• $963 revenue
• $1,085 MRR
• 31 active subscribers
• $7 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

My Niche Site:

• $76.55 revenue from ads and affiliates
• 4,468 unique visitors

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $874 revenue
• $787 MRR

I've been absent from my projects for the past few months, and decided not to share updates since I wasn't actively working on them. I'm not sure if I have time to jump back into them just yet, but wanted to take a moment to assess the current state of things.

Over the past three months (July, August, and September) my projects have made a total of $5,982 gross revenue. Reflecting on these past months, and my absence, has made me really appreciate SaaS. If I pursued a service based business (like freelancing), there's no doubt I'd make more money up front, and faster. But taking time away from the business would mean revenue drops to zero.

I know, I know...you can work around this by negotiating maintenance contracts. But when the main source of revenue relies solely on you working in the business, you're always chained to it. You can never be completely "hands off".

Even after 5+ years, I'm far from shattering the "SaaS ceiling". Yet, moments like these affirm my pursuit. My main goal is freedom, and being able to step away without things falling apart is a big part of that.

Still, there are plenty of problems I can't ignore forever.

High churn means I'm slowly hemorrhaging cash. In the past, my projects have grown by acquiring enough new customers to offset churn. Stepping away at this time, without some kind of marketing flywheel in place, means acquisition slows down.

There's a key lesson I need to learn in order to take the next step in this journey. And I'm increasingly becoming obsessed with it: How to keep customers.

So far, I've learned how to build and launch projects, acquire users, and finally started to scratch the surface of successful marketing. But I've never had substantial success lowering churn.

Admittedly, I was too focused on acquisition to give this problem my full attention. But taking time off helped me re-prioritize. I don't want to run a business that feels like a hamster wheel. I want steady, reliable, consistent revenue. And that starts with customers who stick around.

PageFactory:

• $1,135 revenue
• $1,300 MRR (+12% from last month)
• 40 active subscribers
• $50 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

My Niche Site:

• $136 revenue from ads and affiliates
• 6,574 unique visitors (-52% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $505 revenue
• $873 MRR

This was by far my most profitable June ever as an indie maker. Compared to last year, I increased the revenue of my indie projects by 3x. Progress baby!

That said, this month still felt like a huge let down. I derailed most of my original plans in order to create a "quick" Shopify integration for PageFactory, which turned into a nightmare.

Full Recap

The Shopify Saga

It started like this:

Someone signed up for a trial of PageFactory (my no-code programmatic SEO tool), and asked if we had any plans to create a Shopify integration.

This wasn't the first time I've been asked about Shopify. And being tired of telling customers "no", as well as self conscious of how many meaningful changes I've actually shipped for PageFactory this year, I decided to prioritize the integration.

I mean, I had every intention of adding a Shopify integration eventually. So why not now? It would only take a week or two tops...probably...

I told the customer I'd be pushing out an integration in a week or two, and got to work. Everything seemed pretty standard in the beginning. I was able to connect my app to a test store and start publishing pages in bulk quickly.

I decided to include support for Shopify meta-fields, and that's when I started to hit some snags.

Shopify has two APIs: a standard REST one and a GraphQL one. For some reason, they really push the GraphQL API. But there's certain things you can only do with each, so you end up using both. On top of that, both are buggy. I spent a lot of time sifting through forums looking for work-arounds to things that were supported in the documentation, but not in reality. 😵‍💫

Regardless, in a couple of weeks, I was ready to publish my changes.

Previously I had breezed over Shopify's requirements for publishing integrations, reading just enough to confirm my app wouldn't violate their terms. Now, I was doing a much more in depth read through. And that's when I noticed this section, which explains that Shopify requires all publicly available applications to bill customers through their API.

Obviously, I couldn't change the billing for every PageFactory customer to Shopify. Most of my customers don't use Shopify! This requirement made no sense for an application that integrates with many different services, as opposed to one that exists solely to extend the Shopify platform.

I'll spare you the details of what went down. But after a bunch of back and forth with their support, here's what I was told:

• Shopify has two distribution methods for an integration: one where it can be used on only a single store, and one where the integration can be public (so it can be used on multiple stores).
• The only way to make your integration public (so it can be used by multiple stores), is by publishing it in the Shopify App store.
• Anyone who installs your application via the Shopify App store must pay for your service through the Shopify Billing API.
• It's possible to get an exemption to this rule, but there is no standard criteria for determining if an application qualifies for an exemption. They are determined on a case-by-case basis. PageFactory did not qualify for an exemption. 🙄
• My existing customers would not have to change their billing to Shopify. Only new customers that installed my application through the Shopify App store.

By the time I got all of my questions answered, it was basically the last week of June.

A glimmer of hope remained. I just needed to hustle and create an entirely separate billing system for only a handful of users! And jump through all their other hoops for getting approved, like creating a fully functional demo store and GDPR webhooks. Fun!

I tried to put my foot on the gas and power through, but there was nothing left in the tank. I was totally burnt out from constantly discovering surprise requirements that increased the scope and timeline of this project.

And before anyone thinks I'm trying to blame Shopify: I know this was my own fault. All of Shopify's partner requirements are listed in their documentation. They did not "hide" information or intentionally deceive me.

