May 2022: $7,839 MRR, travel, experiments, and a new app.

Tony Dinh

Hello everyone, it’s Tony again 👋

These days time flies so fast to me! I’m having so many updates in May that I want to share with you all. Let’s go!

Welcome 128 new subscribers since the last issue!

If you are new here, this is a monthly newsletter of my indie hacking journey. I try to document everything happened in the last month and share my insights and knowledge as much as I can.

I’ve been doing this for almost a year! You can see all the previous issues here. Cheers!

Writing code on flip flops in Nha Trang :)

Revenue report: $7,839 MRR

In May 2022, Black Magic reached $7,839 MRR as I’m writing this. This is a very sudden jump from last month!

May 2022 revenue update

The reason: I onboarded a new business customer!

This is my 3rd business customer and they are the biggest by far!

I’m excited to see how I can make Black Magic more useful for businesses, because this is a very good way to make a tons of money quick.

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

💥 Just onboarded a new Business customer to @blackmagic_so!!!

MRR += $624.88

🥳🥳🥳

10:45 AM - 3 May 2022

In case you don’t know, Black Magic for Business offer some more advanced features related to data and API:

All of these are still very new and I’m still trying to figure out what are needed and what should I add to Black Magic.

Having that said, I’m also having some concerns:

I’m not sure if I can keep up with the needs of the business customers. Companies usually have a lot of very specific needs and not necessary related to each other. I’m a one-man army, so I’ll have to be very careful to choose what to work on (already turning down a few feature requests from the newly onboarded business).
I use Black Magic myself everyday and I have insights on what features/improvements are needed for personal use, not so much for business use. This will be my disadvantage when trying to serve for business customers.
It’s also important that I need to focus on improving the product for all existing customers, not chasing the shiny new money.
When a business account churn, I’m pretty sure I’ll have a negative growth month 🥲

Anyway, I’m still happy with this new business deal. I’ll put up a quick special landing page to attract businesses to Black Magic. I hope it’ll work!

Twitter Ads experiment: Failed

Earlier this month, I spent some money on Twitter Ads.

It makes sense to me that I should advertise on Twitter, since my app is a Twitter app.

But turns out, the ads didn’t do very well.

Twitter Ads report

I tried various ads types, formats, and copies. One of the ads did good, but the conversion rate is still too low.

You can see more details in my tweet here:

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

My Twitter Ads experiment turned out to be a complete failure.

💸 Spent $487.18
👀 Impressions: 129,342
👆 Clicks: 1,195
💳 Converted: 2 paying customers

1 of the customer canceled recently 🤦 https://t.co/Fl94V0H7Px

1:15 PM - 24 May 2022

In conclusion, I think Twitter ads isn’t working for me.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I can’t afford to continue figuring it out. I spent very little time and effort on this as I have much more exciting and rewarding things to do with Black Magic than to figure out ads.

Maybe I’ll get to it again when I reach $10K+ MRR. Maybe I will hire an ad agency to figure out stuff for me. Let’s see.

Onboarding experiment: Failed

I did another experiment with the onboarding flow: Only asks for Read-Only Twitter permissions when people sign up.

Previously, Black Magic asks for tons of unnecessary permissions, which turned off many people from signing up. I got asked about this so much that I created a page: Why Black Magic needs so many permissions?

Before doing this experiment, I collected some data to make sure.

I asked people why didn't they complete the sign-up flow.

So, with this new change, I expected the sign-up completion rate to goes up by at least 25%!

um...

It turns out not to be the case. I did not see any change at all in the sign-up completion rate. This caught me at a surprise.

Sign-up completion rate doesn’t change. Number of new sign-ups also doesn’t change.

Conversion rate from click "Sign in with Twitter" to actually signed in.

New sign-ups per day. Red line is when the change are added.

I think the reason for this is that not many people are concern about the permissions, so doesn’t show up as a significant change in the data.

In conclusion, I don’t regret working on this at all. It is still a very good addition to the sign up flow and it will improve the product as a whole.

Besides, people who have concerns about Twitter permissions will now love the app more because it doesn’t so ask so much aggressive permissions like it was before!

"Product Tips" experiment: success!

I receive a lot of feedback that Black Magic has too many features that people don’t know exist and can’t make use of it.

