Product
I started doing Facebook ads. So far I’ve spent $52.29 for 21 subscribers for an average of $2.49 per subscriber. My average sale for April was $52.52, and about 8% of my subscribers buy something, so I believe that means a subscriber is worth $4.20 to me ($52.52 * 0.08). This means $2.49 per subscriber makes sense. For every 100 subscribers I buy ($249) I’ll make 8 sales, resulting in $420.16 ($52.52 * 8) of revenue and $171 of profit.
This is all assuming that subscribers who came to me via Facebook ads convert the same as subscribers who came to me in other ways. So far none of these 21 subscribers I’ve bought have bought anything from me.
Revenue for May hasn’t been very good so far. I’ve made just $257.25 in sales so far and it’s already the 18th. At this rate I’ll make less than $500 this month, which would be lame. That $257.25 even includes a sale when somebody accidentally bought the book twice, so it’s really more like $207. I’m reminded of this tweet:
entrepreneurship:
“all-time sales record! whoo-hoo!”
*no sales for 2 days*
“i’m a failure and doomed.”— Mike Perham (@mperham) May 15, 2017
We’ll see how things shake out.
Training
I’m in Detroit right now teaching a 5-day class. It’s going well. (By the way, Chris Cornell died here in Detroit last night. Crazy.) Next week I’m teaching a 3-day class in Amsterdam. Then I’m off for two weeks, then I’m teaching a five-week bootcamp in Detroit. Nothing planned after that yet.
I have some potential work in the pipeline. I taught a one-day class last week and the client was happy and wants to do more classes. This is through a training company so I don’t have much control over the sales process. All I can really do is make suggestions to the training company and then wait. I also have some other prospects but they’re much earlier-stage.
Development
I haven’t done any development work in a long time. The soonest I could possibly do any development work is after July 14th when my bootcamp ends. So I guess I will have gone four and a half months without having written any production code, which is totally crazy to me. I’ve been trying to line up some development work in what little extra time I’ve had but nothing has panned out yet. I don’t expect to have any more time between now and July 14th to find something. It actually seems more likely that I’ll line up some training work before any dev work. I kinda hope I find some dev work though because I have a somewhat long vacation planned for August and it would be nice to have some location-independent work to be able to do during the vacation.