This was just an ill-fated attempt to "move fast and break things." Unfortunately, the thing I think I broke was my brain. 🙃

But It Wasn't All Bad

I did my best to stay productive during the downtime waiting to hear back from Shopify's support.

First, Fantasy Congress got a little update. Now, when educators log in, they get a notification reminding them about the referral program. I'm hoping this will encourage more people to actually use their referral codes as we enter the busy back-to-school season.

A few other small wins:

• I finally set up a welcome email for PageFactory.
• My programmatic niche site acquired 28 newsletter subscribers in it's first month.
• All of my sites were migrated from Universal Analytics to Fathom.

July Plans

Something I read recently suggested burnout occurs when you feel like you're working really hard but make no progress. And that's where I'm at right now.

Looking back at the past six months, I don't feel like I've made any sizable progress with PageFactory. It's hard to put a finger on exactly why, but I rarely see things to completion.

That said, I'm gently shelving the Shopify integration for a later time. If I keep banging my head against this, I will surely burn out.

Instead, I want to focus on little things. Tasks that I'm confident can be done in a day or two. Maybe if I get some momentum going, I'll avoid burning out completely. I took a nice long break to visit friends over the Fourth of July holiday, so I feel somewhat rested and motivated.

July marks one full year since I launched PageFactory, and I still see so much potential in this business. But if I can't move the needle soon, it may be time to reevaluate it's future.

PageFactory:

• $1,006 revenue
• $1,157 MRR (+17% from last month)
• 37 active subscribers
• $166 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

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.

PageFactory:

• $768 revenue
• $986 MRR (+9% from last month)
• 33 active subscribers
• $156 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

My SEO Experiment:

• $190 revenue from ads and affiliates
• 8,382 unique visitors (+29% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $264 revenue
• $930 MRR

I attended my first  MicroConf in April and got a fresh new perspective on my micro-SaaS projects and indie journey overall.

I also released some small improvements to PageFactory (my programmatic SEO tool) this month. Hopefully I'm setting it up to be in a good position so I can explore some other opportunities in May.

Full Recap

Attending MicroConf

This year, I was incredibly lucky to receive a scholarship to attend MicroConf, a two day conference for bootstrapped SaaS businesses.

Overall, it was a really rewarding experience! I've never attended a conference on my own before, but everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming.

The big appeal of MicroConf (at least as I understand it) is making connections. And the conference kind of leans into this. There were meetups, an organized small group lunch, and even excursions! (I did the go-karts 😎) I found a lot of value in talking with the other attendees, and even joined a mastermind with some of the other women I met!

The talks were also very informative. And even though most of the conference was geared towards more established businesses, I got lots of value as a small solo-prenuer still looking for product-market fit.

So what was my biggest takeaway?

I think I'm more committed than ever to building a lifestyle business.

MicroConf gave me a lot of perspective. It made me reflect on my values, my goals, and what it really takes to 5x, 10x, or even 100x your revenue. After attending MicroConf, I feel more confident than ever that building a small lifestyle business is the best choice for me.

Some Small Enhancements for PageFactory

In between traveling and unpacking after our move, I was able to release some small features for PageFactory.

Most notably, my Wordpress integration now supports dynamic featured images.

Wordpress uses "featured images" for all sorts of things, like thumbnails and social sharing. Now, instead of using the same image for every post, users can set a unique featured image for each post.

Other notable improvements include the ability to copy templates with the click of a button, and finally adding a guide for the template editor to the documentation.

I'm still waiting to get PageFactory approved for the marketplace I've previously mentioned. In April I added a special sign-up flow to better fit the needs of this marketplace. But we've been going back and forth on this since February! I'm ready to see if all this work will actually pay off.

May Plans

I wasn't planning to work on PageFactory at all in April. Originally, I wanted to work on building more programmatic sites. But after MicroConf, I was really excited to jump back in it!

So, my plans for May will be my original plans for April: Build more programmatic websites. And, improve my existing ones.

I've gained so much knowledge and experience helping others with programmatic SEO. And I have so many ideas for sites! It feels like I'm leaving money on the table if I don't pursue more opportunities with this.

Taking time off from PageFactory feels...scary. This was a problem I often struggled with working on Fantasy Congress (my first indie SaaS).

I always felt spending time on something else would negate all the progress I made. But when I finally got the courage to step away from it, nothing bad happened.

I regret spending so much time on one project, and not exploring more opportunities. Early on, I distinctly remember coming across the phrase "put more buy buttons on the internet." My apologizes for not remembering exactly where I saw this, but it couldn't be more true. Since pursuing more revenue streams, I'm making more money!

So, this month, I'm going to try to avoid past mistakes and spend a little time on other opportunities.

PageFactory:

• $768 revenue
• $908 MRR (-18% from last month)
• 31 active subscribers
• $122 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

My SEO Experiment:

• $181 revenue from ads and affiliates
• 6,498 unique visitors (+51% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $413 revenue
• $930 MRR

On the personal side of things, I had a very exciting month. Me and my partner bought our first home and moved in. I also picked up some programmatic SEO client work in March. But as a result, I didn't get to spend much time on my projects. Unfortunately my main project (PageFactory) is still on a downward trajectory. Yet, my SEO experiment continues to take off.  

