Highlights

• Is It Keto’s user visits continued to grow rapidly.
• Revenues increased substantially from the previous month but missed targets for January.
• I figured out an easy and inexpensive way to attract users via Twitter.

Goal grades

At the start of the month, I laid out some high-level goals. Here’s how I did against those goals.

Achieve $50 in revenue

• Result: Earned $23.37 in revenue (53% below target)
• Grade: C

Revenue is growing more slowly than I expected. Almost 80% of the revenue came from a single order because the person bought some high-ticket items after clicking an affiliate link, but this doesn’t feel like something I can rely on.

On February 1st, 2018, I quit my job as a software engineer at Google to start my own single-person software company. It’s exactly one year later, so it feels like an apt time to reflect on how that decision affected my finances, lifestyle, and happiness.

How I made and spent money

Prior to February 2019, I published all my retrospectives on Indie Hackers:

• Is It Keto Month 4: My First Dollar of Revenue

For years, I’ve hired freelancers through a site called Upwork. The site attracts many different professionals, so I’ve used it to find everything from cartoonists to software developers to copy editors. Some were great, some were disastrous, but none of them had ever tried to scam me outright.

That is, until I met Lizzie.

I recently installed a media sharing app to one of my servers. It was simple to install, but it hid a dastardly trap for long-term maintenance.

Every time a user uploaded a file, the web app saved it to the local filesystem. If I ever blew away the server and rebuilt it, I’d have to backup and restore every file manually. The better architecture would be for the app to write its files to a separate storage server, but I didn’t want to spend months rewriting the app to make that possible.