Weekly Update #2

Hello, and thank you for subscribing to my weekly update! I am very grateful to share this journey. I believe a path allows for financial freedom without winning the startup lottery.

My goal is to replace a salaried job with a portfolio of revenue streams that make $1 million a year.

Quarter 4 Goals

1. Launch my SaaS (Wordings.io)
2. Have 250 unique readers on my blog
3. Increase Twitter followers to 250

Numbers

• Revenue: $3/month
• Expenses: $9/month
• $99 single purchase

Website

This week: 170 visitors with 237 views

Last Week: 77 visitors with 133 views

Twitter

Last Week: 211 followers

This week: 241 followers

Learned

• With my schedule, things will take longer than I expect. It's okay.
• Tweet with pictures to increase engagement.
• Don't post links in the first tweet; instead, post the link at the end of the thread.
• As you engage more with the community, more people will engage with you.
• Be honest, helpful, and empathetic. Offer help where you can.

Progress

The second hole was the hardest.

— Holes by Louis Sachar

Revenue

I made $2 this week, doubling revenue from last week.

Thanks, bro.

If I double my revenue each week, I'll... well, I won't. But I'm thankful in any regard. I do think this part of the journey is the hardest. I don't have a product yet, so I'm mostly panning air. Once you have a product, people use it, and then you get more conversions. But I need to build it first.

Product

I did less this week than I was hoping. This is because various other (important) things took up my time. Also, I have a six week old baby boy. He tends to take up time as well.

I'm building a SaaS that manages localization strings and allows non-engineers to write the copy for cloud apps.

It's called Wordings.io.

This week I focused on getting it to a point where I could dogfood better. While I technically used it for the first last time week, it wasn't in production. So this week, I iterated over the core flow to dog food in prod.

The core flow is:

1. The user signs up & logs in
2. Creates their first project
3. Creates their first namespace
4. Adds a key-value pair
5. Exports the data and uses it in an app

Once I started adding content, I realized I needed to work on the language addition. The project page didn't specify a language, so there was none added by default. I could not add keys since each value connects t to a language.

content-key:
  en: English phrase!
  es: Frase inglesa!

Things are improving. I did not get to invite my first beta user this week, but I did get the entire project running in production. I'm hoping for some time this weekend to polish off the pages.

It's rough, but getting better each day. And these parts are the hardest since I'm building a lot of the UI Kit I'll use elsewhere, such as creating the styled buttons, inputs, boxes, popovers, etc.

Consulting

Last week a friend reached out and pitched a project. It will involve building a custom portal with a feedback component and migrating nine different projects. My final proposal is for $35k. If it needs to be changed a little, that'll be okay. I ran the estimated amount of work, and it came out to be a fair hourly rate of $80/hour.

Of course, the goal is to accomplish the work in less time. However, there are so many unknowns still though it's safe to be on the side of caution. It's not a question of ability; it's knowing how long it will take.

Website

• Post 1: https://ethanmick.com/why-graphql-is-better-than-rest/
• Post 2: https://ethanmick.com/on-picking-boring-technolgies/
• Weekly Update: https://ethanmick.com/weekly-update-2/

Update, I've reached my quarterly goal already. I've had 255 unique visitors in October alone. Most of the traffic has been coming from Hacker News. I post the links there even though they don't often get a lot of upvotes. Hacker News has a massive audience; many other services scrape them for links.

I also have posted to Indie Hackers now that I gained write access. Unfortunately, that has been less successful. I'm still working on the format and balance between "here is a link" and trying to start a meaningful discussion.

And, of course, I post on Twitter.

I'm pretty surprised to see Google so high up on the referrers. I'll need to double-check what people are searching for to get to my site.

Twitter

So... if I wasn't spending all my time coding this week, what was I doing?

I, uh, bought a Twitter course.

Okay, okay, hear me out! It was the right price at the right time. I know Justin Welsh (he makes a lot of money) uses this product, so when I got an email in my inbox from Hypefury with a "gain 1000 users in 30 days" course for $100... I had to try it.

Twitter is one of those things that has felt out of reach for a long time. Having a massive audience is a superpower, but I never knew how to achieve it. Reach gives you power in this online world. If you have 100 followers, starting something new is a challenge. If you have 100k followers, you have an army of people willing to buy whatever you sell.

I'm not looking for cheap cash. I'm looking for all the people who love building things and are willing to try out my software. An instant beta testing group. The friends who will work through the rough edges and pay early. People who believe in solo engineers.

Twitter is an excellent place for that group if I can reach them.

I bought the course three days ago. I've gained 30 followers since then.

Followers grow exponentially. Getting to 100 is (paradoxically) easy. Getting to 1000 is hard. Getting to 10,000 is easier. Once the systems are in place with the right content, you are firing on all cylinders.

My goal of 250 followers by the end of the year looks trivial. I'm at 241 today. If the course follows through, I'll have over 1000 followers by the end of the year. They won't all be perfect ones, but it's a start. If 10% of your followers are your target audience, then growing by 10x is incredibly important.

Other Media

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to be more active on Hacker News and Indie Hackers. When I start posting updates on the product, I want my name to have a little more credit.

Wrapping up

This week felt busy. Twitter took up much of my time, more than I thought. To streamline, I will build the systems to be successful. Once I do, I'm sure the benefits will start coming in.

I'm excited to see what next week brings. After that, I will return to work full-time, which will slow me down. Once I have a routine for working nights and weekends, I'll adjust my goals for the rest of the year.

I am looking forward to next week! Let's build and ship!

If you liked my newsletter, the best thing you can do is share it and my website. You can also follow me on Twitter. It means a lot. Thank you!