Elixir Radar
Curated content newsletter and jobs for Elixir developers
This month I added one more line of revenue: newsletter paid job listings.
This time I invested a little bit more of time in structuring that as a business experiment. Here's how I defined it
Experiment description: 4 weeks to test whether an Elixir company would use Elixir Radar paid newsletter job listings to gain more exposure to their job vacancy
- Metrics: nº Job listings sold
- Success criteria: At least one job listing sold for US$ 100
- Measuring start date: Aug 21, 2020
- Measuring end date: Sep 21, 2020
Result of the experiment: success
- Evidences:
- 19 leads prospected
- 6 replies
- 5 positive
- 1 maybe
- 5 sales, US$ 100 per sale
Not only the experiment was a success in the terms of the success criteria I defined, but the funnel metrics were way better than I thought.
I felt this is something I should explore more. I decided to continue this and also to invest time to rebuild the job board from scratch to offer a better experience for companies and developers.
This month I added one more line of revenue: sponsored links.
I was happy enough that a company already approached me the month before, asking how they could help me. I told them I was planning to start this primary sponsored link thing in the newsletter. They decided to buy it!
Starting to experiment with making money with Elixir Radar, to discover whether it could be financially sustainable.
The first line of revenue was what I called "Elixir Radar Individual Sponsorships", which is basically a way for the newsletter subscribers to donate money in a monthly recurring way.
-- Hugo Baraúna
29 people subscribed to Elixir Radar Individual Sponsorship, bringing a total of US$ 163 in MRR.
Given that the monthly recurring direct costs of Elixir Radar were around US$ 25 that month, this was the first month I didn't lose money.
It still didn't pay for my time working in the project, but it was enough to keep giving extrinsic motivation, besides my intrinsic motivation.
At the beginning of 2020, we sold our former company, Plataformatec. Elixir Radar was transferred from Plataformatec to me.
One of the changes I started to experiment with was making the newsletter and the whole communication around Elixir Radar way more personal.
Now it's not a whole company project anymore. It's a one-person project.
-- Hugo Baraúna
https://medium.com/elixir-radar/elixir-radar-has-a-new-home-c800244489b9
We expanded Elixir Radar to help Elixir developers, even more, now we added a job board focused on Elixir developers.
Before this, we were focusing on helping Elixir developers only with professional development by connecting them with quality technical content from their peers around the community.
Now we also have one more stakeholder, Elixir companies. And we could help both Elixir companies and Elixir developers by connecting each other.
-- Hugo Baraúna
Elixir Radar was launched as a content curation newsletter for Elixir developers.
It was created by me and my team at Plataformatec, the company behind the Elixir programming language, and my former company.
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