I decided to do an income report for Angular on Rails for October 2016. I haven’t officially done this before for Angular on Rails. I don’t know if I’ll end up making it a regular thing or not.
In case you’re not familiar, Angular on Rails is a site where I teach Rails developers how to use Angular on top of Ruby on Rails applications. I started the blog in 2014 but didn’t start making serious attempts to monetize it until April 2016, partly because I couldn’t think of a good way how.
In April 2016 I went to MicroConf where some conversations I had made some lightbulbs come on in my head. In June I pre-sold seven copies of Angular for Rails Developers then released the book on August 30th, 2016.
My revenue in those last couple days of August was $868 and in September I made $1053.
On October 25 I released a $199 book + video package which I sold on launch day at a discount of $99 (and, if you had already bought the $39 book, $60). My total revenue in October ended up being $1580.
To sum up the months it has been:
- August: $868
- September: $1053 (18% growth over August)
- October: $1580 (50% growth over September)
My goal for November is $2000 which would be 27% growth over October. I had previously set a goal of $3000 for October which I didn’t hit, but 50% growth is still “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick”, as my grandpa used to say. I decided to adjust November’s goal to something less ambitious, partially because I don’t plan to launch any new products in November.
I’m not completely sure where I’ll turn my attention next. I like to think about next steps based on the health of the various steps of my funnel. The first funnel step is traffic. I think I’m good on traffic for the time being. Traffic has historically been 5,000-6,000 visits a month. In October it was about 7,900 visits even though I haven’t been doing anything to actively try to improve traffic.
The next step in the funnel is to opt into my email list. My opt-in conversation rate last month was about 22%. That’s pretty good.
There’s also the conversion rate from subscription to purchase. According to Gumroad I made 40 sales in October and according to Drip I got 270 new subscribers. That means about 15% of subscribers went on to buy something. That actually strikes me as pretty good.
A little while ago I read something interesting Pat Flynn wrote. He said if you want to double your sales, double a conversion rate. It seems kind of crazy but it really is that simple. You can double any conversion rate in your funnel and it will result in a doubling of sales. So maybe the question is: out of all the conversion rates in my sales system, which could be increased with the least amount of time and effort? That’s hard to say. 22% and 15% are both pretty good conversion rates. But I guess that’s not to say they couldn’t be improved. It’s hard to imagine doubling them though.
So far I’ve pretty much only talked about sales and marketing. There’s also the necessity of maintaining the product itself. There are some certain aspects of the book that I’m very unhappy about right now. For example, the material covering authentication is incomplete.
And there’s also the consideration of keeping my list warm. I haven’t been emailing my list nearly as much as I should be. And in order to email my list, I need to have something worthwhile to say. Putting together a worthwhile utterance usually takes me a pretty large amount of time since the nature of my material is such that I can’t just spout it off the top of my head like I could with, say, freelancing advice. There’s research involved. So I have to somehow fit that in.
And speaking of freelancing, that’s what takes up most of my time. For a while I was allocating about an hour a day to working on Angular on Rails, although lately I’ve been barraged with client emergencies as well as sales conversations too good to pass up, and both those things have swiped a pretty huge amount of time from my plate. So I have to get my schedule back under control, and once I do I have to fit all this stuff inside an hour a day.
Perhaps I’ll spend, say, three days a week developing my educational material and three days a week on sales and marketing (Monday through Friday plus an hour on Saturday mornings).
It’s interesting how the nature of the challenge has changed over the years. When I first started with attempts at a product business, the challenge was that I had literally no idea what to do at all. Now the challenge is that I think I know exactly what I need to do, I just don’t know the best way to prioritize. Like Dan Sullivan said, “The skills that got you out of Egypt aren’t the same skills that will get you to the promised land.”