Full Recap

Can I turn PageFactory around?

This is the third month in a row that PageFactory has had net negative growth. MRR also dipped below $1k for the first time since November.

I keep wondering what's different now compared to the growth I saw in the fall. Then I remember I launched my free programmatic SEO course in November. So it seems since hype for the course has died down, interest in PageFactory has also slowly waned.

But more importantly, I can't hold on to the customers I do get for very long.

So far I've assumed churn was due to a lack of features. After careful reflection though (and reading through old emails), its apparent user churn isn't driven by just one thing.  

Most notably, a lot of people don't need a monthly subscription for a service like this. They sign up, generate their pages, and then they're done.

Switching to a pricing structure that allows people to pay based on usage would likely be the "correct" way to price a service like this. However, I dislike the idea of encouraging one-time transactions over a monthly subscription. It means income from PageFactory would be less predictable, and outreach efforts (which I already struggle keeping up with) would be 10x more important.

Recurring revenue is what makes SaaS such a powerful business model. And I'm beginning to wonder, if PageFactory can't sustain itself on subscriptions is it worth all this work?

I'm building a SaaS application along side direct integrations with many different (and quirky) third party services, and also handling all the marketing efforts, customer support, and everything else that comes along with running a business like this. I actually tried contracting some of my tasks out in March, but none of it saved me any time in the end.

If I don't have recurring revenue, how could I turn a profit without completely burning out? Maybe PageFactory isn't shaping up to be a good fit for a solo-preneur after all.

April Plans

I have a couple new customer acquisition strategies already in the works for April, so it will be interesting to see if either of these have an effect on growth or churn. Mostly though, I'm itching to take a break from PageFactory to build more sites around programmatic SEO.

Since my initial programmatic experiment, I planned on building a small "army" of these sites and monetizing them with ads. However, I've devoted all my time over the past 12 months to PageFactory in lieu of building sites. And it's a bit disheartening to realize that, had I spent all this time working on more programmatic sites, I could be making a lot more money by now. 😅

I'm also going to my first MicroConf in April. Hoping I'll come away from that experience with a lot more knowledge on what to do next with PageFactory. So, it kind of feels like the best time to let my foot off the gas and coast.

PageFactory:

• $823 revenue
• $1,104 MRR (-8% from last month)
• 36 active subscribers
• $96 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

My SEO Experiment:

• $104 revenue from ads and affiliates
• 4,297 unique visitors (+30% from last month)

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $1,247 revenue
• $923 MRR

Due to very little marketing, growth for PageFactory stalled in February. Luckily, my other projects had a good month.

In other news, I'm going to attend my first ever MicroConf this April! Pretty stoked.

I also took time to write two articles for this blog in February: a reflection on my five year anniversary as a full-time indie hacker (which I celebrated this month), and a comparison of potential replacements for Universal Analytics.

Full Recap

Churn is a Bummer

In February, I started working on some bigger enhancements for PageFactory, such as no-code solutions for for-loops and if/else operations. Also, a much requested shortcut feature.

Unfortunately, I didn't take time to prepare any marketing material at the start of the month, and essentially didn't market PageFactory in February. Churn is still high, and customer acquisition slowed, which resulted in negative growth.

Honestly, it's hard to feel motivated to market a product when so many customers churn.

As it stands now, PageFactory only serves about 30% of the customers interested in using it. The other +70% of users need more features, or more hand holding, to make use of the product.

I get scared when I see MRR and active subscribers go down. But I hate having to tell people that a feature or enhancement is on my roadmap. After 6 months, most of what people need is still on my roadmap.

This is expected when you're looking for product-market fit though, right? So I'm not terribly discouraged. Just...frustrated by my speed (or lack there of).

I'm trying to think of ways to make myself faster at shipping and marketing. Wondering if there are cheap things I can hire out that will make a difference. 🤔

March Plans

My focus feels so split. I have plans for a new website for PageFactory, a big dev sprint I want to jump into, and I'd really love to work on my programmatic site since it's traffic has taken off.

This might be the first time I've ever said this, but I don't know what I'm going to work on this month. 🤷‍♀️

My first priority is scheduling some tweets again, so I don't go another month without any kind of marketing. But after that, I can't decide. Honestly, I think I'll just jump into whatever feels most urgent at the time.  

I'm someone who loves to plan. But lately I've been wondering if my planning and obsessing over efficiency is really just procrastination. For March, I'm throwing caution to the wind and seeing if not planning actually helps me get more done.

The time has come. The end is nigh.

Google is officially sun setting Universal Analytics (UA) this year, and I'm tired of getting emails about it.

Over the past year, I've seen a lot more discussion and praise for alternative analytics services. Most of them are paid, with an emphasis on privacy and GDPR compliance (meaning no popups for users to opt-in or accept cookies).

Three front runners seem to get more mention than the rest. And a couple of weeks ago, I tried to throw them all onto a single website (one that I'm still developing and don't care a ton about) to see if one service might emerge as the best.

But wait, what's wrong with GA4?

