Building in Public March 2022 Results
Although it has been my best month ever (by a hair), March was a bit rough both in terms of sales and downloads mainly because it saw the end of a growth trend that I’ve been enjoying since the beginning of the year. I don’t know if the downturn is due to seasonality, macro forces like war and inflation, problems with my products, or all of the above but it had me looking hard at what I could do to improve. It also had me taking a hard look at some of my competitors which is something I think should only be done in moderation.
So... at what MRR does the insecurity go away?
— Serious Bret (@serious_bret) March 5, 2022
Every one in a while I have a look at what my competitors are up to and have a ‘lil existential crisis.
— Serious Bret (@serious_bret) March 6, 2022
I put a lot of work into WebOutLoud in March. I added premium voices to the browser extension and completed integrating my backend with Stripe so that I can acquire new customers through both the App Store and the website. And on top of that, I re-did weboutloud.io, overhauled some objectively bad UI in the iOS app, and started work on the upcoming Safari extension. And at risk of sounding like a braggart, I won't mention that I also added a search feature to one of my other apps and rebuilt the back fence with my neighbor all while caring for sick 9-month old. There's more but I'll shut up now.
A gentle reminder that if you don’t promote yourself and your work, you can’t expect anyone else to do it.
— Fabrizio Rinaldi (@linuz90) March 31, 2022
Anyway, about that Stripe integration. Thanks to a “50%-Off Premium” email campaign, I was able to net an extra $721 in revenue on top of the usual App Store stuff. If it wasn't for that, March would have been my second-best month ever.
March App Store proceeds across all apps was $5.98K. A little less than last month but better than January.
So... with Stripe and App Store combined, I made a total of $6,699 in March, beating February by a hair.
I added 98 net new subscribers across my apps and my back-end costs were about $326.
My next major project is the Safari Extension for WebOutLoud (iOS & Mac) which is well underway. After that I plan on adding something to CustomSymbols that a few customers have asked for. And after that...I don't typically plan that far ahead... but I'll definitely be continuing the trend of luring customers into purchasing from me directly (via Stripe) through email campaigns and the like. It has already shown to be an effective way to supplement App Store income. I also want to get WebOutLoud off of iCloud, allow customers to browse their saved content on weboutloud.io and also start supporting PDF TTS in the browser. All of this is probably enough to keep me busy for the rest of the year but you'd be surprised. We'll see how it goes. Thanks for reading.
