PageFactory:

My SEO Experiment:

  • $80 revenue from ads and affiliates
  • 3,318 unique visitors

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

  • $1,398 revenue
  • $852 MRR

December was so busy, I skipped writing a proper retrospective and just shared my stats on Twitter.

However, life didn't really slow down in January. And things are still pretty busy. So, I'm doing a fairly "light" retrospective for January.

Full Recap

My biggest win for January was finally releasing the dynamic images, links, and HTML embed features for PageFactory (my programmatic SEO tool). With these out of the way, I can finally start on more robust features, like grouping data to create pages from more than just spreadsheet rows.

Another big win was scheduling most of my Twitter posts at the beginning of the month.

I've been using Twitter to promote my projects for a while now, but was giving myself a real headache having to work around its default scheduling limitations.

In January, I signed up for a year of OneUp (affiliate link!), a proper social media scheduling service. Using OneUp, I can now schedule threads, see all of my scheduled posts laid out in calendar format, and schedule posts for other social media platforms (not just Twitter!).

As a bonus, OneUp is entirely bootstrapped by indie hackers!

Scheduling all of my posts at the beginning of the month really helped me focus. However, it took a few days to come up with and plan out all of the tweets. Going forward, I want to schedule more large chunks of posts at once, but I need to prioritize sitting down and planning them out.

In other news, my programmatic site bounced back nicely at the beginning of the year!

I had hoped to make some much needed improvements to it by this time. Alas, I have no idea when that will happen. But, I'm happy to see traffic is picking up well before spring and summer (which is when this niche usually gets going).

February Plans

I have a lot of bottle necks to figure out for PageFactory before I can implement most of the big things I have in the works.

For instance, I want to re-do the public facing website, and I want to set up a blog. But, I can't do either of these things until I set up a proper CMS for the site. This will require separating the PageFactory application from the marketing website (they currently live in the same Django instance), and that means changing some pretty important URLs for the app!

In February, I plan on starting on a bunch of these bottle necks.

This is a difficult decision to make, because it means I'm focusing less on direct marketing or pushing out features (aka, the two things that currently have the biggest effect on my bottom line).

But, so much of the business has become interconnected. I think it's finally time to set up a stronger foundation. One that I can hopefully build off of for months, if not years to come.