For me, the biggest problem with the new iteration of Google Analytics (GA4), is the changes made to acquisition metrics.

Increasing traffic (the ultimate goal for every site, right?) starts with analyzing user acquisition. I want to know where or how people are finding out about my sites. And when I see something that works, I double down on it. Then rinse, repeat, and profit! (hopefully)

Google committed a cardinal sin when they removed the "full referrer" path from GA4. The layout is annoying, but I could get over it. So long as I had access to all the data in UA.

While GA4 does include referring domains, it does not include the full path of the referring page. For example, if you suddenly get a bunch of traffic from Reddit, GA4 will only tell you that your traffic is coming from somewhere on Reddit. But it won't give you the URL to the actual page with the link people are clicking.

There are other, smaller things I dislike about GA4. But this was the issue that made me decide alternative services were worth exploring.

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics (SA) was the most privacy focused option I explored. It uses the user's "referrer" header to determine whether a visitor is "unique", instead of their IP address.

At first, I was a little miffed by this. The referrer method has no means for determining if a visit is truly unique. It simply counts each time someone enters your site. So, even if someone visited 20 minutes ago, if they don't use an internal link, that page view will count as a unique visit.

Having used Google Analytics (GA) for so long, I expected some means for tracking the number of individual people using my site, not just the number of visits (or sessions) the site receives in general.

But after some thought, I began to wonder if I really needed to track "unique visitors" in the first place.

Are sessions actually a better metric for my goals?

I monetize my programmatic site through display ads. Does it really matter how many "unique" people I get on the site if users are constantly being served unique ads? Plus, with so much traffic coming from search, I think it's fair to assume that a majority of visitors are indeed unique.

For my two micro-SaaS though, it's a slightly different story. My ultimate goal is to get lots of returning visitors, because this means people are using the service. It's imperative I know what percentage of visitors are new leads and where they're coming from, versus returning visitors using the app.

These two audiences need to be analyzed separately for a SaaS website. And I'm not sure how I might do that in SA currently.

A Slight Twist

TL;DR: For the purposes of this evaluation, I didn't use SA on the same site that I used Fathom and Plausible.

Next I headed over to Plausible to see how it compared to SA. While SA reported 80 visitors for this site in the past two weeks, Plausible only reported...5?!

I jumped over to Fathom, and was surprised to see the same thing. Only 5 visitors reported for the past two weeks.

Something clearly wasn't right here. Since SA had recorded so many unique countries of origin, I figured it's traffic must have some validity. Surely, in the past couple of weeks, this site hadn't received traffic from only 5 different people.

I opened up the developer tools on my browser and noticed Wordpress was overwriting the URLs for each service's script, in order to serve its own cached version. Clearly suspect, I headed to the Plausible documentation looking for answers. Right away, I found this paragraph:

On WordPress? We recommend you use our plugin. It's very lightweight, excludes admin visits by default and allows you to see the stats in your WP dashboard. It also avoids conflicts with WP Rocket and similar plugins that can happen with our snippet. See more here.

Until recently, I avoided Wordpress. So I was unfamiliar with these plugins and their...features. When presented with each script tag, I simply added it to the site's header (using a plugin since that was easiest), and washed my hands of it. I don't recall seeing any tips about Wordpress when initially presented with the script in Plausible or Fathom. Though, turns out, they both have special sections for Wordpress in their documentation.

This fiasco was definitely user error on my part. However, I think both services could do a little more to guide users and avoid these problems. Perhaps pointing people towards their integrations before presenting them with the script? Not that I probably would have paid attention anyway. 😅

Luckily, I had a hunch these two services might be winners. So I added them both to another site when I set up this experiment.

Plausible

Plausible is the service I've seen praised the most in my circles lately. It's entirely open source. So, if you're looking for a completely free alternative to Google Analytics, hosting a plausible instance on your own server is likely your best bet.

Convenience is more important to me right now, so I opted for the "done for you" paid version.

I wouldn't consider myself an analytics "power user." I mostly care about basic things like overall traffic, bounce rate, and where people are coming from. Plausible does a great job making the metrics I care most about obvious and available right out of the box. The UI was very enjoyable and easy to use.

I also love that they include the user's entry and exit pages as part of their metrics, which was missing in SA.

Where SA puts focus on tracking custom goals and events, Plausible puts UTM tracking (basically custom URL query parameters) front and center. Again, my usage of analytics is pretty simple, so I haven't played with either custom goals, events, or UTM parameters yet. But technically, both platforms support all three.

I found Plausible's method for tracking unique visitors much more reliable, since it uses the user's IP address. And this method is still GDPR compliant since the data is anonymized (so no pop-up necessary).

Compared to SA, I thought Plausible was much closer to a complete GA replacement.

Fathom

Out of the three options I tested in this experiment, Fathom is the one I've been using the longest. It was the first privacy focused, GDPR compliant service introduced to me. And as an added bonus, it's entirely independent and bootstrapped!

I initially loved Fathom because it's so simple. It uses the same hashed and salted IP system as Plausible for tracking users. And you can make things more complicated with custom events and UTM parameters (though I never felt this was necessary).

