February 1, 2020

January 2020: First $100 in Profit

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) 🤫

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