March open startup report
Revenue for March = $1,007
March was an ok month for revenue - not the best (in February I made $2,337) but not the worst (in January I made $225). I added a new product for the first time since September, a matching service for people working remotely which is sort of in limbo just now while I decide whether to keep going with it. It made a little bit of revenue and tipped me over $1,000 so that's nice.
Sources of revenue
My main sources of revenue in March were newsletter sales and affiliate income from Algo Expert, a course which prepares developers for interviews by teaching them algorithms. I'm appreciative of Hugo sponsoring the No CS Degree newsletter once again. Hugo was my very first sponsor way back in July which feels like years ago now! You can check out his guide for Jest here. I made a lot more in February as I had bootcamps sponsoring some posts. So I'm going to be approaching a lot more of them this month.
Newsletter subscribers
The number of subscribers for No CS Degree rose 2% in March. It's not stellar growth but it's growth nonetheless and better than nothing! For my job board for developers with no degree, the figures were a lot better. There was a 9% increase in March!
I can attribute a lot of that to the Corona virus and the unfortunate fact that some developers are being laid off. I hope that I can be of some help with my job board. I've been adding lots of remote positions recently in order to try and accommodate more people who are doing the right thing and staying at home at this time.
Some wins
I did a bit of a site re-design for the first time since October. I had to use the Commandline on my Mac and test out the blogging software I use, Ghost, on my local computer before pushing the changes live. Before there were problems with the CSS and to be honest I had let some parts of the site look really bad. There's still more work to do but it looks a bit slicker now.
I am comforted though that I was able to get sponsors for articles from bootcamps while the site was in a not-so-great state so now it looks nicer I should be able to get lots more!
Some fails
I did a giveaway for a laptop stand on Twitter - the rules were that if someone shared a tweet and signed up to the blog newsletter they would be entered into a draw to win the laptop stand. Unfortunately, only a few people did both steps so it was a costly error, haha!
I had seen Pieter Levels give away a new Macbook Pro and gain 9,000 followers! But of course Pieter has way more followers already - plus, he only asked people to follow him and retweet the message. I was asking people to leave Twitter, go to my newsletter landing page and then sign up there so I think that extra step was too much for some people. I'm going to live stream the draw later today and announce the winner so hopefully that draws a bit more attention!
Conclusion
It was good to try out something new with Remote Roulette and launch something for the first time in ages! Well, 7 or 8 months which seems like a long time for me. I'm really glad I made changes to the site design and re-installed some of the built in subscriber features of Ghost.
It would have been nice to make a bit more revenue but in this current economic climate, making over $1,000 isn't too shabby! I don't qualify for any of the UK government aimed at self-employed people so I just have to keep on shipping. I'm very grateful that I can make a living online and I'm aware that a lot of people aren't in this position.