Month 2 Income Report - battling uncertainty

I made the jump into full time solopreneurship. Here's how month 2 went.

Author

Zach Gollwitzer
June 01, 2023

Hey there!

This is Zach, and as you might have noticed, this newsletter is now called, “Road to $10k”.

Why the change? Well… $10k feels like a more even number. That’s really it 😆 

Anyways, welcome back to the month 2 income report.

I’m not quite as frustrated writing this as I was during the first edition, but boy did month 2 challenge my mental fortitude.

Let’s dive in.

Revenue tracker

Below is my current MRR, which includes anything that has a recurring nature to it (adsense, affiliate, product sales, sponsors, etc.)

As of May 2023, this revenue is primarily broken into 2 separate businesses.

  1. The DIY Golfer - a golf niche site

  2. Indie Tactics - a niche site dedicated to sharing strategies, processes, and tools to help you scale your solo online business (if you follow me closely, you may recognize this is a rebrand from my personal, “Zach Gollwitzer” YouTube channel—will talk about this more in the future)

While my primary focus is growing MRR, I always enjoy seeing the entire business breakdown, so here’s a detailed look at how the overall business has done over the last 4 months.

A few interesting notes on this:

  • My product sales for The DIY Golfer significantly increased over the last couple of months. This is largely due to the improvements I have been making to the landing page and adding more links to my paid course across the site.

  • Reduced web hosting expense because I’ve consolidated all of my sites and moved away from WordPress, which has a bit of $$ overhead running a MySQL database (which is now markdown files)

  • The Cowork space has been an EXCELLENT investment. It’s not super cheap, but I’ve been very productive there and it’s a great way to get out of the house 2-3 times a week. Also, I have fun coworkers.

What I shipped

In the prior month's recap, I mentioned this month would be all about content. Well… I ran into some roadblocks, got completely sucked into the project I was working on, and ended up not doing any content stuff. At all ☹️ 

I spent 80-90% of my time this month working on Local Golf Spot, which is now live and (slowly) picking up organic keywords. Here’s a Tweet where I demo it and explain what I built. Given the 15k+ pages I generated, I’m hoping to grow this site to a substantial amount of organic traffic. I’m hoping Google’s new generative AI search results won’t negatively affect this project, but only time can tell!

Since this is a long-term play that won’t generate any income for several months (or even years), I time-boxed the work on this to ~1 month and will not spend significant time on it until I’ve got a better idea what kind of organic traffic I can get from it.

What went well

Shipping Local Golf Spot was a big weight off my shoulders because it has been an idea floating in my head for YEARS. I’ve picked it up and put it down several times, so it was great to see it through to completion finally.

Additionally, this month was a bit easier on me mentally. While the uncertainty and overall discomfort of not having a constant paycheck still loom over me on a daily basis, I’ve started to develop some strategies for dealing with all of it.

That said, it was still a tough month mentally…

What went poorly

The single hardest part of this journey so far has been choosing what to work on and feeling confident that it’s the right thing to spend my time on.

When working a full-time job, it’s pretty easy to prioritize and feel confident that your current task is the right one. As a full-time indie, you CONSTANTLY doubt whether you’re wasting time or moving the train forward, especially in these early stages I’m in trying to validate various projects.

It’s this constant uncertainty that I’m slowly learning to deal with. I’ve found that a simple weekly review and planning session on Sunday helps a TON with this.

Unfortunately, I did not start posting content to any of my sites or YouTube channels as I mentioned I would be doing in last month’s “looking forward” section. So… Let’s roll it back and try again.

Recap, looking forward

During the first 2 months, I spent my time on two primary things that won’t contribute much to revenue growth:

  • Reviving an old business (The DIY Golfer site overhaul and re-design)

  • Creating Local Golf Spot

Month 3 will be focused on revenue-generating projects, which include:

  • An affiliate post series for The DIY Golfer blog

  • Re-branding and launching “Indie Tactics” (existing YouTube channel, new website)

  • Some TikTok videos…??

  • A micro-SaaS I’ll share more about once I have something built (1-2 months from now)

Hope you enjoyed this issue and I can come back in month 3 with some more exciting news on the revenue front!

See ya in the next issue!

Zach

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