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6 months as a fulltime maker

05 July 2019

6 months just passed by since I left my manager position to become a fulltime “maker”. I can’t say everything goes as planned, but when I look at the big picture, I think, I’m going in the right direction.

A short summary of my results so far:

The begining

Leaving behind a manager position wasn't as easy as I thought it would. In January, I spent a lot of time working on projects I was responsible for the last year. This was partly my fault because I kept a lot of information for myself during these projects which I wasn't able to completely hand over to my colleagues. Meanwhile, I also started to work on my first application, the HashtagCalendar. I couldn't spend as much time with it as I wanted to. I missed the "deadline" to launch it by the end of January, so I was behind my schedule already (1 major release every month). After I launched it, I immediately started to work on my second project which is (not kidding) still waiting for launch. Why? Because I missed a piece of very important information about the requirements using the Google Sheets API and although I finally got the approval for the app, I started to work on other projects and haven't finished the final touches of this one. I have to avoid these situations. I had a similar issue with my 3rd product as well, so I can't say I was completely happy 😂 But, it became better.

My first sales

As my 4th product, I launched Story View at the end of May, and this was my most successful launch by far. I was also lucky to get some help and support from the community which felt really great after the cumbersome begginings. To date, I made $190 with Story View, which is compared to the time I spent with the development (about 80 hours) doesn't make this project the most profitable 😄 Still, it felt really good that someone paid for a thing I built myself. It is really different from what I felt when we launched a project for a client with my team. That was good as well, but different kind of good.

Revenue

Based on my current revenue, I don't think that I'll reach my desired goal by the end of the year. I'll still focus on building my own products and trying to make the existing ones as successful as possible, but I also started to look for short term projects to support myself financially.

I remember, I saw a post on Reddit in the first days of January, about someone going full time working on his own product without any savings or plan B. I didn't follow his journey but I would really like to know how it turned out because, at the moment, I have no idea how someone would "survive" without any savings. I think pushing hard isn't enough, you should be lucky as well. Building a product looks like the easier part, finding your audience and someone who will pay for what you built is another question.

Additional goals for second half of the year

I feel, that the biggest issue is that I’m not solving real problems. I really want to help people reach their goals, make their lives easier, or their business more successful by using my products. So first, I want to find a solution to this.

I want to become a more “useful” member of the maker community. At the moment I don’t know how I’ll do this, but it’s on the top of my todo list 😊

Oh, and there is one goal I didn't talk about: run 500km 🏃‍♂️. I hurt my knees during my first run :D Almost couldn't finish my first round on Margaret Island so I had to skip a few months. About 2 months ago, I started to run again, but I still have to try to protect my knees as much as possible. So I'll try to reach 250km and I hope I can do more.

The numbers

As I'm trying to build as open as possible, I’d like to share a little information about the projects I launched. Let me know if there is anything else you want to know about them.

HashtagCalendar

  • 🤑 revenue: $5 (donation via paypal.me)
  • expenses: $25 (domain renewal fee for 2 years)
  • number of visitors since launch: 1 671
  • got featured on Merca2.0

I don't have any extra plans with this product at the moment. I'll use it to promote my other tools.

CreativeDEVjobs

  • revenue: $0
  • expenses: $9 (domain registration fee)
  • number of visitors since launch: 100 (pretty sad)

I have to build a community around the site to boost the number of visitors and make it attractive for HR companies. I already sent some emails about it to creative agencies, without any response.

TWiS - The winner is

  • revenue: $0
  • expenses: $25 (domain registration fee)
  • number of visitors since launch: 500
  • number of registered users: 22

I didn't spend enough time to make this product more popular. I have to send it to social media agencies, business profiles on Instagram and I also have to do some content marketing and SEO. There are many free competitors of this product, but without the features, I built into my version. I have to talk about those to potential customers.

Story View for WordPress

  • 🤑 revenue: $190
  • expenses: $9 (domain registration fee)
  • number of visitors since launch: 1 480

Besides launching this tool on Product Hunt, I spent a lot of time sending cold emails to potential customers. I collected 100 WordPress sites and sent a short overview about Story View to them. Got 2 negative responses. That's all 😄 At least, they sent me a response. I just created a public Notion board to make it easier for anyone to follow the development of the plugin. I hope, this will help to make it clear to the visitors, that this is a maintained tool.

Maker Goals Menubar

  • revenue: $0
  • expenses: $9 (domain registration fee)
  • number of visitors since launch: 644
  • macOS downloads: 146
  • Windows downloads: 54
  • Linux downloads: 12
  • 🎉 🎊 winner of Makers Festival - API Edition in Desktop app category

I don't have an exact number about the active users, as the app doesn't store any information about them. I want to open source this tool, not looking for any revenue from it.

It's clear, that I have to get much better distributing my products. I also have to find a way to identify and solve real problems.

Looking forward to the second half of the year. I have a bunch of new ideas already.