Discover more from Jason's indie hacker journey
At the start of April I thought this month will be a month of self care and rest, while doing some spring cleaning. I had the month for downtime before the pace picks up again for my consulting in May, so I thought I can finally spring clean my work space and by extension, my mindscape.
BUT no Marie Kondo-ing happened.
I was heading into an energy slump, and no number of plans could pull me back up. It sucked being in low spirits, being neither here nor there. I thought I accomplished nothing this month. But as monthly reviews go, the amount of output always surprises me, in a good way. In the end, it wasn’t half bad.
My mood just added a negative lens to everything, but thankfully, the real data showed otherwise. Despite it all inwardly, things were going just fine outwardly.
Another important demonstration of why I do these monthly wrap-ups so religiously. It shows the work without ambiguity, based on objective reality. Even if the impression in my head was otherwise. And my mind’s wrong pretty often.
Apr metrics
– Revenue:
Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $99 (↓$10)
One-off revenue: $907 (↑$11)
Total revenue: $1006 (↑$1) 🎉🎉
Total costs = $165
Total profit: $841 (↑$159) (excl. consulting revenue)
Profit margin: 84%
– Costs:
Domains (25): $40/m
Heroku: $7/m + $16/m = $23/m
Carrd: $13/m ($159/y)
Blogstatic: $19/m
Twitter Blue: $8/m
Telegram: $4/m ($50/y)
IFTTT: $2/m
Table2site: $8/m
Chatfuel: $15/m
Reinvestments: $49 (ad sponsorships)
Sold 17 (↓4) plugins at $420 (↓$46.15) revenue. Sold 6 mobile navbars, 3 mega navbars, 3 testimonial sliders, 2 listings with filters & search plugin, 2 video button plugin, 1 startup bundle.
$487.20 (↑$59.40) in affiliate income from Carrd in Apr. Affiliate income = Referral and Seller program. Steady growth with more free plugins and paid templates.
Got my first 2 upsell purchases! After more than 1 month implementing it. Not great, but nothing to lose by keeping it there.
Google page rank progress: Occupied SEVEN out of 10 results on the first page of Google for “carrd plugins”! Realised how this happened on its own from @dannypostmaa’s thread about building a product without audience, using just SEO.
Got tired of procrastinating on launching my new plugins, so kicked myself to putting it up on my site at the very least… all EIGHT of them!
Animated gradient buttons
Interactive background
Text popup modal
Autoplay on mobile
Password protection
Carousel slider
Logo carousel
Dark mode freemium
Officially launched animated gradient buttons plugin on FB, Reddit, Twitter, IH, Discord, Substack, email.
Added dark mode pro Carrd plugin to my 3 stores. Now it’s ready for sale! But not officially launched yet.
Added scroll-to ‘filter’ tags at top of home page for better discovery and easier navigation.
Made 5 new plugins:
Created to-be premium Sheet2Table plugin template that pulls data from a public Google Sheet to a Carrd table.
On request, made a separate free version of the animated gradient buttons plugin template that’s compatible with a lower price plan Pro Standard (instead of Pro Plus).
Tried spreadsimple.com, made a demo job board site on Carrd - love the simple interface, easy embed and generous free plan! Can imagine using this for Carrd and MVPs often.
Helped Carrd user with strikethrough text issue (setting red color line-through for black text), and implemented it for myself. Might do a small template for this.
Made v1 of website visitor hit counter Carrd plugin. Tracks only your own views for now.
Continued experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
Continued with $19/m sponsorship ad on @markbowley’s deckof.carrd.co site (400+ visits/mth, top Reddit post in r/Carrd subreddit group)
The $150 sponsorship slot in @MeetKevon’s Public Lab newsletter coming soon on 11 May! My single biggest sponsorship for a single article yet.
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).
Updates and bug fixes:
Fixed bug in passwordsection.carrd.co plugin where prompt dialog box kept triggering and prevented user from going back in browser history
Fixed body padding bug in accordion FAQ plugin accordionfaqs.carrd.co
Updated ticker tape logo carousel plugin to CSS only (from bloated Bootstrap) to lessen support load and questions.
Tried to solve the Bootstrap style conflict issues for testimonial slider by trying to @import Bootstrap at block-level using LESS, i.e. a scoped @import, to use the @import statement inside a selector. But couldn’t figure it out yet.
Did lots of rubberducking with ChatGPT. Surprised by how helpful ChatGPT is for debugging! It’s now a part of my workflow when I’m stuck.
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 🤔
Made and added new Twitter banner to Plugins profile page.
Wrote notes on what truly moves the needle for my Carrd plugins.
Telegram Carrd group at 73 (↑4) members in Apr.
Substack subscribers at 50 (↑4). Published my 3rd Substack newsletter, to release the free animated gradient buttons plugin – open rate was 59% (2nd newsletter was 51%)!!
– Outsprint design consultancy
LinkedIn metrics: 1824 (↑49, ↑3.3%) followers, 49425 (↓87.9%) impressions + 656 (↓89%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 1113 1045 (↑68) profile views (based on past 90 days), 98 (↓11) search appearances.
Need a site refresh! Carrd + plugins?!
Received $11k invoice for delivering 4 design thinking training workshops for non-profit!
Facilitated meetings with client departments to set up upcoming design projects for the year.