Fathom also makes it very easy to compare metrics by default. For instance, if you want to compare page views versus bounce rate, simply click on each metric in the dashboard, and both will show up on the graph.

And as an added bonus, Fathom has uptime monitoring for your site built in. It's required you turn it on first, but I thought this was a really neat touch.

That said, I used Fathom for my SaaS, PageFactory, for a few months by this point. And as my marketing efforts were getting more serious, I wondered if I was missing out on important information.

For instance, I want to start a blog for PageFactory. If a user enters the website through social media or search, how could I track their journey through my funnel?

None of the options I explored provided  the kind of "Behavior Flow" metrics available in UA. However, Plausible at least provided information about the user's exit pages out of the box. At the very least, that's some information about the user's journey that I wouldn't have to set up, or dig for, on my own.

The Decision...

While Simple Analytics might be fine for niche sites that are monetized through display ads, I felt the way it tracks unique users was a little too simple to service the variety of sites I own. So, as expected, the final decision was between Plausible and Fathom.

I really wanted to fall in love with Plausible after all the good things I've heard. But, in the end, I decided to stick with Fathom.

I have to admit, I liked the UI for Plausible more. But Fathom is slightly cheaper, and it includes uptime monitoring. Both services are very similar. But for me, the price and uptime monitoring put Fathom slightly over the top.

To be fair, my analysis of these services was fairly surface level. There may be additional functionality for a service I left out, or got slightly wrong. You should always do your own research when deciding which software to use, as opposed to following the advice of a random internet stranger! But I hope this write up at least gave you an introduction to each service, and information on why you might like one over the other.

• $850 revenue
• $1,201 MRR
• 39 active subscribers
• $203 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

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.

PageFactory:

• $2,483 revenue
• $1,204 MRR (+65% from last month)
• 40 active subscribers
• $1,380 from "Pay what you want" programmatic SEO course

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.

PageFactory:

• $663 revenue
• $729 MRR (-0.7% from last month)
• 27 active subscribers

My SEO Experiment:

• $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. 🤞

My SEO Experiment:

• $118.47 revenue from ads and affiliates
• 3,921 unique visitors (-34% from last month)

PageFactory:

• $1,165.50 revenue
• $734.49 MRR (+44% from last month)
• 28 active subscribers

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $1,727 revenue
• $758.73 MRR

I beat my previous revenue record as an indie maker this month, bringing in a total of $3,010 from my projects. PageFactory saw more desirable growth, and I feel like I finally hit my groove balancing marketing and development work.

Full Recap

At long last, I finally pushed out a Webflow integration for PageFactory in September. This feature was fraught with pivots, and it's made me less than excited to build more integrations for PageFactory.

Initially I wanted to integrate PageFactory with Zapier, which would support publishing directly to Webflow as well as many other platforms. Unfortunately Zapier's Webflow integration wasn't capable of updating pages or publishing them en masse, two things that are pretty important to my users.

I might come back to Zapier eventually. But most people seem satisfied using the existing integrations or downloading their content to copy and paste over to their site. So, more integrations don't feel like the highest priority.

Next, I jumped into working on my free programmatic SEO course.

This is another item I've been promising people for a little over a month now. My original plan was to knock it out in the last week of September. Unfortunately that's come and gone, and I'm still working on it.

I severely underestimated how much work a course might take. It didn't feel like a lot of content when I began consolidating my notes and building an outline. Once I started working on a script though, I realized there's a lot more to cover than I originally thought.

Admittedly, time management isn't my best skill. And neither is estimating my time. I love giving my users a timeline for features because I want to be as open as possible with them and build trust. But I feel like this sets me up for failure since I'm rarely able to stick to it.

October Plans

Currently, it's all hands on deck to finish up my course. The course will drive much of my marketing content for many months to come, so finishing it is key to a lot of things I want to accomplish.

At some point this month, I have to work on Fantasy Congress. This was my first indie project, and I've been "hands off" on this project since starting PageFactory.

Fantasy Congress has a few critical dependencies being depreciated by the end of the year. They must be updated in order to keep the application functioning. Hopefully they're simple upgrades and nothing too crazy. (famous last words!)

That said, I'm not sure how much I can expect to get done for PageFactory this month. The next round of features I want to tackle are pretty complex. I want to focus on creating a solid foundation so it's easier to add more ways for users to mix-and-match spreadsheet data in the future.

At most, I expect to start on my next big dev sprint, but I doubt I'll be able to deliver any ground breaking new features in the next month. I'll probably take a week to knock out some bugs and quick wins, before I plunge into the next big thing.

My SEO Experiment:

• 5,947 unique visitors (+63% from last month)
• $81.13 revenue from ads and affiliates

PageFactory:

• $526 revenue
• $509.17 MRR (+30% from last month)
• 22 active subscribers

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $812 revenue
• $787.71 MRR

August was the first full month of operating my new SaaS, PageFactory. The excitement of launching has worn off and the reality of growing a small SaaS product has set in. I also finally got ads on my programmatic site and I'm very happy with the results so far.

Full Recap

Looking for Qualified Leads

PageFactory (my programmatic SEO tool and latest venture) battled a lot of churn this month. I actually ended up getting quite a few new trials and 10 new subscribers, but net growth was minimal because I had almost an equal amount of churn.

