FlippedNormals

For a long time we thought that we were the only ones suffering financially this past year. But more and more people started reaching out to us to ask what was going on with their sales.
We've spoken to creators on our own platform, competing platforms as well as other founders. Everyone is saying the same thing, more content is being output but it's generating less income than in previous years.

In some way it's been comforting to hear the same stories from other people, but it also leaves us in a precarious situation where we're not sure how to move forward with this information.
All we can do is keep producing better and better content!

It's been a long ride!
To call it an upgrade doesn't really do the work justice. We've rebuilt FlippedNormals from the ground up.

We started this whole revamp about 2.5 years ago and we're happy to be able to say that it's done.
All in all we ended up with a cost of around $800k which is obviously a lot more than anyone of us expected. But when all is said and done, we have a product we're super proud of and that will allow us o focus on the things we're good at.

While we have a few smaller features planned for the future, for now we will go back to focus on content creation, adding more tutorials and resources.

It's been a long journey getting to this point.
We're in the final stages of wrapping up development for the next version of FlippedNormals. While the new version is live, we're still working out kinks and adding a few critical features.

But in the midst of this, with everything happening in the world, we're ecstatic to have passed this milestone. A number we had hoped to reach sooner, but at the moment we're just thankful that out business is still going strong!

Here's to the next $4,000,000!

It's been a slow year, we see this everywhere. But luckily, our creators are still making money!
Being able to add an additional $500k in commissions to creators over the last year is definitely a highlight for us in these trying times.

But with a more refined platform and more products than ever before I'm hopeful that it won't be too long until we reach $2M!

While we're still developing the website and struggling a bit keeping up with customer support as well as slowdowns, we've still managed to keep up with product uploads and on-boarding more creators.
20k products is a massive milestone for us, and more are coming in every day.
As well as reaching 2k creators that put their faith in us on our platform is very humbling.
We're very excited about the things to come as we get closer to the launch of our new platform.

$1,000,000 - What a phenomenal milestone!
Since the inception of FlippedNormals, we've always had one over arching goal in mind and that was for people to be able to make real money through our platform.
This number says it all, while we're still small compared to some of the bigger fish in this space, I can truly say, we're making a difference to our creators.

It took us 35 months to reach $500,000 paid out to our creators and we managed to add an additional 500k in just 13 months.

I can't wait to see what comes next!

We've been under a mountain of technical for a very long time. Anything we do to the site seems to create 10 more issue. On the 17th, Seemingly out of nowhere, the site just went down. We worked with a freelance developer to help us get everything up and running but things aren't running as smooth as they did before.
We never located the root cause, all we could do was to restore a backup going back a few days. This meant that we temporarily lost some user data, but were able to manually get them back into the system as we backed up the version of the site that had gone down as well.

This has been our life for a while now. The downside, aside from the stress, is that we aren't able to focus as much on growth as we would like. We're constantly putting out fires, and our customers are facing more issues than they should be.

Unfortunately, this also means that we haven't bee able to produce as much training and content for our YouTube channel which is a massive marketing channel for us.
This paired with the news that our new site id delayed certainly didn't boost morale.

All we can do is hope that the new version of the site that's being developed will help us overcome some of these issues.

Today is a sad, but not uncommon type of day in the world of development.
We've been informed by the company we've hired to build the new site, that they won't be able to deliver at the end of the month.
Increases in budget and timeline are not uncommon, however, this notice was very last minute and have left us a bit shaky about the process. But we remain hopeful.
The new timeline brings the budget up from 220k to 290k for our MVP and a new delivery date of June 18th.

2021 has been a tough year. COVID and a mountain of technical debt has severely limited the growth we had hoped to achieve.
Despite all of that, we saw our first year above $1,000,000 which is an amazing achievement!
We saw about a 9% growth in revenue compared to the year before, a lot lower than we had projected, but will decent given market conditions and out ever dying website.

2022 is a year to look forward to. The new website is being built and hopefully it will free us up to do what we do best, create high-quality courses, instead of doing customer support.

Aside from that we've of course seen the marketplace grow in terms of creators and products on the site. We now have more than 14,000 products and the library keeps growing every single day.

Profits have been much lower in 2021 due to our investment into the new site. This is something that's likely to continue for some months in 2022, but it will be a worthwhile investment. We're projected to spend around $220,000 on our MVP, with an additional $100k allocated for the remaining features.

Always an exciting event, and one we plan and look forward to the entire year.
This November, we saw the most amount of sales as well as visitors we've ever had in 1 month. However, with a lower conversion rate and less bought per customers, we didn't quite reach the levels we were hoping for.
We had over 10k sales and 114k visitors in the month of November which is a new all time high for us.
In terms of earnings, we managed to pull in 178k for the sale duration which lasted 12 days. This is $2k higher than 2020, but we also saw a decrease in conversion rates during the sale from 10% to 8% compared to 2020.
It's hard to definitely say what's been causing this, but we firmly believe that site performance is the main profit killer. COVID of course could have played a role as well.