Two months ago I signed off my retro with a list of questions about my upcoming trip overseas:
- How “passive” is my passive income, really?
- Will I be able to keep my new hire productive while I’m traveling?
- With my new hire’s help, will I be able to ship Pegasus releases with minimal effort?
- Do I actually love my kids—who are 1 and 3—when forced to spend all my time with them?
Now that the trip is done, I have answers!
Q: How “passive” is my passive income, really?
A: Pretty passive!
Here are the numbers for August (averaged ~10 hours of work a week):
| Project | Profit | Monthly Change |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS Pegasus | $3324.59 | -26.18% |
| Place Card Me | $1804.86 | 28.00% |
| Chat Stats | $94.10 | -41.18% |
| Total | $5223.55 | -14.00% |
And September (~5 hours / week):
| Project | Profit | Monthly Change |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS Pegasus | $6518.11 | 96.06% |
| Place Card Me | $1542.67 | -14.53% |
| Chat Stats | $112.92 | 20.00% |
| Total | $8173.70 | 56.48% |
There’s no obvious change in trends from other months, proving that—at least for stints of a couple months—my income is pretty decoupled from my effort.
Will I be able to keep my new hire productive while I’m traveling?
A: Yes!
This one is kind of cheating since Simon (my part-time contractor who I’ll just start referring to by name), is super experienced and autonomous. He was able to be super productive with only very high-level input from me. The magic of working with good people!
With Simon’s help, will I be able to ship Pegasus releases with minimal effort?
A: Yes!
I managed to squeeze out a Pegasus release with multi-language support that I wrote almost zero of the code for.
🚀 New Pegasus release is out!
— SaaS Pegasus (@saaspegasus) September 1, 2022
This release lets you add translations in any language to your Pegasus apps 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇨🇳
2-minute demo here: https://t.co/qDpckfSxRH
Do I actually love my kids—who are 1 and 3—when forced to spend all my time with them?
A: Maybe most surprising of all… yes!
I thought for sure I’d be exhausted and fed up with hanging out with a couple toddlers for weeks on end, but it was actually kind of awesome and way less tiring and mind-numbing than I expected. I guess I like these little monsters.
Me and the boys bonding in Central Park.
Anyway, the trip was great. Mostly easier in the ways that I worried would be hard, and even better than I expected for the parts I thought would be good.
And it’s good to be back!
I felt a bit disoriented after being away from work for such a long time, so I tried to map out the rest of the year. Here’s what I got:
- Pegasus is still my priority. I’ll probably aim to spend somewhere between 50-75% of my time on it in some way. And I have a pretty good idea of the big pieces I want to get done in the next few months.
- I’m a bit lost outside of Pegasus. I made a list of things I might do in my non-Pegasus time: build a new product, write more, focus on Griffin, volunteer for other organizations, etc. but nothing is really calling me. I think I’m in one of those need to make a plan to figure out the plan phases. A.k.a. divergence.
I’m in a divergence phase in terms of how to spend my time outside of Pegasus, though Pegasus itself is converging.
This Month’s Goals
- Ship a new Pegasus release. Simon’s got several new features that need to get smoothed out and integrated. Maybe I’ll even do some coding of my own this month!
- Choose a topic for my next Django guide. Once again I’ll try to time a big content launch with my annual Black Friday sale, so need to nail down the topic this month.
That’s it. See you next month.