Stats for My Projects This Month

PageFactory:

My Niche Site:

  • $207 revenue from ads and affiliates
  • 10,000 unique visitors (+19% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

  • $306 revenue
  • $892 MRR


Churn declined and trial conversions increased this month for PageFactory (my programmatic SEO tool), bringing in a nice change of pace from the previous months.

Weirdly enough, I had a lot less sign ups in May. I guess the quality of leads coming in must have been better? Unfortunately, I'm having trouble figuring out where these people came from. 😩

Full Recap

Launched a Newsletter for My Programmatic Site

One of my priorities for May was spending more time on my programmatic sites.

Unfortunately, I didn't find time to build any new sites like I had hoped. But my main programmatic site finally has a newsletter on it.

So far the results are promising. It's been about 6 days and I already have 19 subscribers.

Initially, I was concerned visitors wouldn't be "invested" enough to put their email down for a newsletter. The site has a high bounce rate (typically 70% - 80%). And considering I'm using double opt-in (users have to verify their email to subscribe), I figured follow through would be really low.

Averaging 3 subscribers a day is nothing to brag about, but hey, I'm happy to see any interest!

For this site, I'm using ConvertKit (affiliate link!) to manage the list and send emails. Since I don't have time to run a proper newsletter with unique content each week, subscribers are currently put into an automated email sequence.

My goal is to create a funnel for some kind of info product eventually. Probably an e-book.

I'm encouraging people to reply to the newsletter emails with any additional questions they have. Hopefully this will reveal what kind of info product would be most valuable to them. We'll see how it goes!

Tracking My Time

I'm tracking my time again and holy cow it's giving me some great insights into how I work. 🤦🏻‍♀️

The first couple years I worked on Fantasy Congress (my first project) I was adamant about tracking my hours. Unfortunately it became a huge source of burnout for me, so I stopped.

Since picking up some client work in March, I got back in the habit of tracking my time and decided to try a really simple, rudimentary system with my indie projects. Just a color coded Google Sheet where I log the date, how much time I spent working, and what I worked on.

A few things I've noticed so far:

  • Email support takes up a lot of time.
  • I spend way too much time on Twitter.
  • Both of these eat into time set aside for shipping features. So, I ship less.

For email, I fall down a lot of rabbit holes chasing bugs and work-arounds for people.

Twitter can sometimes result in this too. But I also spend a lot more time writing tweets than I expected.

So often I would get to the end of a day and think "hey, why didn't I make more progress on the thing I wanted to do?" Yeah...I think I'm finally beginning to see why. 😅

June Plans

Working on my niche site was fun for a couple of weeks, but I'm ready to jump back into PageFactory now.

I have so many marketing and outreach things I'd love to try, but it still feels pointless to invest heavily in marketing at this moment.

The application needs refinement. Not just in terms of features, but with onboarding and pricing as well. I hate seeing MRR plateau like it has for the past 6 months, but I know if I make a big push for sign ups, people will just churn in a month or two.

So, I'm going to be heads down in June, chipping away at features and bugs as best I can. And now that I'm more conscious of how I'm spending my time, maybe I'll knock stuff out faster.