March ended up being a bit of a bummer. I tentatively returned to promoting Fantasy Congress with limited results. And once again, it's not entirely clear if anything I did contributed to this month's meager growth.
March Synopsis
- $823 total revenue
- 8 new customers
- 6 churns
- $894.36 MRR (+3% from last month)
It feels like I spent the past two months sprinting to the finish line only to find out I was running in place. I feel frustrated, tired, and a little hopeless. Most of all I'm having a hard time feeling satisfied or enjoying anything.
If there's a loud siren going off in your head, you've probably guessed what's going on: the beginning of burnout.
For the first time, I feel like I'm catching burnout at the beginning instead of trying to power through and totally draining myself. But now that I recognize it, I'm not sure what to do.
I still want to work. I want to keep pushing. Taking any kind of break feels like I'm stepping farther away from the finish line (aka, Ramen profitability).
More worrisome is that the longer I work on this project, the more frequent I feel burnout creeping up. Grit is something I consider to be little bit of a superpower for me. But I think I'm finally starting to learn my limits.
March Goals
I'm pretty happy with everything I got done this month. I made some minor adjustments to the public facing site and finally finished cleaning up most of my data collection process.
Content Marketing on Reddit
Creating content for Reddit wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. I targeted r/dataisbeautiful because Fantasy Congress is essentially a numbers game, so I thought it would resonate with the sub's audience.
My first post was very colorful and jam packed with information. The response was warm. I posted on Thursday and noticed two sign ups that day and one over the weekend.
After analyzing some of the more popular posts on the sub, I decided to go with a much simpler chart for my second post. This post got a lot more engagement, which made me excited. But nothing happened. I haven't had a single sign up since the weekend after my first post.
Obviously, this isn't a big enough sample size to draw any conclusions. I'm going to keep experimenting. But after a little bit of success with the first post, I started to get my hopes up that I had finally found a reliable and sustainable user acquisition channel. After the second, those hopes were squashed.
April Goals
- Send update email about adjustments to points
- Clean up email lists
- Updates to transactional emails
- Add FAQ to the site
- Two more Reddit pieces
Since I spent the last two months working on the back-end, I want to dedicate April to customer facing updates.
I also hope that switching gears to more communication/marketing focused work will curb some of my burnout. My thinking is, maybe I'm just burnt out on coding. If I switch to tasks that exercise skills I haven't touched in a while, maybe I'll feel less drained.
Regardless, I'm going to keep my work load light this month and commit to taking more breaks. If everything on my list gets done, great! If not, no biggie. I'm relieving the pressure on myself this month.