This year, I decided to build my first ever home storage server. It’s a 32 TB system that stores my personal and business data using open-source software.

The server itself cost $531, and I bought four disks for $732, bringing the total cost to $1,263. It’s similar in price to off-the-shelf storage servers, but it offers more power and customizability.

Highlights

• TinyPilot generates $58k/month in revenue yet somehow loses money.
• It’s more important than I thought to have low-latency insight into developers’ hours.
• I’m trying paid advertising again for the first time in almost two years.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Publish a blog post and video about building a homelab NAS server with TinyPilot

• Result: I’m nearly done, but I haven’t published yet.
• Grade: D

The blog post is turning out to be much longer than I expected. There are so many details I want to include about my thought process in choosing parts, and I didn’t realize how long that would take. I’m hoping to wrap up in the next couple of weeks.

Highlights

• TinyPilot had its best sales month ever, with $69k of total revenue.
• I’m now five months and $32k over budget on a website redesign.
• I launched PicoShare, and it’s the fastest-growing project I’ve ever published.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Publish TinyPilot Pro 2.4.0

• Result: Released TinyPilot 2.4.0 on schedule
• Grade: A

The latest release adds support for multiple users, which customers had requested for a while. We also eliminated an annoying bug that generated frequent support requests.

Highlights

• I hired TinyPilot’s first support engineer.
• I learned that hiring a support engineer is even harder than I expected.
• I’m evaluating platforms for paying international contractors.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Launch Voyager 2: PoE Edition

• Result: I finally launched Voyager 2 PoE
• Grade: A

Oh, boy. This took way longer than I expected. I looked back at the original design document that I wrote in early April 2021. I estimated that we’d have 200 units ready by May 15, 2021. In other words, I estimated six weeks, and it took 11 months.

Highlights

• I published my fourth annual retrospective about being a bootstrapped founder.
• TinyPilot sales continue running strong despite a delay in launching our next product.
• I analyze how I’m spending my time and figure out ways to allocate my hours better.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Launch Voyager 2: PoE Edition

• Result: Delayed the launch a few weeks due to a manufacturing issue
• Grade: D

I had to delay the launch because we discovered that the first manufactured batch of PoE hardware is behaving differently than our prototypes. We should be able to fix the boards, but it’s going to take a few weeks.