Highlights

• TinyPilot has its first official office space.
• I tried a marketing experiment that flopped.
• Designing IT infrastructure for a new office is fun.

Goal grades

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

Increase TinyPilot revenue to $30k

• Result: Increased revenue by 46% to $29k
• Grade: A-

I didn’t quite hit my $30k goal, but I came close. It’s a relief to end the downward sales trend that began in February.

A transparent look at how I generated $5,247 in revenue from my indie projects in April 2021.

Here’s a riddle. My web app keeps all of its data in a SQL database. I can spontaneously tear it down, deploy the code to a different hosting platform, and the app will still serve all the same data. Running my app in production costs $0.03 per month.

How is this possible?

That’s easy. You have a separate database server running somewhere that stores all of your app’s state.

No, my app never talks to a remote database server.

Highlights

• I plan to open TinyPilot’s first real office next month.
• TinyPilot’s revenues continue to plummet, but I’m learning to accept it.
• I’m inching ever closer to the freedom to take short vacations.

Goal grades

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

Hire two local part-time employees to begin taking over order fulfillment

• Result: Received applications from two promising candidates.
• Grade: D

I slacked a bit here and didn’t get the ball rolling until late into the month. I’ve got interviews scheduled, but I haven’t hired anyone yet.

I bought this book hoping for lessons to apply to my business, manufacturing and selling physical products. I didn’t find many business insights, but it was still an engaging and funny story.