Stats for My Projects This Month
- $663 revenue
- $729 MRR (-0.7% from last month)
- 27 active subscribers
- $70.33 revenue from ads and affiliates
- 2,670 (-32% from last month)
Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):
- $1,169 revenue
- $729 MRR
Even with all my energy focused on finishing my course in October, I wasn't able to publish it until the first week of November. As a result, I haven't had much time to work on PageFactory, and it's seeing the effects.
Full Recap
Was the course a good idea?
What I imagined to be a quick win turned into a slow and steady nightmare as I failed to meet the deadline for my free programmatic SEO course over and over again.
Admittedly, the Dunning-Kruger effect was in full swing when I initially planned out this course. Though I've never done a course before, I thought pshhh how hard could it be to record a voice over and some demos?
I've been bit by this kind of thinking before, and perhaps I should have done some research or asked around about best practices and tools before committing to a video course. But, I was impatient.
The downside is that I hardly spent any time in October developing PageFactory. And I'm seeing the effects of that now.
PageFactory didn't see any growth this month. Though I had a lot of new trials, churn was so high it cancelled out any kind of growth. When I totaled up all the earnings for October, I felt lucky to break even.
As originally planned, I think the course will help with some churn. Often, people sign up before they're really ready to implement programmatic SEO, and the course is intended to address this.
For many though, I think it will simply delay how long until they churn. The product just isn't "there" yet. Some people make it work but others need a lot of hand holding. It's frustrating because I know what people need, I just haven't had time to build it.
Did I go too hard on marketing too soon? Should I have spent this time improving the product, and then go hard on marketing?
It feels like I'm doing PageFactory a disservice introducing so many people to the product this early in the game. But I know from past experience that the product will never feel completely "ready" for promotion.
November Plans
I published the course this week, so I'll save any analysis about how that's going for my retrospective next month. I had hoped to do some cool stuff with user feedback, and extra content I didn't have time to include initially, but that's totally on the back burner for now.
A number of services that Fantasy Congress depends on are being depreciated soon. The first end-of-life deadline for one of these services is November 12th. That's five days away as of right now. 💀
I can't delay maintenance for Fantasy Congress any longer. Additionally, the news mentions feature stopped working at some point in October. So throw that on the pile. I love this silly little project, but managing a portfolio of small bets isn't easy!
There are a handful of bugs and tasks I want to work on for PageFactory before jumping into my next big sprint. I want to avoid using the phrase "quick wins" going forward, so perhaps I'll call them "small wins".
We'll see how long this maintenance for Fantasy Congress takes. Hopefully I'll still get a couple of weeks to work on these "small wins", and then I can jump straight into the next big feature set for PageFactory in December. 🤞