Highlights

• Is It Keto’s visits reached a record high of 11k pageviews.
• Revenues reached a record high of $40.84 in affiliate income.
• Despite this, Is It Keto didn’t satisfy its critical goals, so I’m putting it on the backburner.

Goal grades

At the start of the month, I laid out some high-level goals. Because of Is It Keto’s slow growth, I declared these to be goals the site must meet or else I’d stop working on it.

Highlights

• Is It Keto’s user visits plateaued in February, but that still represents progress.
• Revenues fell substantially and missed targets for the month.
• I’m going to shelve the project unless I achieve my targets for March.

Goal grades

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

Achieve $60 in revenue

• Result: Earned ~$11 in revenue (82% below target)
• Grade: D

Amazon Affiliate revenue continues to be bursty. A single purchase through one of my affiliate links can yield anywhere from $0.50 to $20. Revenues did not grow the way I hoped, and so I finished the month with a meager $11.

I’ve grown a lot over the last year at my job. Things are never really the same for long, and I’ve had a ton of different challenges to tackle – both on the technical side, but in a growing proportion on the side of people management and technical leadership, too. So I wanted to share some of the books I’ve loved over the last year, which I would recommend even to developers who aren’t currently managing people or projects.

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