🛠️ Startups Update: April 2024
Adding expenses 🤦♂️
Ciao my friends!
I went on a 3-week vacation (from my day job). This was fantastic! Finally, my mother came to visit us and we spent high-quality time together. I hadn’t seen her for 6 years and this was long overdue. So happy this finally happened 😊 It was very hard to go back to work, 3 weeks wasn’t enough =)
I hope you are all doing wonderful and starting to feel that summertime is not too far away 😎.
In this issue:
Subscribers
Platform updates
Automation quest
Extra thoughts
🌐 UX Remotely (Link)
Subscribers
Paid: 22
1 person unsubscribed after 1 month - “can’t afford”.
2 people unsubscribed - “no longer needed, landed a job”
Subscription types:
Weekly: 1
Monthly: 17
Quarterly: 4
Metrics:
MRR: 107.05 EUR
Gross volume: 311.42 EUR
Net volume: 244.32 EUR
Avg revenue per user: 5.63 EUR
Subscriber churn rate: 20.8%
Subscriber lifetime value: 27.03 EUR
Total: 357
Platform updates
Expenses
The cost of growth…
I use Airtable as the database tool. Apparently, with so many jobs (and other records, e.g. companies, talent profiles, etc.) I’ve exceeded the limitations of the Free plan and had to upgrade to the next plan which costs 20 EUR/month. Otherwise, I couldn’t add more jobs, which is not an option.
I immediately started thinking about migrating off Airtable to Google Sheets, or something else. I’ll look into this a bit later. Airtable is convenient, but it takes 30% of the revenues for the cheapest of their paid plans 🫤
I keep thinking about going back and reusing my existing job board architecture that I built a while ago on WordPress for My SoulTeam. But the perspective of going through customizations (job fields and labels, permissions, design, etc.) stops me right away. WordPress is very powerful, but such a time pit the minute you decide to start customizing it 🤦♂️
(Unsuccessful) attempt to move over free accounts to the platform
I use Softr as a no-code tool to display jobs and manage access levels. Initially, I had only Paid subscribers to access the platform to view the full job board. Everyone else could see the preview of the 20 most recent jobs.
As a way to increase the subscriber base, even the free ones, I decided that I want to have 3 tier access levels: public, free, and paid. Having a free account would give more value than viewing only public information (e.g. 10 jobs vs 20).
After spending several evenings building out all the logic for the platform to handle different access levels, registration processes, and a few other architectural changes, I imported all 350+ substack subscribers to automatically grant them access as ‘free’ subscribers to the platform. And then I found out…
… that my free plan with Softr allows only 100 user accounts 🤦♂️ 🤦♂️
In order for me to make this work, I’d have to upgrade my subscription to a $49/month plan. The ROI is not clear, so I decided to roll back all those changes (manually 🤯) and now, only paid subscribers have accounts. That’s around 20 hours of my life wasted. The mistakes you make…
Talent List
The List has got 310 profiles now. Added keywords to the profiles for easier browsing. No sales, so far. Reached out to a dozen design managers back when the list had ~160 profiles. A few people said it was a cool idea but nobody signed up. Most didn’t respond at all.
This reminded me of my previous startup project My SoulTeam when I had to keep chasing hiring managers to get them to do their tasks. Like a parent is struggling to make their child do their homework 🤦♂️
Next, I want to do a more active reach-out. Let’s see how it goes.
More content
Added my curated list of UX Career Bookmarks on a few dozen topics, from “Is UX for me?” to “Salary negotiations”. Check it out →
Now, I also have a 9-part series guide on how to find a job with a more novel approach compared to just applying to jobs. I haven’t found a natural way to add it to the platform as a series of posts (Softr is not built for blogging). So, thinking more in line with an ebook. Need to do some research on how to convert my web posts into an ebook.
Also, updated some styling, layouts, and menus.
Free vs Paid
Made a slight change to the offerings:
Paid subscribers get a free Portfolio or Resume review.
Free subscribers receive new job notifications email 5 days later (instead of 3 days).
Automation quest
In the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to set up a semi-automated job crawler and monitor. I am not a developer 🫣
After spending at least 30 hours with ChatGPT (paid plan), I haven’t done it. ChatGPT turns out to be pretty stupid with coding. Lots of back-and-forth messaging with it and it keeps fixing one thing and breaking another, in a loop. For the first time ever, I got locked out of v4 because I was using it too much.
Then, a friend recommended trying an alternative GenAI from Anthropic. Some say it’s better. I shed some tears while trying to set up an AWS account to use this new AI through Amazon.
Verdict: completely useless for my purpose. After a couple of hours trying to get some value out of it, I gave up. Received an invoice from Amazon for 0.58 EUR.
Ah, before this route I tried all website monitors and crawlers I could find. Everything free or affordable doesn’t work for my use cases. I didn’t review more expensive alternatives (100+ EUR per month estimated cost with unknown effectiveness.
Not giving up on the attempts to get this built using ChatGPT, but it’s not easy. Will keep trying, the current manual process is not sustainable.
On a second note, being on vacation and getting Stripe notifications about new subscriptions was marvellous! But… because I have to manually add each new subscriber coming from Stripe to the list of VIP members with access to the platform, this doesn’t feel complete =)
Basically, as soon as the notification comes in, I have to drop everything and spend 5 minutes in front of the computer. Not the level of freedom I’m aiming for, but this is the trade-off for now.
Extra Thoughts
Community
I keep thinking of launching a community for this but haven’t been able to convince myself to commit to this. Key questions:
Is there enough interest? So far, seems like not.
How would it be different and unique compared to dozens of other UX communities? Is Remote focus enough of a differentiator?
Do I want to commit to this community for several years?
The Designpreneur
Related to one of the questions above dilemma that I keep coming back to - Do I see myself committing to UX Remotely for 5 years or should I focus on the project/community that I am more aligned long term?
Technically, UX Remotely is partially related to the idea of Designpreneurship. It would address the location independence, but not the financial component. My dilemma is - should I spend the next n years building UX Remotely (which is a “half solution” to the ultimate problem) or devote myself fully to the Designpreneurhsip?
Vacation problem
Last month, I went on a series of short trips. One time, my travelling and other commitments resulted in a delay in job updates - 5 days. I received an email from a paid subscriber asking if something broke as they hadn’t been receiving email updates.
This highlighted the problem of the type of content I create and the manual process I follow 🙇♂️ I can’t say it was a new observation, but it did serve as an important reminder that I should solve the problem of automation. Big dilemma.
Life purpose
Perhaps, it’s a middle-life crisis, but I’ve been thinking more and more about this question. I saw an interview with Robert Green, the author of the book “Mastery” and this philosophical question sparked my thinking again 🤦♂️
What is my purpose? I want to find it.
Have you found your life purpose?