Transparency report #7 – Oct 2016

Month 7 of the transparency report. If you’ve emailed me in October you’ll have got my out of office. I spent most of the month in Hong Kong and Japan (7th to the 25th October). Through doing this I stuck my out of office on and directed support to the new support inbox.

Help Scout is really good for support. Thanks @ionut for suggesting we use it. Anyway, onto the transparency report.

Again, no charts this month (however I am still generating these) I thought it would be useful to show in a list. Why no charts? Well I recently introduced the ability to pay using Stripe. At the moment I need to add these into the Sales Dashboard manually (until we release an extension for Zero BS CRM).

[UPDATE: 1st Feb 2017: Due to the improvements in the Sales Dashboard from Zero BS CRM. The transactions have been fully tagged and filtered. The final position is shown in the featured image]

Below are the updated figures again back to May 2016. This is excluding freelance work, which I did quite a bit of in the days I was available for work.

• May 2016 – $3,645
• Jun 2016 – $3,644
• Jul 2016 – $3,430
• Aug 2016 – $2,286
• Sep 2016 – $2,692
• Oct 2016 – $2,936     

So, a step up from September. Which is good. It’s also particularly good given I wasn’t ‘at work’.

Underlying the October numbers was quite frankly, a worrying drop in CodeCanyon revenue. In the month of October CodeCanyon (through my elite author account) brought in old 26 sales, or around $400 to that total above. This is 50%+ lower than it has been in previous months.

Something has changed. I know Envato recently introduced Author Driven pricing (where we can choose our own price). I also know they’ve had quite a few site outages meaning customers were not able to visit the site.

I’m keeping an eye on it during November and will see if I can see what’s going on there. This is the problem when you let someone else sell your products. You lose some control and they can make changes without you knowing.

Anyway. Let’s not labour on that point.

New WordPress Plugin – Battles

A week or so ago we launched a brand new plugin called ‘Battles’. This was a project where I didn’t develop the plugin, someone else in the team did. I reviewed it, added some enhancements and then put up a landing page here. It’s a great plugin to get a feel for what people think. It’s perfect for a viral hook. I’m using it to get a feel for who will win the US election. So far it’s looking like Hilary….  🙂

I’m saying no to Freelance

In October I did roughly $2,900 in Freelance work. This takes the ‘total revenue’ up to c$5,800. This is good and bad. I’ve managed to help out some people with websites, modifications to themes and the like, but from the 1st November I’m not doing any freelance. I’ll go into the reason why in a separate blog post. So if you’ve not signed up for updates about new posts, you can do so using the sign up form below.

Recruiting for help

I have been looking to expand the team. So I don’t have to say ‘no’ to Freelance. However for the next few months I’m keeping things lean. Sub $3k in ‘passive’ product revenue is not where I want it to be. So I’ve been set a challenge by a mentor to ‘Develop 12 Themes in 12 Months’. You can read more about the challenge here.  Until I’ve got a way in with that challenge I just don’t have to time to handle CVs (fielding off a lot of nonsense applications, and discussing exactly what I need).

For those who did apply, I’ve kept your details and I’ll be in touch in the new year 🙂 but for now, it’s time to focus on the latest challenge.

Changes, challenges and cocktails

So, why this title? In October I made a couple of changes. I added Stripe because PayPal had been banned in the country of some of my customers. I moved to a subscription based annual billing (rather than making people come back, re-purchase etc). I accepted the challenge to develop 12 themes in 12 months. Finally I had a few cocktails while out in Japan. 🙂

Future focus

My focus for the next few months is get up and running with my 12 themes in 12 months challenge and work on my own website (such as adding more content to the blog). In October I blogged about a number of things. You can read the October posts here.  I’ll be committing to more posts each month and through adding this content the goal is to increase my daily visits to the website and increase the number of email captures.

As always, these transparency reports serve as a way for me to do a mini de-brief each month. If you like reading them. Have any questions, or want me to cover anything in particular please do leave a comment below.