August 2024 Earnings
Very late report this month. I have been busy in real life, but I don’t want to skip this habit, now that I have been posting every month for the past 16 months.
August has been a good month overall. I progressed in my goal of launching as many products as possible, collecting small wins and adjusting course to keep myself on the entrepreneurship path.
Data Internships
The last email I sent reached more than 1700 subscribers. With a 24% open rate and 2% click rate I think I am close to be able to monetize it. I have looked around for platforms that offer newsletter monetization through sponsors, but it looks like they start from something around 2k followers.
Another way I could explore, is to migrate part of the audience to a Telegram channel. Monetizing a Telegram channel is a bit easier, but I estimate that less than 300 of my subscribers will actually move to the channel. Anyway, it’s worth trying and should not take much time to repurpose the same content I have in the newsletter.
X Topics
I have re-launched Xtopics this month and started to work actively on the product. As of now, it’s a very simple product, a bit more than an MVP:
- focused only on Threads
- only does topic analysis
- only lifetime deal
The launch went better than last time, with over 20 upvotes, 5 new signups and 3 Life Time Deals sold. I have made a funny launch video, that might have helped too.
For now there is no MRR yet, and I don’t really plan to add a monthly plan. I think the product is interesting, the launch has clearly showed that there are people that would pay for it, and in the next month I want to figure out how to reach as many people as possible to understand how far this can go. I need to draft a proper marketing plan, test 2 or 3 channels, and find out which one works best.
Soccrbets
I kept working on the website in August. I published 2 new blog posts and 1 YouTube video (plus 3 shorts). The idea is still to write content to drive traffic to my books, but I am still trying to figure out what is the marketing channel that will bring the highest ROI. In the past I had some success with Reddit, so I will try to repeat that by posting more often, now that the main European leagues have restarted.
The cashflow
Time to look at the income for this month.
Item | Income/Expense |
---|---|
Amazon book sales | + $238.65 |
Gumroad book sales | + $1 |
Twitter ads share | + $33.30 |
Xtopics | + $45.00 |
Appliku | - $10.00 |
Hetzner | - $5.31 |
Twitter blue | - $10.68 |
HuggingFace | - $2.07 |
Total | + $289.89 |
The revenue is still stagnating around the $300 mark, and mainly coming from the book sales. First money came from shitposting on X. Now that I have 5M views in the last 3 months, I am eligible to get paid. It’s not much, but it’s still a one-week grocery from me and my family (or two light meals out).
I am definitely not happy about the situation though. I have stopped freelancing in March, and it’s now been 6 months without any significant revenue, despite having launched 3 products in the meantime. But I am not despairing, and I am happy that I have made progress in many areas, especially in my technical skills on how to code and market a SaaS. Probably I will make money with the product I expect the less.
Real life
My baby girl was born 1 week ago, and I feel more focused and energized than ever. I think the time pressure and responsibility make me sharper. When I look back, it’s been like this all my life. I do my best work and take the best life decision when I need to make money for me and my family.
I hope it will work this time too.