First time I've reached $10K ARR 🚀

While I'm not quite pulling in the revenue needed to make this a full-time business, I see a path forward.

Big things I'm working on to take my startup to the next level:

👉 Improve SEO
I'm getting decent traffic, as I launched this as a freebie side-project 4 years ago. I recently made some big upgrades to my site to take advantage and have started to add much more written content.

👉 Going deeper into the metrics
From day one, I added Google Analytics, but it doesn't tell you how your web app is being used. I've added two tools with generous free tiers: MixPanel and FullStory for that reason. MixPanel let's you track custom events that your users trigger. I can get a picture of what features are being used for instance... and more like funnel conversion, retention, etc. FullStory let's you watch users session and uncover problems in your UI/UX.

👉 Attacking my weakest links
Now that I can better see how my site and app are being used, I'm using that to inform what I work on. For example, I see my conversion rate is poor (0.05%). But I also setup a funnel to figure out what steps are the worst performing, where one fix can have the biggest improvement.

👉 Encouraging feedback
A big mistake I made was expecting users to reach out with feedback without much prompt. A few users reach out when they have problems and I have an exit survey, but that's not nearly enough. A bigger fix is I made a big CTA on my site to ask for feedback from paying users. I plan to take this further, but I want to see how this works out first.

👉 Act on the feedback
Feedback is worthless if you don't act on it. You obviously want to see trends to know which criticism apply to your userbase, rather than a single user. As a small founder, big picture things are hard to act on. For now I'm keeping the scope small and acting on things that will obviously provide value on my current trajectory.

👉 Marketing
Haha. Haha. Haha. Anything I do will be an improvement. Since I do have decent organic traffic, I have been more focused on improving my conversion rate before going all out on Marketing efforts. But I'm planning marketing campaigns for 2022. One thing I have done in prep has been building my Twitter presence. I think 2022 will be big a big year for me.

That's what I've been thinking about now that I hit this big milestone, I have been focused on taking my side-project to the next level.

Here's the tweet that inspired me to share this:

Thanks for listening!