Another month flew by and I have barely noticed.

Since I have 5 or 6 hours per week that I can dedicate to work, I am trying to focus my attention on things that are likely to bring more customers and more revenue in general. Which means marketing.

Data Internships

Just paused. I didn’t even check how many subs I got this month. Ok, just checked, 1889. Not bad, but I am not going to work on this project in the near term because it’s not generating revenue.

X Topics

I have reached out to all users, to understand how are they using my tool and if I could help them to get more value from it. I got a few suggestions

• add a login page (I was using Threads login)
• make a video on how to use the tool

Implemented the first one, I hope to find the time to do the video this month. I also spent some time rewriting the copy for the landing page, and I think it is much clearer now. In the previous months I got 4 paid users from 600 visitors, I hope the new landing page can bring me more. Will monitor the numbers.

I sold one more LTD this month, which brings the total revenue to $75. It came just at the end of the month, and I am not sure what was the reason. I got a post with 1k views about AI and code, that must have been it. I definitely should write more about that. And I should write more on Threads in general. This has been my most reliable marketing channel so far, if not the only one.

I have got 5 paying users right now. My goal was to get 3 more users, but I only got one this month. I think what can bring me there is to start to talk more about the tool on Threads. I don’t think I need a smart strategy, just being more active on the platform, talking about what the product does, and the new features will hopefully do the job.

Soccrbets

I have kept posting betting predictions and articles on the blog this week, and I also opened a Telegram channel, where I post all predictions, analysis, and visualizations related to European soccer. More importantly, I spent quite some time automating the article and comment creation process, which saves me a lot of time. Now I can push a button and get the article for the blog, the comment for Reddit and the post for the Telegram channel automatically created and posted for me. The automation is mot perfect yet, and there are still a few manual things I need to do, but I am planning to extend it this more and more this month.

The plan with the blog and the TG channel is to bring more and more traffic to my Gumroad page and increase my book sales. Judging by the numbers it didn’t work so well this month. Traffic to Gumroad is down, and only 5 users came directly from the website in October. For comparison, even organic search is performing better.

The TG channel has less than 10 subscribers, my plan is to keep posting on Reddit and other Discord communities and bring some people to the channel. I think the TG channel has the potential to grow, if I keep posting every month and sharing interesting articles and predictions. Once the channel grows enough, monetization opportunities could become available, but I will need to wait for at least 1000 engaged subscribers to the channel.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month.

Lowest revenue in months, partially because book sales are historically low in October. I don’t plan to add any source of revenue in the short term, so the only way this can go up is to sell more books or more subscriptions to Xtopics. The cost is already very low, and I am happy I can keep it this way, especially considering that I am running ML inference on a pretty heavy model on a daily basis.

The plan is to keep doing what I am doing, which means writing content about the books and Xtopics. I am aware marketing efforts cannot be judged over 4 weeks, so I will be patient and wait at least until the end of the year to see what happens.

The big problem is that, since I need to take care of the while my wife takes care of the baby, I am effectively back to a 9 to 5 without the salary. I can maybe work 1 or 2 hours per day, mostly in the evenings, when I have very low energy and all I want to do is to sleep. This is not the ideal situation and a recipe for disaster if it is going to prolong for months. Because even if I wanted to freelance, I would not have any time for it.

Fingers crossed things get better, otherwise it’s time for drastic decisions.