Month 6 Income Report - Feeling Behind

Hey there!

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

I’m at the end of month 6, and… Where did the time go?!

Let’s dive in.

Revenue tracker

Below is my current revenue. I did some one-time contracting work this month which I have highlighted in gray. All the recurring/re-occurring revenue is still in green.

As you can see, from a re-occurring revenue standpoint, this month was down a bit, but overall, in-line with prior months.

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 - a coding tutorials channel

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

A few notable highlights:

• Expenses are down this month, but it’s temporary. I’ve canceled some things that weren’t useful to me while adding some new subscriptions that I hope will help my business grow. More on that next month.

• Adsense and affiliate revenue is slowly improving thanks to being monetized on my golf YouTube channel, some site optimizations I did months ago, and a slight increase in traffic. Nowhere near where I need to be though!

What went well

Let’s just say that finding good things to say about this month was… Challenging 😕 

Nevertheless, here are a few silver linings.

I wrote a LOT of code.

I’m doing a massive re-write of my golf site to give myself the chance of ranking for a lot more long-tail SEO keywords. And in doing so, I’ve gotten completely carried away. I never intended to for this to become a 2-month project, but here we are.

I have two things to say here:

1. I’m VERY excited with what I’ve built and I’m pretty confident it’s going to pay off in the long run.

2. This is a single PR that hasn’t been merged to production yet:

   

   Luckily, nobody has to review this because… I’m flying solo.

Local Golf Spot is showing positive signs of growth

Remember that project I was working on for a month and a half early on in my journey?

Well… I can’t make too much of an early call, but I’m starting to get a few of the pages ranking in the top 20 on Google, and this is happening:

Google is still taking its sweet old time indexing my entire site though. Heck, we even went backwards for a few months, which I was not happy or hopeful about.

It’s easy to generate thousands of web pages. It’s hard to convince Google that they’re worth showing in search results.

What went poorly

A lot.

I worked way too many hours this month. I forgot to have fun. I had a lot of doubt and fear (nothing new). I got mad at myself for not shipping fast enough. I got discouraged by yet another month of stagnating revenue growth (even though I haven’t done anything specifically to increase it).

This month, I went from, “I’m only 5 months in, have patience” to “I’m 6 months in, where has all the time gone?!”

Delayed gratification? Or stupid decisions?

I’ve been fighting this since day 1 but fought it extra hard this month. I’m through 6 months of this and I still haven’t spent much of any time on direct revenue-generating activities.

I know that in order to reach this $10k goal one day, I need to do some serious marketing for this golf site.

Yet…

The marketing feels useless at the moment because I have so much “foundational” work to still do. This includes:

• Email sales funnels (side note: I discovered that my primary sales funnel has been inactive for the last 3 months 😭)

• The number of offers (e.g. online video courses)—I only have 1 paid offering right now and it’s for a narrow audience. I simply don’t have enough things for people to buy yet.

• A website capable of generating large amounts of traffic—No, I’m not talking about systems scalability here. I’m talking about a CMS and data model that allows me to publish a mix of programmatic SEO content, AI-generated content, and high-quality, long-form content written by myself. In addition, I need the content on my website to organically flow into my paid online training course offerings. And after fighting my old site for several months, I realized it was going to seriously hold me back in its current form.

So given these factors, the tendency is to keep building things.

Yet if you go on Twitter/X, you’ll read an unrealistic, one-sided pitch to “ship faster” and “do more marketing”.

But as with any internet advice, there’s nuance. Shipping faster and marketing more does not work if your customers land on a terrible product that they hate. Sure, you can generate some quick sales, but in the long run, if you have a bad product, you’ll have to aggressively sell it forever. 

I have no interest in becoming a career salesman. I want and need a product people tell their friends about. I’ve already accomplished this to some degree with my website. I get referrals all the time. But I need it for my paid offerings too.

On the flip side of all this—there is some truth to the “Indie Twitter” advice. I’ve been down the road of build → build → build → launch → fail. I’ve fallen for the “build it and they will come” fallacy and I don’t intend to again. Amidst all of this building, I’ve done a lot of validation. I’ve been running this golf site on the side since 2015 and have a good idea of what sells and what doesn’t.

So that’s a long-winded way to say that it’s incredibly challenging to know when to keep building and when to call it “good enough”. I genuinely think the things I’m spending my time on will be worth it, but it’s really hard to have that conviction as a first-time entrepreneur.

I guess we’ll all find out together in due time 🙃 

What I shipped

This is mostly a therapy section for me—read it at your own peril.

1. Published 4 golf newsletters and 2 videos

2. Wrote an automation script that allows me to write all my newsletters in the Sanity CMS and automatically publish to my new site and schedule in Brevo at the same time. This will save me 1-2 hours per week and was fun to write!

3. The DIY Golfer website overhaul and CMS migration (none of this is actually shipped yet, but it’s done)

   1. Built a pretty sweet navbar that will help people discover new things on my site way easier than before

   2. Complete overhaul to my content data model which will allow me to do all sorts of internal linking that will help users discover new content on the site

   3. Built a ton of new page templates for various content types on my site (product reviews, comparisons, golf drills, golf swing positions, golf terms, etc.)

   4. Built the most comprehensive glossary of golf terms on the internet (seriously though, it’s got absolutely everything)

   5. Built out a JSONLD structured data component so my pages will have rich search results

   6. Built out “The DIY Golfer Academy” with all my training courses, which I have pretty big plans for over the next calendar year.

Recap, looking forward

During the first 6 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 (4 months)

I’m full-force on The DIY Golfer until I get all the “foundational” stuff built. The end goal is to get it to the point where I can run it on 20 hours per week, but I think it’s going to be a while before we’ve reached that point.

I’ll see ya in the next issue!

Zach

My Links

• Twitter

• YouTube

• Website

• Golf site