Stats for My Projects This Month

PageFactory:

My SEO Experiment:

  • $104 revenue from ads and affiliates
  • 4,297 unique visitors (+30% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

  • $1,247 revenue
  • $923 MRR

Due to very little marketing, growth for PageFactory stalled in February. Luckily, my other projects had a good month.

In other news, I'm going to attend my first ever MicroConf this April! Pretty stoked.

I also took time to write two articles for this blog in February: a reflection on my five year anniversary as a full-time indie hacker (which I celebrated this month), and a comparison of potential replacements for Universal Analytics.

Full Recap

Churn is a Bummer

In February, I started working on some bigger enhancements for PageFactory, such as no-code solutions for for-loops and if/else operations. Also, a much requested shortcut feature.

This is a rough mockup for how I plan to implement more complex logical operations in PageFactory. I'll be sending it out to my email list for feedback this week. 

Unfortunately, I didn't take time to prepare any marketing material at the start of the month, and essentially didn't market PageFactory in February. Churn is still high, and customer acquisition slowed, which resulted in negative growth.

Honestly, it's hard to feel motivated to market a product when so many customers churn.

As it stands now, PageFactory only serves about 30% of the customers interested in using it. The other +70% of users need more features, or more hand holding, to make use of the product.

I get scared when I see MRR and active subscribers go down. But I hate having to tell people that a feature or enhancement is on my roadmap. After 6 months, most of what people need is still on my roadmap.

This is expected when you're looking for product-market fit though, right? So I'm not terribly discouraged. Just...frustrated by my speed (or lack there of).

I'm trying to think of ways to make myself faster at shipping and marketing. Wondering if there are cheap things I can hire out that will make a difference. 🤔

March Plans

My focus feels so split. I have plans for a new website for PageFactory, a big dev sprint I want to jump into, and I'd really love to work on my programmatic site since it's traffic has taken off.

This might be the first time I've ever said this, but I don't know what I'm going to work on this month. 🤷‍♀️

My first priority is scheduling some tweets again, so I don't go another month without any kind of marketing. But after that, I can't decide. Honestly, I think I'll just jump into whatever feels most urgent at the time.  

I'm someone who loves to plan. But lately I've been wondering if my planning and obsessing over efficiency is really just procrastination. For March, I'm throwing caution to the wind and seeing if not planning actually helps me get more done.