Many of the users who churn appear to be unqualified leads. I've had a lot of people tell me they'll "come back" to PageFactory when they figure out how to target their niche with programmatic content.

Luckily, I already had something in the works I think should help with this.

Since last spring, I've been considering creating a course. I thought a course on programmatic SEO would make a good lead magnet, but the timing never felt right. At the same time, I've seen countless people ask for a course on this subject. And even though one or two exist, they're not very popular.

So I put out some feelers, created a landing page with an email opt in form, and announced my free programmatic SEO course on twitter.

My tweet really took off. In two days, I had over 500 opt-ins for the course. By the end of August, I had over 700.

Hopefully this will bring people into the top of my funnel (like a good lead magnet should), and also answer their questions and objections so they move farther down the funnel as well.

My Experiment is Making Some Real Money

My programmatic site finally got approved for Adsense in the beginning of August. No one talks very highly of Adsense, so I had very low expectations about what I might make from it. Nonetheless, I was pleased with the results.

The site made $76.07 from its first month with Adsense. At this point, I feel like it's time to stop calling this an experiment and treat it as a serious revenue stream.

And this is just the beginning. There's still so much I can do to increase traffic and improve the site's metrics. I can't believe it was that easy to make ~$75 from programmatic SEO.  I'm stoked to see how much I could make if I took it more seriously.

September Plans

A big thing I continued to struggle with in August was balancing my time between marketing and development. I only shipped one feature for PageFactory in all of August (custom post types for Wordpress templates). I also started on a Webflow integration, but wasn't making great progress on it.

The last week of August I experimented with a new schedule: development work in the morning (my most focused time of day) and early afternoon, then a couple hours of marketing in the evening after dinner.

So far, this feels good. Normally when I try to do marketing tasks along side development I feel like a mess. But this schedule feels very natural. I do the hardest work in the morning when I have the most energy and focus. Then in the evening, I curl up in bed or on the couch with my laptop and do more creative, reflective work.

For September, I'm going to continue dedicating my days to shipping regardless of my marketing goals. The application needs more features, and improved features, in order to reduce churn. But hopefully a couple hours of marketing in the evening will be enough to keep moving forward on that front as well.

My SEO Experiment:

• 3,642 unique visitors (-3% from last month)
• $6.74 in commissions from Amazon Affiliates

PageFactory:

• $1,449.50 revenue
• $392.17 MRR
• 20 new subscribers

Fantasy Congress:

• $701 revenue
• $828.88 MRR
• 2 new subscribers

Thanks to the successful launch of PageFactory, I had my highest grossing month ever as an indie maker.

Full Recap

Successful Launch for PageFactory

My biggest priority for July was launching PageFactory - a tool that makes programmatic SEO easier to implement.

The days leading up to the launch were particularly harrowing. Between food poisoning, my neighbors house catching on fire, and things not working like they should (damn you Wordpress!), I ended up having to delay the launch by a couple of days. But considering the results, I don't think this affected the outcome.

I had 273 emails on my waitlist when I launched in mid July. In it's first week, PageFactory made $1,235 in cash from annual signups and had 20-ish people trying out the product on a free trial. The free trials started to convert at the end of the month, which resulted in $1,449.50 total revenue for PageFactory in July.

This launch was by far my best to date, and I did a little write up on indie hackers about why I thought this time was different. To give you a quick TL;DR, here are the things that I think made the biggest difference:

1. I over communicated with my audience leading up to the launch.
2. Required credit card information in order to start the free trial.
3. Offered an annual plan.

In my last retrospective, I stated my goal was to get 10 paying sign ups by the end of the month. I beat this goal twice in July by getting a total of 20 paying subscribers (not including users still on a trial).

Of course, I've had some churn. So far I think about 50% of my free trials are converting. The two biggest factors for churn seem to be a lack of specific features, and not having enough time to try the product before the free trial is up.

Choosing to leave because the application doesn't have more advanced features makes sense. It's pretty minimal right now. Luckily customer research has given me a good idea of what people want. The problem is I'm a one woman team and can't do everything at once!

But when people share they didn't have time to try the product, that makes me nervous. My guess is that the problem PageFactory solves isn't very important to them. Although, it takes a little bit of investment in order to get started with programmatic SEO, so perhaps I'm overthinking it.

Should I consider this idea validated? I think "yes". Not only have people paid for the product, but they're really using it as well.

Validation isn't product-market fit though, and this is where I got hung up with my last project. Can I reach the right audience and iterate fast enough to make this product profitable? I'm nervous about getting stuck again on the long, slow SaaS ramp of death...

Things may be turning around for my SEO experiment

There wasn't much extra time in July to invest in my initial programmatic SEO experiment. Unique visitors were roughly the same as they were in June. But I continued to see more pages get indexed, which is a really great sign.

At the beginning of July, I saw a big jump in impressions. From asking around, it looks like this could be the result of pages moving up in the SERP, or the pages I finally got indexed are beginning to rank.

The last time I had a big spike in impressions, my traffic took off. So, fingers crossed that happens again.

