April Stats + Intro Maker Kickoff

Gross profit was ~$4,471. SDE was up to $2,438. It's taking a bit of time to get one of the new ad partners set up for payments, so I expect to see a bigger SDE spike in May.

I ran three A/B tests in April, but nothing amazing to report. Two were duds and the third (Stripe.js vs Stripe Elements vs Stripe Checkout) needs a bit more data to be conclusive.

For most of April, I wasn't super motivated to do much. I took a week off for spring break, got the garden in order, figured out how to use the bread machine, made a few fabric masks. In the last week or so, though, I've started coming out of my shelter-in-place funk a bit.

I added a new render server to keep up with the demand spike. I built a new intro video template, added variants of a couple, and rebuilt another intro to be more customizable. I mentioned "maintenance mode" in my March post, but that's maybe not the way to think about it. I think all the big optimizations have been made and the site is really in "playbook mode" or "operations mode." I need to add 4-6 templates per month, do a blog post, and do a newsletter. If I can keep doing that (and keep an eye on SEO), the site should continue to grow.

That frees me up to work on Intro Maker.

Finally.

I bought https://intromaker.com just about the same time I purchased IntroCave, but I've been too busy with IntroCave to execute on that plan. I go back and forth in my head about what I want it to be, but the central thesis is that realtime rendering is getting really good, AfterEffects is really slow, and there's money to be made there.

Idea #1: I hate managing render servers. Build a standalone client so people can run on their own hardware. Sell it for $50. (Or $50 for 1-year of updates model. Or new templates as paid add-ons).

Idea #2: Built a web front-end for creating/customizing projects from scratch that hands off to a backend renderer. This would not be "pick a template and add your logo," but more like "here's a blank canvas -- add text/images/effects from scratch." The idea here is that IntroCave would stay "pick a cool template" and IntroMaker would be "or make your own."

The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but they do compete with each other. Idea #2 is probably more B2B friendly (installed/managed software is a pain in the ass compared to having everything live on a website), but I think the YouTube creator audience has more in common with B2C than B2B even if individual channels could be considered a "business."

Whichever of these paths I end up taking (or something completely different), there are a handful of technical hurdles I need to solve first. I started putting that big-ass list together last night and started putting a proof-of-concept together. I knocked off the first big technical hurdle and have maybe 10-15 more items on my "I think this is doable, but let's make sure" list before I need to decide on a business model.