It’s been over a year since I announced that I’d stop doing my monthly retrospective process.

And… I kind of miss it. So I thought I’d try writing one again and see what happens.

Maybe this is like a coke dealer giving himself a free one, and I’ll get hooked and keep doing them regularly. Or maybe it’s a flight of fancy. Who knows. Either way, here we are!

Last Month

Here’s my timespend for the month.

Time breakdown for February, 2024

I did a good job hitting my 70% target on time spent on SaaS Pegasus.

Here’s what I have to show for that effort:

1. New Github distribution model. This is one my favorite additions to Pegasus in recent memory. Where before you downloaded your code as a zip file and had to do a bunch of manual work to set up source control, now you can push your project directly to Github from Pegasus. Here’s a video showing how it works. As the biggest power-user of Pegasus myself, it has been a huge game changer for updating my projects. And the community seems to love it just as much as I do. Win!¹
2. Five (!) Pegasus releases. Not all of this is worth bragging about since three of the five were hotfix releases, but there were two major updates. I didn’t add a lot of new features, but I did the important-but-boring work of upgrading dependencies and fixing things that had changed or broken since they were added. As Pegasus matures I imagine that I’ll continue to have to do this type of work regularly, but it’s important to my brand (and pride) to keep Pegasus up-to-date and working well.
3. Overhauled my email marketing. Not the sexiest of tasks, but I migrated my email list from Mailchimp to Email Octopus, which at my current scale saves me about $1000/year. It also opens up the door for more complex automations, so I created a five-email onboarding sequence that everyone now gets when they sign up for Pegasus. I don’t yet have a clear picture of whether it’s changed anything in terms of conversions—or unsubscribes.

In addition to the above shipped stuff, I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what a decoupled React front end + Django back end might look like in Pegasus. I have been a long-time proponent of the hybrid model of embedding React inside Django, but it’s hard to deny the popularity of the decoupled approach, so I wanted to see if it’s something I/Pegasus can support. This has been a pretty painful process—one that has frequently involved me feeling very dumb for not understanding the latest in front-end architecture and also just being paralyzed by the overwhelming number of choices there are for how you do things these days. But I think I’m slowly arriving at a plan I’m happy with.

Revenue-wise Pegasus is having a great year so far. I suspect it’s due to the increased attention on SaaS boilerplates that’s taken over the indie community in the last few months, and Pegasus still being the obvious best option for Django. I’m just hoping I can continue to maintain that edge as the copycats keep popping up at an ever-increasing rate.

This Month

I have two major plans for the month. The first involves getting the decoupled front end work I’ve been doing over the hump and into Pegasus—probably as an experimental/beta feature. The second is more interesting: I’m building a new product!

I know, I know. I’m supposed to be focusing on Pegasus. Which is why I’m building the product with almost zero intention of turning it into a real business that I run. The goal in building the product is actually just to showcase, support, and grow Pegasus. So I am going to do some things differently.

First, I’m going to try to livestream the entire process and put it on my YouTube channel. This serves as both a form of marketing—getting people aware of Pegasus and how powerful it is—as well as support—documenting doing various things with Pegasus. I don’t have the details fully worked out yet, but I’m hoping to publish at least one stream a week this month. I recorded my first one yesterday, so this is all gonna start happening soon!

The other difference is that I’m planning to make the complete codebase for the project available—likely as an add-on to Pegasus. So if you are using Pegasus you can buy it as a reference codebase to see how a specific, real, production project gets put together by its creator. Longer-term this could be something that I repeat, or even offer as a marketplace for other Pegasus users to sell their own apps. But for now, I’m now going to test the waters with this one project.

You might be wondering what the product is going to be. Well, to find out, subscribe to my YouTube channel!

I kid. It’s something very simple. A SaaS that helps you translate your app into multiple languages, using AI. I figure the core tech is like five lines of OpenAI code, and then it just needs the entire SaaS / UI layer built on top of it. Making it a perfect candidate to showcase Pegasus.

My market research has revealed that there are a ton of other products in this space, but all the ones I looked at seemed way upmarket (e.g. $120/month on the lowest tier). So I’m wondering if I could make the indie-friendly version of this. But, again, the point of this experience is the content and the codebase, not the product. So even if it’s a terrible business idea I don’t mind spending a chunk of time on it.

For gory details on the product you can read my bare-bones planning doc.

March Goals

1. Ship a Pegasus release with an experimental PoC showcasing a decoupled front end.
2. Publish at least four screencasts working on the translation app.
3. Switch my personal email list to Email Octopus.

That’s it! Thanks for stopping by. See you next month, maybe.

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Notes