Welcome to my second edition of the Weekly Indie Log!
Let’s get the big news out of the way first: Stomod reached $120 MRR for the first time.
Reaching $100+ MRR
Stomod reached $120 MRR in February and I couldn’t be happier about it! It took way over a year to reach here but now that’s I’m here it feel unreal and makes me believe that I can kick on and increase on that number.
With this though in mind, I am doubling down on marketing, SEO and ads. I will be trying out various combos in the next few months with the idea of finding the best channels to acquire customers for Stomod. So far ads has been a good push toward moving beyond $100 MRR.
I will be trying out some influencer marketing as well and have set aside a monthly budget for these initiatives.
Since I am new to ads and using ads platforms as a channel, I will be giving each channel a spin and see what works best. I will be reporting back of course in the upcoming weekly indie log posts. The channels I’m looking at are: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Reddit Ads, Twitter Ads, TikTok Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
This is a long term plan and I only have so much money to throw at these platforms - but I intend to give each one a shot and re-invest earnings from Stomod into those.
Contingency planning for my trip
After the first edition of my weekly indie log, I went on vacation with my family to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur for two weeks - which put a stopped on my updates during that period.
However, the life of an indie hacker is to be on alert all the time. During the time I was in Bangkok, I fortunately did not have any downtime for either of my products stomod.com or assistflare.com.
However, I did prepare for the trip in advance to make sure if shit hits the fan, I am ready.
Before the trip, I did some contingency planning for what I would do if stuff went awry during my time away from home.
I did pack my laptop to bring along for the trip. However it was not idea lug that around Bangkok in a backpack. I decided to take the lighter weight 12.1” iPad Pro I have along and setup essential software on both my iPad and iPhone.
These are the software I have on all my devices which allows me to be ready to intervene if anything goes bad:
- Termius - app which allows me to SSH into my VPS to restart/diagnose problems if any.
- Uptime Robot - monitors my products’ uptime and alerts me if there’s any issue.
- Crisp - For users to reach out to me if there’s any problem via live chat.
- Logsnag - To keep an eye on new sign ups and user flow on the apps.
- Drizzle Studio - For making changes to the database if needed.
- Airalo - For easy e-sims for data plans for internet access
Going into action during the trip
During my trip, I had to spring into action twice for two customers to help them setup their blogs on Stomod. Fortunately both times I was in the airport and had time to kill anyways and managed to help them out without any issues.
Coming out of those support sessions, it’s evident that I need to automate the ability to host a Stomod blog under a sub folder of another domain. Right now, there’s some manual intervention needed from my side which I plan to resolve in my next coding week.
Marketing week x coding week
This brings me nicely to my new initiative going forward into March. I came across Jon Yongfook’s blog post: 3 Reasons Why I Think 50% Coding 50% Marketing is the Best Framework for Solo Tech Founders.
This prompted to me consider trying this out as I felt mixing both coding and marketing was being counter productive. So last week, I decided to fully focus on coding. Previously, I would code a feature and then tweet about it with a video showcasing it.
This time around, I decided to forego any tweeting or talking about those features and fully focused on my todo list for the week and managed to knock out a record number of tasks off my todo!
Weekly 3x gym challenge
I saw a tweet from Pieter Levels (a.k.a levelsio on X) where he challenged anyone joining his “2024 PIETZ GYM CHALLENGE” to go to the gym 3x weekly or pay him $100. I’m not going to pay him $100.
I decided to join the challenge and I’m posting updates on Twitter to keep me accountable. So that’s two initiatives already I’m part of together with the alternating coding & marketing weeks 😅
Product Updates
Stomod updates
Using a fully focused coding week, I managed to ship a bunch of customer requested features, including numerous bug fixes. Below is a list of what’s going into the February product update email:
- Table of contents upgrades - The table of contents which is displayed on blog posts how highlights which section you are currently on within the page. It also will display a default (adjustable in the settings page) number of links on mobile as not to overcrowd the top of the post.
- Discord social link - Added the ability to add a link to your Discord server in the footer alongside the other social links like X, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
- Zoomable images - Added a toggle in the settings to allow users to enable zoomable images - this will zoom any blog post image in a popup modal.
- OG image for blog - Previously Stomod supported OG image only for blog posts but used the favicon as OG image for the landing page, but now you can upload a custom OG image for your blog.
- datePublished/dateModified Meta Data - Each blog posts on Stomod now embed meta data within the <time> HTML tag to signal to search engines regarding when the post was published and updated.
- Author bios - Stomod now supports author profile pictures and bios which are listed at the bottom of each post, on the author page and as a hover card when hovering on an author name.
- JSON-LD support - Stomod finally supports JSON-LD for blog posts and will generate proper JSON-LD tags which helps search engines better understand your content.
AssistFlare updates
No updates for AssistFlare for this week as I consider the product stable for now and working on getting customers for the platform.
That’s it from me! Catch me next week for Weekly Indie Log #3 and follow me on X for updates.
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