It’s June! Taking a moment to collect myself and zoom out a tiny bit for some high level retrospecting and planning.

The month past

May was a busy month both in and outside of work. As a result, the vast majority of my available time went to Dimagi and consulting work, leaving very little left for progress on personal projects.

May’s “work” time—a busy month outside of work that resulted in mostly working for others.

On the upside, Place Card Me eeked out its best-ever month (revenue-wise) coming in just under $590 for the month and passed $3000 all-time revenue. My lifetime hourly income on the project is now hovering right around American minimum-wage and hopefully only going to go up over time.

Place Card Me’s all time revenue by month

In May, Chat Stats banked $100 in its second month generating revenue, up from $80 in April.

Those two numbers really help reinforce the long-term value of these passive income sources to me. When income isn’t tied to effort it’s basically free money!

I also managed to ship a blog in May which is always exciting.

The month ahead

As I mentioned in my “crisis of comfort” blog I’m committed to trying harder this month.

I think I’ve said this before and failed, but this is the month where I hope to make my first substantial effort on Place Card Me in 2018. I plan to focus on revenue-generating ideas and activities, and by the end of the month my goal is to have a substantial change or test in place that will hopefully bear fruit in July’s numbers.

I’ll also aim to document it—because it’s the story I’ve been telling for the last year.

My other projects will be mostly on autopilot, though I am hoping to take a couple small strides on build with django—just enough to keep the lights on and the mailing list warm. I don’t plan to do much of anything with chat stats.

Outside of side-project land I’m continuing to take on more and more ambitious projects, which will be a whole second side to my “effortful” month that I may or may not write about.

The week ahead

This week is all about figuring out what I’m going to do with Place Card Me.

First I’m going to look at the last few months of analytics and setup a new pricing test based on what I find. Then I’m going to go into brainstorming mode trying to figure out what the most interesting path to increasing revenue will be.

I’m about 90% certain it’s going to be something around monetizing the free tier, which is something I’ve been resisting for a long time due to not wanting to upset my non-paying users, but almost certainly where the highest ROI is. I’ll just need to get ready to get yelled at by all those people who expect everything on the internet to be free.