So I added a new section in the daily report email: “Product Tip of the day”. It’s a collection of short “how-to” GIFs to teach people how to use Black Magic features.

It looks like this:

Product Tip of the Day in Black Magic daily report email

Then I find out the “proof of usefulness” 😍:

Justin Welsh

@thejustinwelsh

@AlexAndBooks_ It's amazing. @dvassallo talks about it quite frequently, and ever since @tdinh_me released his "how-to" video set, it's been a game-changer for me.

7:41 PM - 31 May 2022

You should do the same with your product! Highly recommended.

A new experiment: Hiring a freelancer

I have so many ideas and so little time.

I also have a lot of boring (but necessary) tasks need to be done for both DevUtils and Black Magic.

So I decided to try out a new experiment: hiring a developer freelancer.

The idea is to build a new product and get profitable without me actually writing the code.

Then if things work out ok, I’ll start to outsource some of the tasks from DevUtils and Black Magic to the freelancer so that I have more free time to build more exciting stuff.

I got introduced by a good friend and found a very good developer. We’re working on a completely new product. Let’s see if this works!

I bought the domain devutils.com for $3,000

Yep.

This is out of nowhere, but I just want you all to know it 😆

Still haven’t move the site to devutils.com yet but very soon!

Also, I’m considering increasing the price for the Team license to a subscription of $5/user/mo. I think businesses won’t bother much with this change.

The usual personal license types are still one-time purchase, I don’t think I will ever change that.

Traveling

I’m doing a train trip around Vietnam and then the world. Current location: Nha Trang, Vietnam 🏖️

If you are in Nha Trang, ping me on Twitter for a beer! 🍺

My favorite dish in Nha Trang: Bun Sua (Jellyfish noodle) 😋

Also, follow me on Instagram for more pics 😄

1 year of tweeting everyday

On May 2021, I started tweeting everyday and I have never stopped ever since!

14 May 2022 is the milestone of my current and longest streak: 365 days. Still going on.

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

Hit a milestone today: 1 year of tweeting every day! 🎉 https://t.co/Mh9D0pjEb7

11:49 PM - 14 May 2022

Tweeting everyday has helped me to train my consistency to come up with new helpful content every day, and the writing habit in general. It’s very important and a very good way of growing an audience on Twitter!

I started writing this newsletter every month shortly after I started the tweet streak. It’s been close to 1 year!

I encourage you to do start your writing habit by starting a blog or a newsletter, the earlier the better!

I also noticed that the recent newsletter issues are getting longer and longer. If you have read this far, please click here to let me know. I’m very curious how many people actually read all of these text 😂

I started streaming on Twitch

Yep, that’s right!

Tony is streaming!

Why? Few reasons:

I want to chat with people.
I want to reuse some content on my inactive YouTube channel 😂
I want to have a perfect excuse to work on some fun projects!

I only stream on weekends, about 1 to 2 hours each.

If you want to get notified, go give me a follow ❤️! https://www.twitch.tv/tonyisstreaming

I'm working on a new small app!

As you may know I’m pretty obsessed with screenshooting tools. I’ve been looking for a “perfect” app for a while, tried CleanShot, Snipaste, LICECap, Shottr, Skitch, and a bunch of other apps.

I have never find what I was looking for. So I decided to build one.

Introducing: Xnapper.com

It makes your screenshot beautiful, instantly.

Xnapper is my perfect screenshot tool and maybe it’s yours too 😄

Native macOS app
Instantly make your screenshot beautiful 💅
Ready to share on social media

As you may have noticed, a few screenshots in this issue are created my Xnapper! The app is in private Beta and I’m inviting new testers to try it one by one and collect feedback.

You can join the waitlist here: https://xnapper.com

I’m excited with this app!

That's all for now!

Thank you for reading this far! If you like my newsletter, please forward it to your friends! 😊

See you next month!

Best,

Tony

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Tony Dinh @tdinh_me

Monthly updates about my indie hacking journey, what I have built and learned.

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Created with Revue by Twitter.

May 2022: $7,839 MRR, travel, experiments, and a new app.

Older messages

April 2022: High churn, reached $6K MRR, and other updates.

March 2022: $5,316 MRR and my journey to 30K followers

February 2022 updates – 6 months milestone

Feb 2022 updates: 4K MRR, new release, new features, new learnings

My entire marketing strategy (+ December 2021 updates)

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