April resulted in an 18% increase in MRR and only one churn. But the most unexpected part? My site traffic is waaay down. Conventionally, if site traffic tanks, sign ups should also tank. But the opposite happened. It's clear I need to interview my latest customers to get a better understanding of who they are and how people are finding Fantasy Congress.

April synopsis

  • $315 total revenue
  • 3 new customers
  • 1 churn
  • +18% MRR

This month came and went in a flash. Though I put more hours into Fantasy Congress, I don't feel particularly accomplished. Most of my time was spent grinding away at one goal: moving legislator profiles to my main domain. But even with my nose to the grindstone and no active promotion, Fantasy Congress still acquired three new customers.

Other things that happened:

  • I heard back from twitter about my promoted tweet that was, er, never promoted. They said the charge doesn’t go through until the campaign starts, so I shouldn’t be out $50. Phew! But looks like promoting anything on Twitter that is even vaguely political is a no-go.
  • Email open rates are back up. I sent my list an update about the legislator pages and saw a 44% open rate. Regardless, I'm reconsidering how I communicate with my audience. Updates about the website don't feel as interesting now that Fantasy Congress is launched. I still want to communicate platform changes to my users, but my gut says I need a new strategy to really engage the full list.

April Goals

Finish moving legislator pages to main domain

All I needed to do was move this information from one place to another. But I thought, why not improve the information along the way? I spent time researching other data I could add about legislators, fancier chart libraries for displaying the data, and redesigned the page layouts. Eventually I realized the scope of this goal had grown far beyond what was originally intended (this was supposed to be a quick win) and scaled back. But much of my time had already been spent. As a result, this ended up being the only thing I really accomplished in April. There's still a lot of tweaking to do before the pages show up in search, but at the very least, I'm done laying the foundation for a larger content strategy.

Start on features for educators

So much of my time was spent on legislator pages that I never really got to this. However, I wrote down the features I need to build and started planning how to implement them.

Average 10 hours per week for Fantasy Congress

I logged a total of 51 hours for Fantasy Congress in April. That averages to roughly 12.75 per week!

Get back into daily routine

I started out really strong with this, but fell off the wagon the last week of the month. Work at my day job has become increasingly sporadic, which changed my afternoon routine and essentially affected everything else.

May Goals

  • Finish the first half of planned educator features
  • Pick 3 long tail keyword searches to target with new legislator pages
  • Personally reach out to new customers for interviews
  • Look into decline of website visitors

Educators have been the most enthusiastic, clearly defined audience supporting Fantasy Congress since my launch in 2018. But everything released so far is intended for adults playing with friends. Several teachers are using Fantasy Congress regardless, but the platform lacks some administrative features that would make their lives much easier. These features need to be shipped by end of July in order to have them prepared for the coming school year. I'm dedicating most of my energy in May to shipping, and if I have time, I'll look into the other stuff.

Conclusion

Scope creep got the best of me in April which slowed down progress considerably. I'm going into May hyper vigilant about shipping first and improving later.