January Update | Ben's Pathless Path
Hey,
It's been a while. It looks like the last time I wrote one of these updates was (checks notes) early November. Wow, time flies. I hope you had a lovely holiday season and your new year is off to a great start.
The past two months have felt like a whirlwind. I think the holiday season is like that, especially with the kids. They were off for two full weeks, so I took that time off as well, and it was great fun for us all to have adventures every day.
I've written some updates on ColorBliss, a bit about a new project I'm starting, and a person al reflection on work relationships. Hope you enjoy :)
ColorBliss.art updates
From a work perspective, over the past two months I focused a lot of effort on ColorBliss.art, my AI coloring page generator.
I focused a lot on distribution, mostly by creating a ton of free coloring pages, and the results are starting to come in with over 1,856 people coming from Google alone in the last 28 days. I doubled down on this approach in January, so I expect that number to double (or triple, or even more-le).
I built a gifting feature, so you can buy a gift subscription for someone else. Sign up for a free account, and then click on Gifting in the right nav. You can send a little message, and you'll both get an email confirming the gift. You also will have a little dashboard where you can see when the gift has been redeemed. I had a few people buy gifts for special people over the holidays - thank you!
I also fixed some bugs, made things faster, and tried to optimize the conversion flow a bit.
So far ColorBliss has made about $885 since inception, and is at around just over $120 in monthly recurring revenue. Margins are pretty good--around 60% in December and January--if you don't count my time. I'm really proud to have hit that $100 MRR milestone, especially from what some may call a "silly" product.
Nevertheless, the growth trajectory for ColorBliss isn't going to take me to where I need to go to stay independent this year. I need to add 1101 more customers by the end of the year to do that, and I'm not currently on that trajectory. Not saying it can't be done, just that it'll be a slog.
New Project 🌱
That brings me to my next project. I've now learned for myself why bootstrapping a B2C product is hard: You have to stack up a lot of $4.99 subscriptions to make a living, and that takes a lot of time.
So for my next project, I'm aiming for a $49 / month price point. At that price point, I need around 115 customers to support my family, which feels much more achievable for me this year.
I've been looking around at what people are paying $49 / month for and trying to find the nexus of that price point, something that is interesting to me, and something I think I can build. I've really enjoyed using products like Typefully and Hypefury over the past year to grow my audience on Twitter (almost 270 new followers), and have wanted something like that to help me grow ColorBliss.art on Instagram.
I also watched while Tibo built TweetHunter and Taplio for Twitter and LinkedIn over the last year, and both of those start around $49 / month. I think it's possible 😅.
So that's what's in the works for me right now, software to help you build your audience on Instagram, quickly and authentically. I've started on the Analytics features this week, and am thinking of launching just that as a way to validate before building out the rest of the content creation / scheduling features. Here's some early screenshots:
Personal Reflections
I surprised myself with the realization recently that I find myself missing the depth of relationship I was able to build with folks at work over the past few years.
Leaving my job has given me a lot more time to spend on work that I enjoy and with my family and friends and I am so grateful and happy for that extra time back.
But I've realized it's been challenging for me to find the same intellectual and even emotional connections that I had at work over the past three years without my job.
It makes sense when I think about it - I was a manager of a team of 8 (to eventually 15+) people. I met with each of them weekly, as well as many peers. I had at least 10-16 hours of my 40 hour work week devoted to intellectually and / or emotionally fulfilling conversations with the same group of people, every week, for many years. It's difficult to recreate that experience without the affordance of a job structured in that way.
This all came to me when I realized one community that I had been investing a lot of time and energy in my life since leaving my job really wasn't delivering the same energy back to me. It led me to reflect on where I really had meaningful relationships over the past few years, and how special my work relationships at Gatsby and Netlify were for me. If you were someone who I worked with closely over the past few years - thank you for being a special person in my life.
Now one of my tasks this year is to find a similar kind of connection outside of the 40 hour work week. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I expect that to be one of my biggest personal challenges this year.
Other Tidbits
Here's a few other things I've been up to over the past two months.
Furniture building
I took on an ambitious project and built the kids loft beds for Christmas! It was very rewarding and very challenging. I'm proud of how they turned out. But boy that was a lot more sanding than I anticipated.
The bread continues to get better and better
Here's some bread pics. Ruth got me a dutch oven for Christmas which has taken things to a whole new level. All my IRL friends have been asking for my recipe, so I wrote it down. Here it is if you want to dabble as well! Ben's favorite sourdough recipe
I incorporated a business
I made things official and incorporated an LLC to do business under. It feels good to be "official". And I finally got to use a name I've wanted to use for a while - Marginalia Ventures (https://marginalia.ventures/). Nothing much to see there for now, but just feels good to be official ;)
Wrap up
That's all for now. I'll be in touch likely towards the end of the month or beginning of next month to ask for some help promoting the Instagram project.
Until then, I'd love to hear from you - if there's anything you liked or want to know more about, just hit reply :)
Ben