Side project marketing and MRR

It walks like MRR and it quacks like MRR. After 3 months at $80/month I am going to call this little duckling what it is - MRR.

The revenue is coming from two Android music apps. Here are the revenue graphs bumping along for the past few months:

Beat Maker 3-month revenue graph

PO LoopSync 3-month revenue graph

It feels a bit lame celebrating such a small win but I'm excited about this because it's the first time I've got "channels" to work. In a turn that will surprise absolutely nobody the channel that is working is SEO. I built two sites which are sending a small amount of traffic back to my apps. But there's a twist - one of the sites is not content driven.

The first site I made is a classic content-heavy site. My apps work with pocket operator devices and I had done a bunch of research in that space, so I made an info site all about pocket operators. Here's the graph of search traffic:

This site is ranking on the front page of search for terms like "pocket operator apps" which lo-and-behold is exactly what my apps are. Other terms that are ranking well include pocket operator cases, stands, and cheat-sheets.

The second site is more interesting. It's a web app. It's a random melody generator you can use to create royalty free MIDI melodies for use in your own music. Here is the graph of search traffic:

The reason I'm excited about this second channel is because I was able to build it with code instead of content. It is code that procedurally generates content for visitors.

This web app was actually a side project I was working on for a while. It didn't click until I heard on the Veed IH podcast the other day that "side project marketing" is a thing. That's where you take some free side project and use it as marketing for your main app.

Like many people here I prefer to write code. Sure I can write content but I always prefer writing code. So I'm very happy to find there is a way to create channels based purely on writing code.

So if you have your own side project that you've been sitting on, think about turning it into a channel for the thing you're selling.

One thing I'm going to be looking out for is evidence that these channels are actually feeding the sales in a meaningful way. I can see the channels are working, but is that traffic translating to sales, or are the sales just coming from background traffic? I need to figure out better ways of measuring this.