Off to the Races

January 2021 Retrospective

Total profits, Jan 2021

2021 looking good after just one month! Data from personal project dashboard.

January felt like a big month for me and my businesses. Here’s why.

First, Pegasus broke records without proactive marketing or sales.

Here’s the January numbers:

Project Profit Monthly Change
SaaS Pegasus $6644.64 45.57%
Place Card Me $591.95 -54.92%
Chat Stats $141.15 -16.67%
Total $7377.74 22.00%

Another record-breaking month of profits, this one achieved more quietly and sustainably.

What’s most exciting about it is that these profits happened without any promotions or major marketing efforts. There was a sale running for the first few days of the month, and there’s a new partnership that’s going well, but by and large the sales numbers this month reflect what might be a sustainable pace of passive sales.

This is great because historically profits have been tied to big sales and promotions. If I can earn sustained monthly profits of $6k or $7k without those efforts, then Pegasus will truly be able to sustain me.

Also, I’m back at the day job.

The other big thing that happened last month was my return to Dimagi (at ~half time). This has been an adjustment, and I still haven’t quite found my flow there, but, there hasn’t been a substantial impact on the pace of Pegasus work, which is big.

I was worried that returning to work would mean neglecting my personal products, and that I’d have to find something in my life to cut, but so far that hasn’t been the case.

Jan 2021 Time

Time breakdown for January 2021. A lot of time is going back to Dimagi, but Pegasus time and output has stayed strong.

Finally, I’m close to shipping something big.

More than two months ago I decided to start trying to add new CSS frameworks to Pegasus. It all started with the TailwindCSS 2.0 announcement.

The TailwindCSS 2.0 release got me very excited—for a time.

But, as I got into it I realized it was going to be hard.

The hard part wasn’t making Pegasus work with a new framework—that was straightforward. What was hard was doing it in a way that would be both intuitive for my Pegasus customers, and not a maintenance nightmare for me.

This “intuitive” part meant my initial plan—building my own CSS component system on top of each framework—got thrown out the window, and I ended up on a hybrid approach with a fair amount of complexity and magic, but the complexity and magic is on me, and my customers get a good experience. And I think maintenance will be ok.

Thankfully, I mostly abandoned this idea.

Anyway, point being, I’m close to finally shipping it for real.1 Which means the last ~2 months of product development will finally pay off, and I’ll be able to move onto other things.

This Month’s Goals

Simple goals this month:

  • Release Bootstrap support in Pegasus to everyone
  • Come up with the next big-ticket Pegasus item and start working on it.

The big question on my mind is whether I pursue another product improvement or make a return to marketing.

As always, my heart says product and my head says marketing. We’ll see who wins!

Recommendations

Recommendation for the month is the podcast Rabbit Hole by the New York Times. Fascinating account of how the internet—and specifically Youtube algorithms—are radicalizing people’s opinions. The overall message is familiar, but the details are fascinating!


Notes

  1. Ironically, not with Tailwind but with Bootstrap, because it ended up being much easier and I think might be a better fit for most of my customers.