April 2024 Roundup

• On the up!
• Spiky
• Development

¶On the up!

It's amazing what a difference being engaged with your product will do for awareness.

• Traffic has beaten expectations this month! Managed to creep over 15k pageviews which is nice to see.
• This was largely down to two posts that were quite popular: PHP Is Like A Toilet and I Love Sushi.
• Crossed 3,000 registered users! 🎉 That's more than 4x the number from when I acquired the site.
• Sponsors have stayed steady, but Team subscriptions have fluctuated. There's currently only two active right now, so MRR has dropped a little 🤕
• I launched the Artisans Decoded podcast, recorded the first 7 episodes and published 3 of those 🎙️

¶Spiky

It's nice to occasionally be able to get traffic spikes from popular blog posts, but it doesn't feel like a particularly sustainable source of traffic.

For one, I'm not a font of creativity. Also, I feel like it takes (me) a lot of time to produce content that is truly valuable.

Also, the topics that are popular/valuable don't always translate into being related to the product/platform, so while the traffic is nice, it may be the only metric that's positively affected.

I'm fine with this—not every piece of content needs to drive loads of sales, it's a long game—but I do think I need to focus my attention to bring the right kind of traffic to the site.

While I dislike playing to the algorithm, there's a certain amount of it that feels necessary if you want any kind of organic growth to happen.

For me, that means moving into some deeper content research in the next few weeks and trying to tap into the topics that are going to be relevant to the kind of people who are more likely to buy.

¶Development

April ended up being a clean-up month as some of the main features I'm working on are taking me a little longer to tackle due to other commitments.

The immediate goal is start making the platform more valuable for Teams. Hopefully I'll be able to roll out Team Profile pages soon, which will be public pages giving teams a space to show off.

I have a few other things in the works which I'm hoping to announce in May too. So Teams, keep your eyes peeled 👀

That's it for this month! Thanks for stopping by.