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

Tony Dinh

Hello everyone, this is Tony! 👋

In January 2022, I released a new DevUtils version, added a lot of features for Black Magic, reached $4K MRR, and learned a ton!

Here comes the monthly update! Hope you like it!

🧩 New DevUtils release: 1.13

The latest release of DevUtils comes with a brand new integration with Alfred and Raycast. These are the features people requested the most. I’m a happy user of Alfred, so I’m also excited to work on this release!

DevUtils 1.13 with Alfred and Raycast Integration

I also added a lot of new tools, improvements, and fixes. You can see the full changelog here:

Raycast + Alfred Integrations, Cron Job Parser, and more in DevUtils 1.13!

🎁 New features in BlackMagic.so

I added a lot of new features for Black Magic too! Here are some GIFs for your pleasure:

Followers prediction

Customize tweet table with more columns

Clickable metrics with detailed charts

These are some small but important features I wanted to push out while working on other big improvements, like this dashboard (work in progress):

Black Magic new dashboard!

Other things you can look forward to soon:

Daily/weekly/monthly reports via emails
Schedule tweet/threads with images and videos.
more unique features that you won’t find anywhere else! 😉

🚀 Reached $4K MRR!

Black Magic has reached 4K MRR! At the time of writing this, it’s $4,503 MRR 🔥

The growth has slowed down (as you can eyeball the graph below). But I’m super happy with the progress.

Black Magic revenue in January 2022.

In January, I haven’t done much marketing for Black Magic. The new MRR comes from organic traffic, which mostly comes from my Twitter account.

Here are the top referrers for BlackMagic.so (analytics by Goat Counter).

I have no idea what is that "(unknown)" source

📈 I learned to track conversion rate

Up until now, I have never set up anything to track the conversion rate for Black Magic. I was 100% focused on building.

Now that the product has picked up some momentum, I started to spend some time setting up proper tracking and picking some low-hanging fruits that will help with conversion.

Here are some interesting learnings I want to share with you:

Only ~58% of people complete the sign-up flow. Only 23% actually started using the sidebar.

Some funnel I set up. I use Mixpanel for this.

It’s quite bad. I don’t know why. It’s worst when I think about how many missed opportunities with such a high drop-off. But hey, at least I’m learning 😂

I think the reason may be people accidentally click the sign-in button, or they get scared away by the list of permissions requested from Twitter (which is a painful problem I cannot fix).

I’ll look for ways to find out the reasons soon.

Only 36% of people finish the onboarding flow after they started

Onboarding flow funnel

Probably they get bored at some point?

After I find out about this, I started looking for improvements. I pay $50 for people to record their onboarding videos and made some changes. Let’s hope this will be improved soon!

I also added the Sign-up → Subscribe conversion funnel. But there isn’t much data yet. Maybe I’ll update this in the next newsletter issue.

Waiting for more data (probably a few months)

👣 My journey from 0 → 20K followers

My last newsletter issue got to the front page of Hacker News. A lot of people asked me how I grow my audience from 0 → 20K followers in 2021.

In short, my story can be summarized into 4 bullet points:

Engage with people
Do cool/creative stuff, make noise
Build products in public and fail in public
Be genuine, be nice to people, and spread positivities

Somewhere along with those steps, I got lucky. A few times.

For example, this tweet got me 4,000 followers within 48 hours. I only had ~1,000 followers at the time.

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

I have done it.

My profile banner now shows my latest 3 followers!

Update every 60 secs.

Nope, unfollow and follow again won't work, sorry 😂

10:50 PM - 26 May 2021

This one also earned me a lot of followers too:

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

When you like my tweets, you throw a heart into my banner... https://t.co/X2oTUxFMSx

9:53 PM - 14 Jun 2021

When you tweet every day and spend ~3h/day focusing on building a Twitter audience for a few months straight, “luck” is almost guaranteed to happen.

This is just an overview to give you some ideas of how I grew on Twitter. I promised to write about it in more detail soon. I will, and I have already written half of it.

I figured that it has become a bit too long for a section in my regular updates newsletter issue, so I think I’ll publish it as a separate issue later in the month (when I finish it!)

Stay tuned!

💫 Other small and random updates

I created a self-destructing tweet.

I can’t link the tweet because it has destructed itself (it worked 😂), but you can see the “archive” here:

https://blackmagic.so/self-destructing-tweet/

Click the tweet below to see its history 😁

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

Thanks to all of you, this tweet has another 1.5 hours to live 🥺🥺🥺 https://t.co/MhUh4M9yYe

12:53 PM - 7 Jan 2022

My last newsletter issue gets to the front page of Hacker News.

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

I'm currently #9 on Hacker News 😄 https://t.co/PkpGyBjJjT

12:25 PM - 5 Jan 2022

Reached 25K followers!

(28K now at the time writing this! 😁)

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

Thank you for 25K! 🥰

I have probably set my goal way too high for 2022 (100k followers 😱)

But... I have tripled my MRR goal in 2021 ($3K MRR)

So let's see!! 🔥🔥🔥

As always: thankful for your support! 😊

7:41 PM - 6 Jan 2022

Twitter team sent me some swags!

Twitter decided to send members of our Twitter Maker Slack community nice swags as a thank you note for building with Twitter API 😍.

Tony Dinh 🎯

@tdinh_me

Twitter send me some real nice swag for building with Twitter API 😍

Thank you @TwitterAPI! 🙏

#buildwhatsnext https://t.co/PK30eVDpTF

6:02 PM - 25 Jan 2022

New notes

Why I use Paddle instead of Stripe

I made a self-destructing tweet

Tools and services I use for BlackMagic.so

👋 That's all for now!

I hope you like this month’s updates!

I’m so glad I started writing this newsletter when I started my indie journey. It now serves as an archive of my story! Sometimes, I read the old issues and appreciate how far I’ve gone!

I encourage everyone to have a newsletter or some sort of blog, even if no one reads it (like mine in the early days). It’s so valuable to document your progress somewhere!

Alright, good luck! I’ll see you all next month. 👊

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

Older messages

My entire marketing strategy (+ December 2021 updates)

$322 → $2K MRR in 60 days by building in public

My Best Month Ever: $23,109 revenue (+ November 2021 updates)

Just two things

I turned down a $40,000 cash offer. Here is how and why.

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