Stats for My Projects This Month

PageFactory:

My SEO Experiment:

  • $65.57 revenue from ads and affiliates
  • 1,853 unique visitors (-30% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

  • $1,307 revenue
  • $832 MRR


November was very profitable, but in unexpected ways. The launch of my free course brought in a size-able chunk of change, while Black Friday was a total flop.

Full Recap

Finally Launched My Course

I finally launched my course on November 5th, and so far the results have been really positive.

The course is distributed through Gumroad using their "pay what you want" feature. I'm really glad I went with this method of distribution because I ended up getting a lot more in tips than I expected. By the end of November, the course had been downloaded 2,089 times and I made over $1,300 just from tips.

MRR for PageFactory jumped up significantly this month, and I have to imagine the course had some impact on that. But it's unclear how big that impact really was. The course coupon for PageFactory has only been redeemed 10 times, yet PageFactory had a total of 44 new trials in November.

So, while I assume most of these people came from the course, I don't have much evidence to back that up.

Regardless, the overwhelming consensus seems to be that the course is very comprehensive, well paced, and genuinely helpful. I'm incredibly grateful at how well it went over. ❤️

Swing and a Miss on Black Friday

I didn't take Black Friday seriously at all this year, and I feel like I missed out on a big opportunity for PageFactory.

My original plan, since launching PageFactory in July, was to offer a life time deal (LTD) during Black Friday. Unfortunately, other priorities took precedence over this one, and I didn't begin work on a deal until the week before Thanksgiving.

To my surprise, that's actually when Black Friday starts now. Recently it's become sort of a month long event, and doesn't have much to do with the actual Friday after Thanksgiving anymore. I didn't start exploring a potential promotion until the event was well underway.

Realizing I was late to the game, and how much work a LTD would take, I quickly scrapped the idea for a simple coupon. I sent one email about the promotion to my +3,000 list the morning of Black Friday, and another on Monday to remind people that the deal was ending soon.

My email open rate was about 30%, not great. And in the end, the coupon was only redeemed five times.  

Given the size of my list, I was disappointed by this response. It's clear I should have promoted the deal well in advance.

Black Friday wasn't all bad though. I had a nice bump in revenue because of the few redemptions I did receive (the coupon applied to the PageFactory annual plan, which is paid upfront). And a few existing customers used this coupon to upgrade from a monthly plan to an annual one, which I think is a great indication that PageFactory is providing a lot of value to people.

Moreover, my short exploration of offering a LTD made me realize that path likely isn't right for PageFactory anymore.

If you're starting out and looking to get your first users, or build some runway cash, I think LTDs are a great idea.

But PageFactory already has a substantial user base. The influx of cash would have been nice, but a LTD feels like a huge distraction from the continuous, sustainable growth I've built for PageFactory so far.

To me, focusing on product-market fit seems more beneficial right now than building runway. I still feel conflicted about leaving money on the table though.

December Plans

In November I started on some "small wins" for PageFactory that I wanted to complete before jumping into my next big dev sprint. This included bug fixes, supporting html in templates, more dynamic features in the editor (like images and links), and improving some of the error messages in the application.

I'm in the process of wrapping these up right now, and hopefully I'll be ready to start on the next big feature set by next week.

I'm also looking to hire some help.

My limited time is a huge bottleneck for PageFactory, and the extra cash I made from my course is begging to be put to good use. So, I'm evaluating some writers to help me offload a few marketing tasks.

If all goes well, I can focus more of my attention on development without sacrificing my marketing goals.