February wrap-up
A too-short month to buildbuildbuild
The shortest month of the year has passed.
I had wanted to build build build:
I just want to build build build. And then share cool stories in this digital campfire called Twitter with other builders and hackers. Not to win social status or get more followers but just to make cool things and tell a story!
And I think I achieved it. 5 new Carrd plugins. A productive long list of improvements to my Plugins project. A banger month on Twitter. Starting on a new long-term consulting/coaching project with a non-profit client.
It was such a short month…it didn’t feel enough! I want to continue this building momentum for the months to come.
Feb metrics
– Revenue:
Current MRR (all from Lifelog): $109 (•$0)
One-off revenue: $755 (↓$61)
Total revenue: $864 (↓$61)
Total costs = $385
Total profit: $479 (↓$230) (excl. consulting revenue)
Profit margin: 55%
– Costs:
Heroku: $9/m + $14/m = $23/m
Table2site: $8/m
IFTTT: $2/m
Telegram:
Carrd: $13/m ($159/y)
Domains (24): $40/m
Reinvestments: $234 (ad sponsorships)
Business admin fees: $65
Realised I tripled my revenue for Plugins in 2022 (compared to 2021)!
Sold 14 (↓12) plugins at $380.70 (↓$144.30) revenue. Sold 3 mobile navbars, 5 mega navbars, 3 testimonial sliders, 2 video button, 1 startup bundle plugins. The sales in Feb last year was low too - a pattern? 🤔
$369.60 (↑$132) in affiliate income from Carrd in Feb. Affiliate income = Referral and Seller program. This is growing slowly and steadily, the more I release free plugins.
My very first Carrd plugin animatedaccordionfaqs.carrd.co just went past 1000 downloads!
Made 5 new plugins – so many that I don’t even have time to properly launch them all!
Dark mode Carrd plugin, with free and paid versions! The free version was using a darkmode.js library but it didn’t convert images well. I went on to re-create a dark mode plugin suited for Carrd using CSS and some Javascript. This could be a new business model moving forward - making 1 free 1 paid.
Free plugin for an interactive background of physics-based particles/polygons.
Flurly got shut down by Stripe! Scrambled for 2 weeks moving my plugins over to Lemon Squeezy, Payhip and Gumroad. Now I should be mostly platform-proof.
First concerted effort in optimising the site – compressed all images and gifs, updated landing page (added more testimonials higher up, and darken hero overlay).
New upsell experiment in Payhip: If customer buys X, suggest to them to buy Y using a 20% discount, 30-day coupon code.
Continued experiments in reinvesting revenue back into product:
Bought $10/m sponsored ad spot in Zite Design’s popular Carrd course page on Gumroad.
Paid for my 2nd $20 sponsorship ad in Jannis’ Tools For Creators website (toolsforcreators.co), since 17 Jan.
Waiting to be added to @markbowley’s $19/m sponsorship ad on deckof.carrd.co (400+ visits/mth, top Reddit post in Carrd subreddit group)
Just bought 4 ads (US$204) on Katt’s No Node Exits newsletter, will be shown once every 4 wks over 4 months.
Created 2 carrd subdomain sites for redirecting to HQ, to protect my IP - pluginsfor.carrd.co, plugin.carrd.co
Updated my Gumroad affiliates’ links to all the new plugins (affiliates get 20% commission!).
Enabled purchasing power parity for all my plugins in Gumroad.
Added long overdue social proof to main site by embedding static tweets. In the process of figuring out how to embed tweets in carrd, I ended up creating a testimonial tweet plugin!
Added tutorials for FAQs to various plugins’ demo page. Can imagine each demo page to host it’s own support docs in future (so that I don’t have to copy-paste every time)!
Telegram Carrd group at 59 (↑4) members in Feb.
Found a way to integrate Substack with Carrd (using substackapi.com to embed a sign up form). Published my very first Substack newsletter for Plugins, to release the testimonial tweets plugin.
– Outsprint design consultancy
LinkedIn metrics: 1060 (↑23) followers, 16721 (↑21%) impressions + 397 (↑75.7%) engagements (based on past 28 days), 293 (↓12) profile views (based on past 90 days), 78 (↑39) search appearances. Most metrics are back up again after a quiet Jan. Definitely lending more credence to the New Year and Chinese New Year vacation hypothesis.
