CFP Land

It's a really bad time to be in any business that deals with in-person events.

CFP Land has been hit pretty hard by Caronavirus. A couple people canceled their paid accounts to save money, and new signups have basically dropped off a cliff. My KPIs:

• 3643 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1987 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $336 in Pro Subscriber Revenue 💳
• $0 in other revenue 💵

My Focus in March

Caronavirus isn't going away anytime soon, and while it shuts down the events industry as we know it, it opens up a huge opportunity for job boards. Unemployment is skyrocketing, and the Developer Relations industry is likely to be especially hard-hit since much of what they do is speak at conferences.

So, I launched Hire DevRels! 🎉

I've had this idea in my backlog for almost a year now. I'm starting to think of CFP Land (and now Hire DevRels) as my "top of funnel". Both these tools will be free, but allow me to collect leads for a higher-priced SaaS app built for these audiences (more on that coming next month).

The nice thing about Hire DevRels is that like CFP Land it can be almost entirely automated. It takes me about 15 minutes per week to keep it running, so it's very do-able (and eventually outsourceable). In its first two weeks, I got over 100 subscribers.

As long as Hire DevRels doesn't become a distraction and it grows organically without too much input from me, I think it's a worthwhile lead magnet.

A friend of mine reached out last week saying he was trying to check out on CFP Land and was running up against an API error. Fortunately, I was home and available, so I started looking into it. Turns out I released a bug in the middle of January that was preventing a majority of new users from checking out. 🤦‍♂️

I probably only would have had a couple of new paying members, but it's still frustrating when stuff like this happens. I emailed everyone who had tried to sign up telling them I fixed the issue, but nobody went through the checkout process, so I think the moment had passed for most of them.

Needless to say, my revenue numbers didn't increase this month:

• 3559 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1970 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $320.50 in Pro Subscriber Revenue 💳
• $0 in other revenue 💵

My Focus in February

I actually did really well in new email subscribers, but I manually unsubscribed about 190 people who had not opened an email in 6+ months. So, I continue to pack on 100-200 new subscribers every month. 🎉

Here are some of the things I worked on this month:

Podcast Marketing Campaign

I have now appeared on 4 published podcasts to promote CFP Land, and recorded appearances on 4 more. I'm not actively pitching the project anymore, but I'll know more about how well this strategy works in a couple months when I go back to check my Google Analytics.

Search Engine Optimization

I invested some time building new pages and optimizing some existing ones that should help get more search visibility to CFP Land. I added individual conference pages, so users can see the pages from CFPs in previous years.

Hired a freelance writer

I want to spend more time on product and business development, so I hired a freelance writer to build up my library of content. It ended up being more expensive than I would like (~$200/article), but it's a long-term investment, and it's definitely saving me time.

What's Next?

I'm planning to spend the next 3 months working on a major revamp to the CFP Land Pro platform. I will continue to post updates here for CFP Land, but this will be a pretty significant pivot of the project, so stay tuned! 📺

After about a year and a half, CFP Land finally hit profitability for one month!

January's KPIs:

• 3298 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1970 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $295.50 in Pro Subscriber Revenue 💳
• $290.00 in other revenue 💵

What's working?

This year I want to hit $1000/month in "Pro" memberships and $1000/month in revenue from other sources (mostly sponsorships). I've sold a couple of whole month sponsorships now, but it's not consistent, so I added a simple $45 option to promote your conference in 1 email newsletter. Everyone who submitted a conference in January saw it (around 50 people), and two people paid. I actually cut it off mid-month because a large sponsor bought the whole month of February so my ad spots were all spoken for. There's probably more I could do here to make a small amount from each conference that submits their CFP.

The other thing that worked for bringing in new subscribers - including a couple Pro members - was posting the 17k+ word "Guide to Speaking at Tech Conferences" in December. It got to the front page of Hacker News and was widely shared in newsletters and on social media, so it brought in a lot of new visitors.

Now, I'm leveraging that guide to get interviews with developer-focused podcasts. I've got 6 booked so far, and will probably do another round in the summer if this works well.

What's not working?

The free subscriber conversion rate is still extremely low, but I realized after talking to some of them that many don't know what features are included in the Pro plan or that it even exists, so I need to do a better job publicizing it. That's my big goal this month.

I'm also spending too much time on the weekly grunt work for CFP Land to spend much time making improvements. I'm currently looking into hiring a virtual assistant to take some of that off my plate. It'll hurt short-term profits, but right now I have more money than time in my life.