In July I also added more blog content to pad out the site, was officially approved for the Amazon affiliate program, and made $6.74 off of commissions. The biggest thing I want to do now is swap out my current affiliate links for higher priced items, and get approved for Adsense. At some point, I actually need to do a write up about the results of this experiment. But, who knows when I'll have time.

August Plans

Looking back, I'm very happy with everything I did leading up to the launch of PageFactory. I think I did a good job shipping small things, iterating, collecting user feedback, and validating the idea. But I'm struggling to find my footing post launch.

PageFactory needs work, but I'm hyper vigilant about avoiding the mistakes I made with Fantasy Congress. It's gotten to the point where spending time on anything besides promotion and marketing feels scary!

Much of this is fueled by the fear that the channels I used to acquire users for my beta and waitlist don't seem to be working anymore. Almost all of my signups have come from the waitlist. I thought I had validated a couple of marketing channels, and therefore would continue to get a slow, steady trickle of sign ups. I guess validated channels for a free product versus paying ones are different. 😅

How do I find balance between reaching out to my audience and continuing to develop the product?

I've seen others do one week of marketing and then switch to one week of coding. I tried this the past couple of weeks and it's been a mess. Too much context switching for me. I can never get into a state of "deep work."

For August, I think I'm going to try switching off every two weeks. Hopefully, this gives me enough time to switch gears and settle in.

August will surely be a big period of growth for me personally. I'm pushing myself to do a lot of things that make me very uncomfortable. But hopefully I'll come out on the other side better and stronger. 💪🏻

My SEO Experiment:

• 3,769 unique visitors (-10% from last month)
• 6,275 page views
• 00:55 avg session duration

PageFactory:

• 243 waitlist signups
• 556 site visitors

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $469 revenue this month

June was all about "deep work". I spent most of my time heads down, hustling to launch PageFactory. But even though I've been neglecting my other projects, they had some small wins this month.  

Full Recap

Plateaued Growth for the Experiment Site

Growth for my experimental programmatic SEO site slowed for the first time this month. It had a slight dip in visitors this June, but overall, traffic seems to have plateaued around 130 visitors per day.

I'm unsure of what's causing the dip. Part of me is concerned this is a consequence of Google's core update from May. If so, traffic would likely continue to decline. But also, the niche this site is based around (gardening) is seasonal, and it's peak period has passed.

Since site impressions in Google Search Console leveled off in June, I'm inclined to think gardening searches have slowed in general. But to be frank, this is speculation more than anything else.

On the bright side, the experiment made it's first affiliate earnings in June! Two separate purchases which earned me a whopping total of $0.87 in commissions.

As others pointed out, you won't get far with the Amazon affiliate program selling cheap merchandise like $5 seed packets. Selling more expensive items means higher commissions. So, I'm thinking about higher priced items I can highlight on the site in place of the seeds.

I also started to see an uptick in the number of pages indexed by Google this month.

In May I worked on improving internal linking for the site, hoping this would get more pages out of the "discovered - currently not indexed" status. By the end of June, I had 14 more pages indexed.

Safe to say, I think the changes are working. There's a lot more I'd like to do in regards to this, but I doubt I'll have time in the next few weeks.

Fantasy Congress' Fall Preview?

Summer is typically the "off-season" for my small educational game, Fantasy Congress. A majority of it's revenue comes from civics educators, who make most of their purchases in the fall and at the beginning of spring semester.

To my surprise, Fantasy Congress got a handful of inquiries in June. One educator made a purchase, while others have started the process of purchasing through their school (which typically takes a full month).

The interested parties came from a teacher Facebook group, and I was delighted to see that the person who shared it also shared their referral code!

Referrals were the last project I worked on for Fantasy Congress before taking a break to pursue other ideas. The update was pushed live in February, so it hasn't been tested during peak purchasing season yet. I'm hoping these June purchases are a sign the referral program will bring in more business this fall.

Hustling to Launch PageFactory

My main focus for June was launching the MVP for PageFactory, a tool that helps you generate pages for programmatic SEO.

I sent an email to my 200+ waitlist about closing the beta in mid June. Initially I communicated that PageFactory would be launched at the end of June, but with the Fourth of July holiday in the states starting around that time, I thought it would be better to launch the week after. My official launch date is July 11th to the waitlist (with a discount), and July 13th to the public.

The fully "launched" version of PageFactory will be different from the beta in a few ways.

First, users will be able to use a WYSIWYG editor to create templates, replacing the need to write HTML or Jinja code.

And second, PageFactory will "sync" pages to Wordpress websites, so users don't have to deal with manually importing content into Wordpress. If the launch goes well and this seems like a viable product, I plan to integrate PageFactory with more website builders. Next would probably be Webflow.

Admittedly, I'm doing more for the "official launch" of the MVP than I probably should. Unnecessary customization, optimizing things that don't need to be optimized...typical stuff that builders and tinkerers like to get hung up on. But solving the technical challenges for PageFactory have been really fun! When I get in the "zone," it's hard to keep myself in check. 😅

Enjoying working on PageFactory has surprised me. I've had a lot more fun working on PageFactory than anything I've done for Fantasy Congress in the last couple years. And yet, Fantasy Congress is the project I'm more passionate about. Maybe it's because PageFactory is shiny and new. But I've also started to think "passion projects" are less adaptable and inherently more grueling than "profit driven" projects.  

