A few days ago I got this email from a customer. Something about all the amounts coming out as negative. I converted their PDF. PDF Sample Converted Sample The customer was right, all amounts were coming through as negative. Pretty weird. Interestingly the column headers end with minus sign characters. I then opened up the PDF in PDFSnake to see how the text is encoded. Let’s look at how the values “$110.

Yesterday I was going through error reports and I saw this email. At first I was kind of annoyed, often users like to merge multiple PDFs into one large PDF to abuse my free plan and convert more than one PDF a day for free. Then I looked at the PDF and thought “Ah actually this is supposed to convert correctly even if the PDF has been merged into one mega PDF”.

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.

I have written a book about how I coded Bank Statement Converter. You can read it for free here.

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.