If you haven’t read one of my monthly reports before, I include things such as traffic stats, subscriber growth, personal updates from the month, and even regular financial updates with some of the companies I’m investing in/advising.
Blogging Update:
I made two posts for the month of February:
Bootscaling: The Exact Strategy My Startup is Using to Generate Leads
Here’s a screenshot of the traffic for the month:
Subscriber count:
(I’ve decided to not include feedburner numbers, so there’s another ~300-500 feedburner subs not included)
January 31st: 3,702 (numbers are slightly off due to Aweber tracking error – this happen to anyone else?)
February 28th: 4,017
January subscriber growth: +315 subscribers
If you haven’t followed the monthly reports much until now, I’d recommend subscribing, as they should get pretty interesting in the next couple months:
I’m working on creating a lot of content for ForeverJobless, and expect the things I’m doing to have a big impact on traffic and subscribers, which I’ll be updating in these monthly reports.
I’ve talked about launching a podcast before. Well, that’s finally happening too. I plan to launch one in April. I’ll also be including the details of the podcast in these reports, and will share the strategies that are working for me in terms of generating traffic, and subscribers.
I just returned from the last trip I plan to take for a while, and plan to focus on business and fitness 100% the next few months. I just went to a meet up/conference in Arizona, and always come back from these types of events inspired and with more ideas, but traveling to a lot of events each year eats up a lot of days that no “work” gets done.
I’ll be going to SXSW next week, but it’s a 10 minute walk from where I live so I’ll have plenty of time to work. I’ll be speaking there on an e-commerce panel.
Fitness:
I’m starting my strict fitness/diet program I followed the last year or two to get the health/fitness results I wanted. It was pretty amazing to me what type of drastic changes you could make to your body just by setting up a program with someone who knows more about that stuff than you do, and then just following through and doing it. Much like business, a lot of people try to overcomplicate it. Get advice from someone that knows the answers, then just do exactly what they say. It’s not any harder than just putting the work in after that.
I started an accountability group with friends that I called: Get Ripped, or Get Embarrassed. Everyone posted their before picture to a private group, and stated their goals. The wager was, that if you didn’t hit your goals by a specific timeline, you had to make your before picture your Facebook profile picture. Let’s just say it helped a lot to keep everyone on track. A lot of people saw major improvements.
I might start one for ForeverJobless readers who want to get ripped for the summer. Leave a comment below if you would want to do that, and if there’s enough interest, I’ll get it going so ForeverJobless readers can help hold each other accountable.
Design Company Revenue Update:
As I mentioned in previous posts, I became a partner in a design company recently.
The company is growing much slower than I’d like it to.
After the first 1.5 weeks or so of February we had a meeting, and they were on pace to have around a $10k month. They fell massively short due to some of the same reasons mentioned in this post, but some of that time was spent to set systems in place that will allow work to be done much more quickly in the future.
They ended up only doing around $4k in February.
If it doesn’t scale by an insane amount this month, it will be a catastrophie. At this point it’s just a matter of getting the billable work done. Some bootscaling jobs are completed, so hours that were going there will now be going to billable work.
I do think they’ve made a mistake by not working harder on generating more leads. It could kick them in the ass a month or so down the road if a lot of the current jobs get completed, and then they have a new bottleneck of not having enough leads. That should not happen given the massive amount of time they’ve had to get some marketing going, so hopefully they kick it into gear and get lead sources ramping up quick.
They should start generating tens of thousands/month with everything that’s in place, but you never want a business to hit the point it should be hitting, and then drop off a cliff because you don’t have a plan to sustain it. That’s one big worry I keep stressing with them, and hopefully they take it to heart.
Mike and Mason were at the same event I was at in Arizona. While we were out there, I wanted to arrange a meeting with someone who could offer a perspective different than mine. I think sometimes if someone is getting advice from one person all the time, you can start to mute it out. I thought hearing advice from another person would help. I set up a meeting w/K from the Ferrari post, and their friend who runs a development company out there joined us as well. K runs several successful, lean companies, and we talk several times a week so he had good knowledge of the business and I thought he would have some great insights for them. Their friend Jacob runs a 7 figure development company, so having gone through growth with a similar company, was a great addition to the meeting, as he was just starting out like Mike and Mason a while back, and from chatting with him— worked his tail off to scale it to a nice sized business.
So, the five of us met and chatted about what was holding them back, what needed to get done to grow, and anything that could potentially hold them back going forward. It seemed like a productive meeting, now they just need to buckle down and execute and they’ll be golden.
Several friends have gotten on me about why I’m putting time/money into a deal where the bottleneck seems to be just not hustling/grinding to get the billable work done. They don’t think that’s a habit that can be changed.
I’ll be honest, that is a real concern of mine, which I’ve stressed to them. Strategizing about ideas are great, but at this point in the company, billable work should be getting dominated, and there should be a system in place to make sure billable work keeps piling in. I see the potential of this, and the potential of Mike and Mason, so I’m hoping they prove the theory wrong and get this business to six figures/month where it can be. I hope my desire to see them succeed isn’t clouding my judgement.
There’s another deal that’s being finalized this week that I’ll be partnering on to help with investment/advising.
If I get the okay from them, maybe I’ll start doing monthly updates on that project as well. It’s a very different deal, with completely different marketing strategies.
Btw, do you have ONE specific question you’d love me to answer in depth that would help you with your business, or business idea? Leave it in a comment below, and there’s a very good chance I’ll answer it in one of the episodes of my podcast. I may have a segment dedicated exclusively to this— so leave a comment letting me know what I can help you with.
