Epilocal - April 2021 Report: $150 Total Revenue (+$120 from March)
This is my first report for my open project, Epilocal. I've set a goal of $500 total revenue in a month before I move to a public revenue dashboard on my website. Until that happens I'll do monthly reports here on Indie Hackers.
April has been an up and down month, but with progress leading in the right direction. The month started with what felt like a step-change of organic traffic, but it didn't last - maybe Google algo changes?
During those days, I got two quick monthly subscriptions ($15 each) for my Mailchimp Connector for Data Studio, but then quickly ran into issues. One of them cancelled immediately the next day, while the other contacted me to say that they couldn't get it working.
One and a half days of frantic troubleshooting and back and forth with the customer before I solved the problem: I had hardcoded a part of the Mailchimp API Url that needs to change for each user. And I didn't do myself any favors with the error handling - cryptic error messages and nothing logged to my console made it tougher to solve than it should have been.
Refunds to both customers and a big lesson learned - at least one stuck with me and will hopefully still contribute to next month's revenue.
After that, there was a bit of a lull where I saw decreased traffic and newsletter sign ups, with no sales.
Slowly though, things picked up towards the end of the month as it looks like my recent efforts to build backlinks have started to pay off. I also got one annual subscription sale ($120) which is a nice boost to the total revenue for the month but not so much for the MRR. (I count it as +$10)
Total Revenue:
April: $150
March: $30
Monthly Run Rate (MRR):
April: $55
March: $30
Newsletter Sign Ups:
April: 21
March: 27
Next month I'll start adding in traffic numbers as well. I've just added Plausible Analytics which has given me a lot more insight into total traffic than Google Analytics. Currently I don't start Google Analytics until a user has accepted cookies, and that actually only captures around 1/3 of users it seems. I'm leaving both analytics running for now to do a comparison after a few weeks which I will share on Twitter.