Finally, I spent too much money on stupid stuff that didn't move the business forward this month. I bought a few domain names on a lark, paid for a month of ahrefs (total waste), and tried enriching some subscribers with VoilaNorbert and got totally ripped off by them. 😡

Plan for February

• Find a VA, outsource the easy tasks in maintaining CFP Land
• Spend time optimizing the CFP Land Pro conversion funnel
• Continue development on new CFP Land "teams" tool (more on this soon) 🤫

I have been interviewing Technology Conference Speakers (my target market) for about a year now, so I took those 30 interviews and combined them with my own observations on public speaking to compile a 17,000+ word guide for new tech conference speakers.

This was a huge undertaking, but I think it'll go a long way toward improving SEO, inbound links, and getting new free subscribers.

December's KPIs:

• 3091 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1683 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $247.50 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

What's next?

I have two primary goals for CFP Land in 2020: increase subscriber revenue, and find a new revenue channel.

Unfortunately, there aren't a ton of tech conference speakers in the world, so the upper bound on my revenue from that channel is pretty low. I'm hoping to reach $1,000/mo this year.

On the other hand, there are a lot of interesting pivots I could make. Speaker team management and sponsorship opportunities are two that I'm exploring now.

While revenue has been pretty flat the past few months, I'm really excited about the project for this year. If this guide produces results, I'll likely be publishing more long-form content in the coming year as well.

My goals for CFP Land have always been long-term, so now that the project is almost breaking even every month, I'm starting to think more about what kind of content I can create to increase revenue in the long-term.

But first, November's KPIs:

• 3027 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1600 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $240 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

So, this month I started working on a long guide for new conference speakers. Since March, I've been publishing interviews with speakers, so I used many of their tips and others from around the web to compile a huge piece of content (so far over 5000 words!).

I'm planning to use this content in several ways to increase search engine traffic and give me something to post about on social media all year round. My Twitter posts still bring in a fair amount of traffic and engagement, but lately I haven't had much time to hang out on Twitter, so I'm also going to invest in creating a huge library of scheduled Tweets for 2020.

As 2019 comes to a close, I'm starting to set some goals for 2020. The big ones are:

• $1000/mo in recurring Pro Membership revenue (that's 4x today's revenue)
• $1000 in total revenue from a new source (TBD on what that is, but I have some ideas)

Honestly, I would run CFP Land even if it didn't make any money, but having some income helps me justify spending more time improving it.

In the past 4 months, I've doubled subscription revenue ($115 => $230/mo). Better yet, CFP Land is about $14/month away from breaking even!

Here are my monthly numbers for October

• 2936 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1531 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $231 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

This month I'm getting back into my groove with CFP Land, so I've got two big initiatives that I'm kicking off:

1. Team Features - I started interviewing potential customers about what they would need in a team CFP management tool. While it's not a huge market, the subscription price would likely be higher than the $10/mo that I'm currently making from single users.

I also started some of the underlying dev work required to support team accounts. I'm trying to keep the feature set lean, but there are some data changes that needed to happen before I could group users into teams.

2. Podcast Tour - I've been trying to think of what comes next for marketing the project. My weekly Speaker Stories on the blog have been fun - and they continue to trickle in as speakers reach out - but the rest of my marketing is on autopilot.

So, I'm going to try a concerted effort of going on developer podcasts as a guest on the topic of speaking at conferences. I'm hoping to build inbound links, awareness, and have some conversations with potential customers along the way.

Another marketing strategy I'm trying this month is a sponsorship trade with a conference. Developer First reached out and asked if I could sponsor the conference. I countered with an offer to trade links in emails and online, so they've included CFP Land as a sponsor for the conference, and I'm including them in my emails for the next month.

My concern with this strategy is the sustainability of it - it's a pretty big headache to go back and forth on copy and set it up, plus it's really hard to measure performance.

I've continued to grow paying users this month - I've now got 20 paid users. It's still a tiny amount of revenue, but it definitely helps keep me motivated. I also carved out some time to release a couple new features:

• Abstracts - Speakers can store their abstracts and choose which ones they submitted to which conferences. Eventually this will let them see success rates for different talks they pitch.

• Email Click Tracking - I turned this off for a while due to some limitations with Sendgrid's free plan, but after building an internal tool to track email clicks and opens, I was able to re-enable this. I'll also use this to auto-unsubscribe people who don't open emails for a while to keep my list warm.

September's numbers:

• 2880 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1451 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $190 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

All metrics continue to move up, despite the fact that I'm really not doing anything active on the marketing front these days. I have some ideas on that front for the end of the year, but am still more focused on new features for the next month. I really want to get team accounts working so I can add a new pricing tier soon.

In personal news, on September 24th, my wife and I had a baby, so now I'm a real father as well as being a side project father!

I missed my August update by a few days, but better late than never, right?

