February 2021 monthly review
February was the 2nd best month I've had so far as an entrepreneur! Here's a look at how things went with No CS Degree and my other products. I made $2630.
I've adjusted to well with working on my systems and not setting goals. So I work on a bit of coding each day, try and do 5 sales and then do my newsletters in the afternoon. It's very liberating to not be tied to any goals. And despite this I had my second best month ever! (It was my best month if you don't count November which was a bit of a one-off due to Black Friday income).
Things that went well
I got some revenue from coding bootcamps. B2B deals typically take longer but pay more. I need to focus on these deals a lot more. I also sold some newsletter adverts.
Sticking to a schedule with newsletters. I've got into a rythm of doing my job board newsletter on Wednesdays and my remote newsletter on Thursday. It's lots better to have a routine to stick to and not just send them on random days.
The No CS Degree one has varied a little as I'm focussing on quality and that's the downside of user generated content. Sometimes interviews don't really hit my expectations. I'm doing my best to have Monday and Fridays as development days and keeping deadline things like newsletters on Tuesday through Thursday. It's a much more relaxing way to end the week.
I was on two podcasts, Newsletter Crew , which is out now, and Indie Bites, which will be out in March. They were both loads of fun and we talked about a variety of things like my Monetize Your Newsletter course, bootstrapping a company, building in public and doing sales.
On the back of the Indie Bites chat with James, I bought a proper microphone, the Rode USB-Mini so I can either do podcasting, YouTube or just have a better mic for interviews! I had a chat with a founder today and he said there was a big difference in sound quality with the mic!
My job board newsletter got a big bump in signups and it's almost at 4000 people now! I also got a blog post on Hacker News at the end of the month which got me a bump in traffic.
I also started using BannerBear and getting nice images with text for sharing on Twitter and Facebook.
What went badly
I've probably exhausted sales for my newsletter course from Twitter so I need to try things like YouTube, Udemy or App Sumo now.
The email sign up form on No CS Degree isn't great. I tried fixing it and then the captcha I had on it made it look ugly. I need to test it out more but it's annoying I can't get a theme with an email box out of the box. I did start working on a custom theme to solve this.
I got bogged down thinking about SEO/website structures and technical stuff like that. I think doing lots more sales is the key and I can fix minor issues and do re-designs when the money justifies it.