Still, I'm trying to keep my expectations for the launch to a minimum. Already I've put a lot of energy into something that might completely flop. Perfectionism is something I still need to work on.

July Plans

The big plan for July is launching PageFactory and validating it's potential to turn a profit.

My goal is 10 paying sign ups by the end of the month. Anything less than that and I doubt this is a product people really want.

Since I spent all of June heads down cranking out code, I've neglected marketing the launch. But I didn't completely forget about marketing! I've promoted it on twitter here and there, trying to build the waitlist. I also submitted PageFactory to BetaList but was rejected, even though I followed all of their guidelines. 😒

Regardless, I'll need a real marketing plan if the launch goes well. Ironically, programmatic SEO doesn't seem like a great match for PageFactory. So whatever marketing channels end up working will likely be brand new to me.

Launching is exciting but also nerve-wracking. Honestly, if people don't find value in PageFactory, I'll be bummed. But disappointment is a small price to pay for the potential upside.

In one month, we'll know if the ship sinks or sails!

My SEO Experiment:

• 4,187 unique visitors (+108% from last month)
• 7,753 page views
• 01:07 avg session duration

PageFactory (new!):

• 183 total beta signups
• 525 site visitors

Fantasy Congress (maintenance only):

• $358 revenue

Last month I said I wouldn't be working on my latest SaaS venture any time soon. Instead, I planned to spend May doubling down on building more websites with programmatic SEO.

Well, surprise surprise, my priorities made a complete 180 mid-month and now I'm hustling to launch a new SaaS.

Full Recap

Monetizing the experiment website

In May, I set out to add Adsense and Amazon affiliate links to my experimental programmatic SEO website. So far, the outcome has been less than desirable.

First, I was rejected from Adsense for "low quality content." This isn't a total surprise. I assume it has to do with the content on each page being so similar.

I'm not the only one who's been flagged for this before. And others have told me their site was approved after waiting a little and applying again, even without making any changes.  

Getting started with an ad network like Adsense is something I'm eager to try. In an attempt to improve my chances of getting approved when I re-apply, I actually wrote a few articles for the site.

This might seem counterintuitive, since the purpose of the experiment was to see how far I could get with programmatic SEO. But, I don't see why the two strategies shouldn't be used in parallel. At the very least, I've spent considerably less energy getting to 4k visitors per month than if I'd started with traditional, long-form SEO.

To help me write content faster, I also got an annual subscription to Copy.ai (affiliate link, fyi!). I love this tool. The AI isn't perfect, but it's great for whipping up a quick rough draft and combating writers block. They have a generous free tier that I was completely addicted to (until I maxed it out!). I can't imagine writing content without it at this point.

After making some changes to improve internal linking and highlight my new long-form content, I signed up for Amazon Associates and began adding affiliate links to the site.

So far, I'm getting clicks every other day or so. But no one's made a purchase that can be credited to my account.

Lots of potential factors at play here I think. Am I getting enough traffic? Am I selling the right products? Should I highlight the products in a different way? Most of my traffic is on mobile. Can the Amazon app track cookies like a browser would?

I'm sure there are best practices for affiliate marketing, but searching around, I haven't found anything particularly helpful. Thinking of joining some affiliate marketing communities in hopes of learning from other's experience. If you know of any communities like that, I'd love to hear it!

Introducing PageFactory (originally "Opal")

I had three more customer interviews for my programmatic SEO tool in May that went really well. Additionally, more beta users were trying the application and sending me their thoughts on it.

The feedback coming in was really exciting. People began asking me when the product will be fully launched, and (unprompted) explicitly stating they would pay money for it. Unbeknownst to me, someone even wrote a guide on how to use the tool for programmatic SEO.

Through all this, something became clear in May that I couldn't see before: This tool promises something that people are saying they need.

Launching wasn't originally a priority because I wanted to validate the project before getting more involved. But, the feedback I got this month feels an awful lot like validation. As far as I can tell, the next logical step would be asking people to pay for it.

So, I started to prepare for a full launch.

First on the list was picking a new name for the tool. I was beginning to really dislike the name "Opal" (which I wrote more about on indie hackers if you're interested). But luckily, a name came to me that I really liked: PageFactory. After sharing it on twitter and getting a lot of positive feedback, I think it was the right choice.

June Plans

PageFactory has my full focus going into June.

While people have shown a lot of interest in the tool as is, feedback has made it clear the beta version is lacking a few critical features:

1. Usability by non-technical folks (making the tool more no-code friendly).
2. The ability to publish directly to Wordpress.

I'm hustling to tie up loose ends and get these fixed ASAP. My plan is to fully launch the product, with these features, by end of June.

But hustling has never felt like my strong suit. Honestly, I'm kind of a sloth. It will be a real test of my abilities to ship this by end of June.

But tests are good, right? That's how you measure your growth. Shipping is a skill I so desperately want to be better at. So I keep pushing myself. 💪🏻