Received notification that $64k bid for gov consulting project was not successful… oh well was kinda expecting it 🤷♂️ (but upside is realising that the new tender limit on gov tenders is now >$90k! And I under-bidded 😓)
Updated site to reflect new Remote and Jumpstart pricing to $5,990 - but in truth I really need a site refresh!
Registered for virtual office address ($50/y) with vofficesingapore.com
Registered ($40 one-time) an Alternate Address for owner details on ACRA
Started and enjoying delivering the design thinking training workshop series for non-profit! This work is worth $52k (+ additional $20k of optional work items) for the whole year!
– Lifelog
MRR stagnant at $109/month.
Got 1 new Lifelog trial sign-ups, who cancelled immediately. Zero net increase for paid users.
Got a working keyboard shortcut feature - hit “esc” and see markdown preview on local.
Decided to go with a hide/show sticky rich text editor instead of tooltip editor - simpler implementation.
Got secondary trauma from @dannypostmaa’s Heroku saga, where Heroku simply deleted his account without notice and was unresponsive for a week. After chatting to indie devs on Twitter, the decision is to bail from Heroku to probably Render. But it’s a lot of work to migrate. Might have to take a while before I do enough research and have the guts to migrate. In meantime, researching in using Snapshooter / Backblaze / Simplebackups to backup the Lifelog stack offsite.
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! Dang you Heroku. :(((
Lifelog chat group at 26 (•0) members.
– Indie solopreneur build in public journey
Just hit 100 subscribers on my Substack newsletter!
Twitter stats - Feb vs Jan
Tweets: 1409 vs 826
Tweet impressions: 609k vs 334k
Likes: 3.9k vs 3.2k
Engagement rate: 2.5% vs 2.9%
Profile visits: 27.1k vs 12k
Mentions: 1687 vs 1106
New followers: 396 vs 311
Link clicks: 351 vs 185
Retweets: 171 vs 164
Replies: 1.4k vs 1.2k
Followers: 6189
Emails: 109 (↑17) subscribers
Going back to building in public instead of using content creator approach to tweets.
Continued publishing weekly newsletters on Saturday.
Considering switching on Tips on Twitter account – should I do it? What’s the downsides?
Felt low morale for a while, but “tall trees grow slow” advice helped. And then it all went to hell with the platforms - Stripe, Heroku, Upwork.
Did an epic review of all the products I’ve ever made. Tweet went viral!
Not sure why but tweets about payment platforms seems a hot topic, like this tweet. Nearly hit 100k impressions!
Zero sales/enquiries in Feb, even though got lots of Twitter profile visits. There’s really no PMF is there? (rhetorical question)
Next steps: 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.
– 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 , or a Gumroad standalone product.
– 5am creators club Telegram chat group
158 (↓6) total members for Feb.
Low engagement, just 2-3 of us posting our wake times. To get more people posting their wake times, I wonder if we need a social challenge (like ship30for30) or an app like a Telegram bot to track our sleep stats/streaks. Many apps can already do that, but the small differentiator here is the social aspect.
Planning to make a dedicated micro web app for sleep cycle calculator for myself and the community.
Bought Telegram Premium at 45% off ($50) for running communities. I love using the app so much, and with the huge discount it’s a no-brainer.
Zero ad revenue (•$0) this month.
Keto chat group at 120 (↑2) members.
This site needs a refresh. Time to also break away from table2site.
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).
COVID restrictions are all lifted = I finally can shut down my site safedistancing.sg. Sent out site closure post + gratitude email to all my Buy Me A Coffee supporters, and to give notice that I’ll be terminating their monthly/yearly subscriptions - all 6 existing memberships.
Brainstormed new social impact SaaS - A11y × AI.
Went for half-day morning networking event on inclusive design at SG Enable/School of X. Got inspired and went to start a new social impact project called Inclusive Design SG. Bought inclusivedesign.sg domain for 2 years (S$100). Building a NomadList-style directory for inclusive design directory. Even got my first coffee (US$5.45) for it!
– Sleep biohacking
Updated mindset about sleep biohacking = less anxiety around poor sleep.
– Health
Mental health pivot. This is more important than it looks. Probably the most important thing that happened to me in Feb.
Since the mental pivot, health haven’t been the same. It’s gotten way better! No more chronic ailments. It really was psycho-somatic. Especially from stress.
– Money
Nothing much happening on my Mind My Millions Telegram chat group.
Onwards!