Month 3 Income Report - Forward progress, BAD results.

Hey there!

This is Zach, and in this newsletter, I share a monthly update on how my full-time solopreneurship journey is going.

For 3-straight months, I’ve sat down and dreaded writing an update because… This is HARD.

While the revenue numbers don’t look great this month, I feel like I made substantial progress toward growing the business.

Let’s dive in.

Revenue tracker

Below is my current revenue. You’ll notice I’m no longer calling it “MRR”. This is for a couple of reasons:

1. The business I’m building is not a SaaS (at least yet) and the concept of MRR is a bit misleading

2. By focusing on MRR, I was holding myself back from doing things that “didn’t scale” but ultimately would help grow the business

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

1. The DIY Golfer - a golf niche site

2. Zach Gollwitzer YouTube - I mentioned something about a re-brand of this business last month, but as of right now, I’m 100% focused on The DIY Golfer business and have not touched this. More to come on this in the future, just need to free up some time to build it.

Here’s a detailed look at how the overall business has done:

A few notes on this:

• My biggest expenses are:

  • Cowork space - $205

  • Ahrefs - $105

  • Brevo (email marketing) - $65

• Pretty much EVERYTHING was down this month. This was very tough to watch, especially after seeing consistent growth in the last two months.

The “Pulse”

Here are some quick updates on how things are going.

The DIY Golfer

My main focus this month was content creation.

I FINALLY got things rolling here, and as a result, had a solid month of growth on both my email list and YouTube channel.

Some quick stats:

• Posted 15 TikTok videos and got 1209 likes

• Posted 3 YouTube videos, one of which got over 5,000 views

• Grew the email list by 466 people, a record month

• Started a weekly newsletter for the brand

• Sold a $200/month advertising slot on my site to a golf company in my niche!!

While this growth did not translate to more revenue, I’m feeling optimistic that I can start turning these new leads into customers as I work next month on optimizing my sales pages and my email marketing funnel.

Local Golf Spot

As a recap, this is a long-term project I don’t expect to generate revenue with for several years. I’ve spent ~1.5 months of work on it out of the 3 months I’ve been at this but do not intend to dedicate a ton of time to it moving forward (until I can validate that it’s worth my time).

I spent 1 week on this project this month to drastically improve the individual business pages. Overall, these changes seem to be having a positive effect (see page indexing screenshot below), and I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll see these charts take off in the next few months.

Here are a few screenshots of the new business pages for each golf course! I went out and played this one myself and built an entire course tour, which doesn’t scale, but showcases where I’d like this to be for all golf courses one day!

What went well

I shipped a TON of new website pages and social media content.

What went poorly

Revenue was down, and having worked as a software developer for the last several years, it was HARD to create all this content and stop coding so much.

It was hard for two reasons:

1. I didn’t feel productive when I was not writing code - I think this is mainly a habit from the last few years where code output was my only measure of productivity.

2. I haven’t ever really created content on a schedule, so this was tough to keep up with. Video editing sucked a lot of time away from me.

Recap, looking forward

During the first 3 months of this journey, I have roughly spent my time on the following things:

• Local Golf Spot (1 ½ months)

• Reviving The DIY Golfer (1/2 month)

• Growing The DIY Golfer (1 month)

So far, this journey has been VERY challenging. I’ve enjoyed moments here and there, but most of my days have been filled with:

1. Never-ending backlog of things I want to get done faster than I actually can

2. Self-doubt - I didn’t think I’d have near as much of this as I have. It’s pretty much a daily thing.

This goal of $10k still seems daunting, but each month I’ve made a TON of forward progress in both the work I’ve done and the direction I’m moving, which is all I can control. I’m preparing to be patient in month 4, but also secretly hoping for something fun to share in the next update!

See ya in the next issue!

Zach

My Links

• Twitter

• YouTube

• Website

• Golf site