through general detox in the first month as expected. Will see what will unfold once past the initial onboarding period.
- 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
- 128 (↓5) total members this month.
- New low on engagement. Just me posting my wake times now.
- Thinking of a rebrand, that’s why I changed the name to hackers. Want to go back to a sleep hacking club for indie hackers. Eventually will morph the name to “sleep hackers”.
- 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.
- S$45 ad revenue (↑$45) this month!
- Had keto anniversary! Shared some learnings.
- Keto chat group at 122 (•0) members.
- This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site. Considering using Spreadsimple/Softr + Carrd for it, or create my own listings diretory HTML boilerplate for all such kinds of projects.
- Considering using ChatGPT for content generation like blog posts, Facebook posts…
- 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!
- Inclusive Design SG directory still in progress.
- 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.
– 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.
- Started going pillowless. It worked for my neck pain!
– Health
- Starting to feel a bit low, then started topping up more magnesium and it helped!
- Experiment: Subscribed to Quantum Upgrade (quantumupgrade.io) US$60/m to support business, home and myself.
– Money
- Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!