On Monday morning I was going through emails and see one from a user telling me the forgot password form isn’t working. That’s weird, it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t really break. I try resetting their password for them using the form, the form errors out. That’s weird. It turns out this user’s email address was capitalised, and the query code that fetches a user by email address sends in the lowercase value of their email.
A few months ago I got an email from a customer in Dubai asking me to help extract transactions from a PDF bank statement. This is pretty normal. I get about ten of these emails a day. I had a look at the PDF and thought:
“Damn, banks are even stupider than I thought.”
The statement was basically an excel file, exported out into a PDF. It’s so annoying when people do that, because most people would rather have the Excel/CSV file.
Plumpbird: February is the shortest month of the year. Did you make any damn money?
Net Volume January 2023 - $59390 HKD February 2023 - $57878 HKD A bit of a drop, but February has three fewer days than January, so you could chalk it up as a win.
Monthly Recurring Revenue January 2023 - $50408 HKD February 2023 - $57820 HKD A very nice increase. This means MRR has now exceeded $7000 USD.
Plumbird: It’s been a while since you’ve shared sales numbers. How’s the Bank Statement Converter doing?
It’s been pretty good.
Net Volume I like this number, because it’s the number of dollars that go into my bank account.
November - $53,531 HKD December - $55,525 HKD January - $59,390 HKD It’s a nice steady increase. The best month we’ve had was $59,507 in August 2022. That month was a bit of an outlier because I charged one client $40,000 HKD for some one off work.
Normally this blog goes out on a Monday, but since the month ended on a Monday I figured it would be better to wait a day. Let’s go through October’s stats.
In September we brought in $46,736 HKD and this month we brought in $46,846 HKD. That’s not very much growth!
We ended October with MRR at $40,455. We ended September with MRR of $37,521.
Active subscribers has gone from 212 to 225.
On October 21st monthly recurring revenue (MRR) exceeded the $5000 USD mark. We hit $4000 MRR on September 12th, so it took only 40 days to earn the last $1000 MRR. If MRR continues to grow at this speed, we should hit $6000 MRR on December 1st 2022.
Plumpbirds: We’re getting tired, we don’t want any more MRR.
Last Week’s Goals ✅ 1. Contact 100 users
I emailed every user who signed up in the previous week.
Last Week’s Goals Plumpbird: Set some harder goals this week you lazy jerk!
✅ 1. Contact 100 users
I contacted more than 100 users last week and scheduled the emails to arrive at 10 AM in whatever timezone the user was in. Sadly only four of the users replied. Some users I emailed had signed up several months ago. It might be better to email users who recently signed up.
Bad News Last week I walked from Tung Chung to Mui Wo, which is section #1 and #2 of the Lantau Trail. At the end of the trail I sat down in what turned out to be an ants nest. The ants started biting me it was pretty painful, but I got up and brushed them off. This taught me an important start-up lesson.
Do not sit on a nest of ants, but if you do, just brush them off.
September Sales Another month has gone by, let’s take a look at the monthly revenue graph.
Oh no, revenue went down! In August we brought in $62,596 HKD and in September we brought in $46,736 HKD. Not great news, but it’s actually okay. This is because 60% of August’s revenue came from one off work for a single customer.
The Monthly Recurring Revenue graph is looking excellent. It increased from $21,701 HKD in August to $37,481 HKD in September.
