Here’s every month of Angular on Rails’ sales so far:

And here are the last five months in graph form (I used Gumroad prior to December 2016 so Stripe doesn’t have data for those months):

So March 2017 was the worst month ever, and then April 2017 was the best month in a long time. I attribute this improvement to two main things:

• I dramatically improved my opt-ins from April to March
• I raised my prices from $39/$89/”custom” to $49/$99/$249

More opt-ins means more sales and higher prices means higher average sale size.

I had set a goal at one point to double my average sale size. Prior to April 2017 my average sale was $35.13. In April my average sale was $52.52. That’s of course not a doubling but it’s a 50% increase which isn’t bad.

In my last Entrepreneurship Journal I described a 4-step plan:

1. 3X opt-ins/mo
2. 2X average sale size
3. 2X traffic
4. 2X average sale size again

I think I was initially imagining I would start with the first goal and not move to the second goal until the first goal had been achieved. Later I decided it would probably be more effective to turn some knobs on goal #1, then move to goal #2 while I’m waiting for results to come in, and so on, since there’s a delay between the time I take action and then time I have enough data to see the results of my action.

Here’s what has happened with opt-ins so far:

That’s not a 3X but it is a 1.5X which I’m happy with for now. And we’ve already seen that I’ve 1.5X’d the average sale from $35.13 to $52.52. 1.5 * 1.5 = 2.25. That’s interesting because March’s revenue, $352.25, times 2.25 is $792.56, which isn’t too far off what April actually was. So it looks like fiddling with these inputs really does affect the outputs in the way I would expect. And as long as my opt-ins stay about the same and average sale size stays about the same, I can expect May to be about the same as April.

I haven’t done much yet to influence traffic and I certainly haven’t 2X’d the average sale size for a second time. But for the foreseeable future I think traffic is what I’m going to be focusing on. My first goal is still to 2X traffic but I wonder now if maybe I should just try to, say, 5X traffic. I’ve been told that all my conversion numbers are pretty good and that it might be easier just to crank up traffic than to try to squeeze out some higher conversion rates. I can see the logic in this.

Right now my traffic is at about 8,000 visitors a month, so I’m shooting for 16,000 a month. My guess is that if I do that my revenue will go from about $750/mo to about $1500/mo. So that’s the next milestone.