HackingFIRE Month #2 in Review
The road to $250K of side-gig revenue is full of hard months. July was one of them.
Well, July wasn’t the best month.
As most of you know, I fell off my writing habit pretty significantly this month. I lost my streak, restarted and lost it again. Revenue was also way down this month as well. Subjectively, this month felt like a scramble for survival than a determined and organized march. I’ll talk about that and more toward the latter half of this post!
Revenue and Investments
Revenue this month was down across the whole board.
Goals for this month:
Projected Tech Revenue: $74.00 (+32%)
Projected Educational Revenue: $74.00 (+32%)
Projected Crypto Account: $295.00 (+15%)
Projected Stock Account: $295.00 (+15%)
Total Income+Investments: $738 (+23.3%)
Tech revenue:
$0 😬 (-100%)
Educational revenue:
Web scraping class: $25.00
Web scraping book: $6.39
Amazon Affiliate: $3.75
Medium: $1.24
Total: 36.38 (-51%)
Investments
Crypto account: $585.91 (+98%)
Stock account: 603.33 (+104%)
Total income+Investments: $1,224.38 (+66%)
Breakdown
So, income was way down. My blog production was in the toilet because I didn’t focus enough on establishing my daily writing and researching habit, so I only published three blogs this month. My Affiliate income suffered from that, on top of not actually publishing blogs with affiliate links in them. I still don’t have a tech product (more exciting news on that in a bit) so I had zero tech income this month.
The only thing that really saved me was getting my budget under control so that I could throw way more in my investment accounts than I had originally planned. I finally did buy in on my stock account, purchasing some shares of ESGV, ESG, TAN, NEE, and CRBN. All of those except for NEE are ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance-focused) ETF’s, while NEE is a solar energy company. Surprisingly, that portfolio has done quite well, netting me 9.2% over the last month.
Crypto has done pretty well as well, netting me a fairly good return. I’m not sure of the exact percentage because Binance is weird about showing you the percent gained without counting your deposits. I’m still split between SOL, BNB, LPT and MATIC on the Proof-of-Stake staking front, and I’ve started putting some away in ETH since the ETH chain is likely about to switch over to PoS as well.
Overall, I’ve got my investments on autopilot more or less. I might check out some new investment opportunities on the ESG stock side, but since I’m limiting myself to crypto investments that are PoS only, I don’t figure that will change much.
Marketing and socials
Marketing and socials did okay this month.
SEO was a pretty big winner this month! The 3 month chart is trending up nicely and my blog is picking up a bit more diversified steam as well which I’m happy about.
Social growth leaves a bit more to be desired… I don’t think I was intentional enough with my social media activity, and I’m taking some advice from Justin Welsh on how to fix that for the next month.
My newsletter growth was… functionally non-existent. 1 new newsletter subscriber all month! That’s rough… I moved things over to Substack so I’m hoping that helps the newsletter grow a bit.
The first elephant in the room: Tech income
Yeah, it’s bad.
I don’t have a bit of tech income yet. I’m $74 behind and honestly don’t have anything that’s likely to pick up that slack over the next month. I tried to up my Fiverr game a little but honestly that was a massive waste of time.
I am working with a co-founder on a SaaS-like product, but I don’t see that being revenue-generating this month. I’ve made some good progress on it, though, and I really do foresee it being a great revenue generator soon. I’ll talk a bit more about my plan for tech income in my section on the next month.
The second elephant in the room: My writing habit
I let myself fall off the wagon in a big way on my writing habit. I think part of it is losing my initial big streak while I was on vacation. I no longer had that big number to keep up, so I wasn’t as ambitious about keeping it going.
I also lost my morning routine completely with my day job and side hustles pushing too far into my night. Since my daily writing usually happened early in the morning, that meant I lost my writing habit too. I’ll talk a bit on how I’m going to fix that in my section on planning.
The plan for conquering August
Okay enough talk about how bad the last month sucked. Let’s get together a plan for conquering the next month!
Starting with the Second Elephant: Fixing my writing habit
This is, seemingly, the easiest problem to solve: I just have to get writing again!
Technically, though, it isn’t. I need to re-establish my morning routine in order to do that. That means getting more organized about my work:life balance so I can get to bed at a good hour and wake up refreshed. I’ve changed around the way I plan out my weeks and have put together a solid organizing system in place to make sure I don’t overdo it on any given day.
Obviously, LifeLog is going to be the core of my daily writing habit. I actually tried out MakerLog and honestly wasn’t super impressed with it. I’ll also be upping my output on my blog and Medium as well by brainstorming some solid content that is a bit of a quicker turnaround to fill in while I work on longer-form content.
Planning and organization are key here, I just have to be more intentional with the way I do it.
The Bigger Elephant: Tech Income
Honestly, some of this is just going to boil down to “it’s not going to happen this month.”
SaaS income is hard to build up when you’re working full time, being a dad, and developing several side projects!
That said, I’ve got full confidence that the big project I’m working on will eventually turn into a great stream of income, so I’m not worried about the long term as much.
I don’t want to just sit around and wait for that to be done, though, so in the mean time, I’ve got a couple of ideas.
Set up a legitimate consulting front - No more of this Fiverr/UpWork nonsense. My blog is in desperate need of a makeover, so as part of that makeover I’m going to make a legitimate consulting landing page. I don’t have the service offering 110% planned out, but I’m thinking consultation on web scraper development and tutoring sessions on learning how to code.
Possibly develop a tiny SaaS - I tried to develop a SaaS in a week a couple months ago (which failed massively) and have a pretty solid idea for a good SaaS project. It’s not great by any stretch, but it’s good, and I think it’s something I can develop out into a real thing. Done in August? Maaaybe not… but at least close.
Local consulting - Finally, I have a couple of potential leads on some consulting work I can do in my city/state. I live in a pretty rural place, which means there’s not much tech, meaning it’s kind of a hard nut to crack but there’s also close to zero competition. I think I can probably win some easy consults to get started.
Content creation plan
So, I’ve decided to try out the Ship30for30 writing class! It starts on 8 August, so it’ll probably still be going by the time my next monthly review goes out. I’m hoping that’s really going to supercharge my writing process and help me get organized and efficient.
Outside of that, I watched a great video on Ship30For30 with Justin Welsh that taught me that I need to start systematizing my content creation efforts, so that’s going to be what I do next: create some great templates and start barring off time for content creation efforts. What I really need to do is nail down a good habit of creating some lower effort, high value content that can fill up the queue while I work on longer form content, so ideation is going to be a big step here.
There’s also the book. I’m up to a couple thousand words a week now and I’m slowly increasing my cadence there. I don’t think that’s going to be ready in the next month, but I’m definitely going to have way more of it fleshed out in that time. I’m also hopefully going to have a cover commissioned by then as well.
Finally, I’m putting together a plan for a paid course that I’m going to offer at some point soon. Details will come soonish, but it’s another thing that I’m aiming to release in the latter half of this year.
Goals and expectations for the next month
Tech income: $108.05
Educational income: $108.05
Stonks: $348.10
Crypto: $348.10
That tech income mark is gonna be hard considering we’re quite literally starting from zero… but we will see! I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve that may allow for it.
Here’s to hoping for a better month!