Honestly, I have been sort of laid back on CFP Land this past month. After writing a blog post on my marketing funnel for Indie Hackers, I wanted to see how it would work before messing with things too much, plus my wife's having a baby in two weeks so I'm getting a lot of stuff at my main job ready for a hiatus. 👶

August's numbers:

• 2788 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1363 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $142.50 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

Recurring revenue continues to rise - albeit slower than I'd like. The plus side is that I'm reaching a critical mass of marketing/awareness where I barely have to do anything anymore. I have stopped my more aggressive email and auto-follow campaigns and I'm still gaining subscribers and Twitter followers. Now I think the challenge is figuring out what this market needs enough to pay for.

This month, I started developing a couple new features for the paid app. I'm ultimately working towards team accounts, but there's some underlying updates that need to happen first. I've realized that many of my paid users are already getting their companies to pay, so it makes sense to give them a more team-centric experience at a higher price point, and allow more casual speakers greater access to the basic features for free. Charging individual users a few bucks per month in a market this small (<50k potential users worldwide) would be very limiting.

Next month will be touch and go. With the new baby, I'm not going to commit to much on CFP Land, but you never know, maybe it'll be a good sleeper and life won't get too crazy...I can dream at least. If I do get time, I'm going to introduce some more features for paid and free users as well as a trial run of team accounts to a few interested users.

June was exciting. A few people started paying for CFP Land's new Pro Plan, and I was thinking that if I could continue that growth, the project might get profitable by October.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's going to be that easy (never is, is it?). So, revenue was flat, but most of my numbers are up:

• 2599 Twitter Followers 🐦
• 1244 Free Email Subscribers 💌
• $123.50 in CFP Land Pro Revenue 💳

One thing that was encouraging was that three of my paid users reached out and mentioned that their companies would be paying for their subscriptions, and that they would be interested in purchasing team plans if those were coming in the future.

I'm learning that individual conference speakers are not a great target market. Speaking isn't part of their job, so they're very price-sensitive. Even $10/mo may be too much.

That said, DevRel professionals - people who speak and travel as part of their role - are very likely to pay, and likely to make their employer pay...this is encouraging.

So, now I'm thinking of pivoting a bit. I'd like to adopt a Trello or Slack-like freemium model where individual speakers can use the platform for free, but in order to access team features, analytics, or past conference data, they'll need to purchase a license. This means the monthly price can be higher, and I can use the free users as a crowdsourced means of collecting more conference data.

In August, I'll be working on some fundamental platform updates that will give free users and subscribers more features. In September, I'll be introducing team features and starting to convert users to those plans instead.

CFP Land is my free email newsletter for conference speakers. I'm also developing a Pro tool, and sell occasional sponsorships.

I have been marketing it pretty aggressively this summer, so I wanted to take a look at each channel, and see what's working and what isn't. Maybe you can learn something from this analysis, or give me some feedback on how I can improve my little business.

CFP Land marketing overview

• Visitors - Unique visitors who come in via the channel.
• Signups - Email newsletter signups from the channel.
• Services - The amount I'm paying in services that automate this channel.
• Hours - The number of hours I'm spending maintaining this channel.
• Rate - My "hourly rate", which is artificially low, but meant to be a placeholder as I'd like to hire someone at roughly this rate once I figure out what works and what doesn't.
• Total Spend - Combines the hours worked and services paid for on each channel.
• CPV - Cost Per Visitor
• CPA - Cost per Acquisition. Ultimately, this is what I'm optimizing for.

Channels

Cold Emails

By scraping emails using Hunter and Phantom Buster on Linkedin, I can get about 1000 email addresses per month. Then I send some cold outreach with GMass. So far, this has not performed as well as I hoped. Early on I did this with emails from Github and it was much more successful, so I may have to abandon this if it doesn't pick up.

Twitter

I do targeted following and auto-dming on Twitter. This has been one of the most successful (and consistently used) channels to date.

Organic SEO

I don't spend any money on SEO, but some of my dev work contributes to it. Mostly just optimizing tags and adding new archive pages to improve page count.

Blog content

While blog content contributes to SEO (so it's hard to separate these two channels), I count new visitors who come into blog posts as a separate channel. I like publishing regular content, but the time it takes makes it really hard to justify, especially when I look at it compared with other channels here.

Referrals

Excluding Twitter, most other inbound links I get are organic. I have reached out to a few websites to trade links, so that accounts for the 1 hour of time I've spent, but this has obviously been a really successful channel.

Analysis

At this point, my paid product is immature and sponsorship dollars are pretty inconsistent, so I don't have a great LTV (Lifetime Value) for each email subscriber, but I am hoping I can get it up to around $5.

With that in mind, it's pretty clear that many of these channels aren't going to work. Cold email seems to be a bust, and while blog content does contribute to SEO, I could publish fewer, more focused posts and probably still get the same lift.

I also want to explore link-building more. Referrals from other blogs, social media platforms, Quora, etc. seem to be paying off, and I've spent very little time on them thus far.

Hope that was interesting, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts/critiques!