Sent out proposal to philanthropic client for possible design sprint gig, but sadly didn’t pan out due to price.
Filed taxes for year of 2022.
Got 2 opportunities to be design facilitator for Design Singapore Council’s School Of X programme with 2 government agencies. Will sign up!
Got another partnership opportunity for government project!
Learned about design thinking for children via lunchtime talk at National Design Council.
– Lifelog
MRR dropped to $99/month (↓$10).
1 paid subscriber who never used my SaaS cancelled after 4 months.
Founding user paid for $10/m subscription… thanks Brandon!
Got 2 new Lifelog trial sign-ups this month.
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.
Super happy with my decision to do side projects weekends for Lifelog. The progress feels great, even if incremental.
Did lots of rubberducking with ChatGPT. Surprised by how helpful ChatGPT is for debugging! It’s now a part of my workflow when I’m stuck.
Deployed many new features this month:
Updated Markdown preview. Previously you hover your cursor outside of the text area to preview in rich text. Based on feedback and dogfooding, found that the hover preview tend to trigger ‘jumpy’ spurious previews. So now it’s a preview button on the top editing toolbar.
Added a keyboard shortcut: Hit the Esc key shortcut to preview in rich text.
Added toggle off to markdown preview button on the
/writepage so that don’t have to click on text to disable rich text preview mode. Thanks for feedback, @tao!Code from scratch the side snackbar Markdown editor. Add Markdown syntax using the editor panel to format the text. Great if user is unfamiliar with Markdown.
Tried integrating Cloudflare Turnstile but couldn’t figure it out yet.
Added typing sounds of a mechanical keyboard when writing post - got it working on local! Next to deploy and consider future sound profiles like typewriter, cash register, and mechanical keyboards of click, clack and thock.
Fixed bug where the raw text was overflowing out of preview mode
Fixed bug on mobile view where the back to home button overlapped with the preview button on the
/writepage.Fixed bug where the footer overlapped with preview text (see image).
All-round style fixes when the textarea didn’t resize properly to text input.
Lifelog chat group at 26 (•0) members.
– Indie solopreneur build in public journey
Second month in a row where my revenue is above $1k (at $1006)! I hope this is here to stay! 🎉
Twitter stats - Apr vs Mar
Tweets: 1683 vs 1613
Tweet impressions: 833k vs 551k
Likes: 4.7k vs 4.6k
Engagement rate: 2.7% vs 2.5%
Profile visits: 43.5k vs 28.8k
Mentions: 2015 vs 1983
Link clicks: 821 vs 337
Retweets: 239 vs 240
Replies: 1.7k vs 1.6k
New followers: 239 vs 367
Followers: 6798
Emails: 195 (↑41) subscribers
Went viral with a vulnearbility tweet sharing my lack of progress. I think stories like this keeps things real. Long form post here.
Invested in Twitter Blue on Apr 1st! But didn’t get verified till a week later on Apr 6th. Will try this experiment for 3 months at least to see if it helps with reach! So far, this month feels promising! Tweet impressions is up, though that didn’t translate to a similar increase in new followers (compared to last month).
Tweeted out my first longform tweet, repurposed from a Lifelog post. Didn’t do half bad at 28k impressions!
Culled my Twitter follows list from 2180 to 695. Apparently the algo punishes you if your following:follower ratio is above 0.6. I was at 2180:6558 on Apr 1st, so that’s about 0.3 – I passed, but that got me thinking about spring cleaning my follows. So bit the bullet, culled it to 695 then (now it’s increased a bit to 701). Also unblocked and unmuted all accounts I previously blocked/muted as an experiment. Will see if it matters at all!
Collected all Twitter algo tips in one place. Followed some!
Got a new product idea for a Buffer for ecommerce platforms, that came out out my problems being on multiple platforms.
Created IFTTT applet to automate posting tweets from Twitter to Mastodon - as backup and hedge against deplatformisation.
Continued publishing weekly Substack newsletters on Saturday. Started on Substack Notes too.
Learned about “The Stackless Way”. Might end up being my new tech stack!
Got an email enquiry, but no reply after engaging via email.
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.
Interesting counter point: IndiePa.ge is doing well. It’s a similar concept, like Sheet2Bio, except without G Sheets. Why did it succeed where Sheet2Bio failed? 🤔
– 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
146 (↓4) total members for Apr.
Low engagement continued. Just 2-3 of us posting our wake times. To get more people posting their wake times, considering a social challenge like 5for5 (5am for 5 weeks) or use ChatGPT to make a Telegram bot to track our sleep stats/streaks. Of course, there’s many sleep tracking apps already, but few are anchored to a community.
Planning to make a dedicated micro web app for sleep cycle calculator for myself and the community.
An info product for sleep could be another top-of-funnel resource for the community.
Zero ad revenue (•$0) this month.
Got mentioned in local newspaper The Straits Times! Should I revive/update this?
Got an email enquiry for ads.
Keto chat group at 120 (•0) members.
This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site. Consider using Spreadsimple + Carrd for it?
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).
Inclusive Design SG directory still in progress.
– Sleep biohacking
Hit 100% sleep score again, my 2nd time.
– Health
Since the mental pivot in Feb, physical health got better but got into a slump recently.
– Money
Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!
April wrap-up
Congrats on the milestone Jason 🥳🎉