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Dmitrii goes public - Issue #1

Hey everyone! 👋

Welcome to my very first newsletter issue.

Thank you for subscribing. In these newsletters I’ll share my journey as an indie hacker and YouTuber. I’ll post about my progress and results of different experiments.

If you have any questions you can always hit reply and I’ll answer you! Since it's my first issue, I’m open for any feedback or suggestion you can give me 🙂

I’m planning to send this newsletter every 2 weeks but don’t beat me up if I fail from time to time 😅

Approach

This year is going to be a year of building for me.

I’m working as a part-time software engineer, but my last day is on 31st of March. After that I’m planning to double down on my projects and YouTube.

About the process, I want to try approach “1 week marketing - 1 week development”. It was inspired by this tweet:

It feels like a sane approach. It allows you to start prioritizing and don’t forget about marketing as we programmers tend to do often. In general, I like the separation of concerns pattern, so why don’t use it for entrepreneurship?

The idea is to make even weeks (#2, #4) focusing on marketing and odd weeks (#1, #3) focusing on building.

Goals

At the beginning of the year, as many others, I set an annual resolution for 2022. For this year, I set one and only goal — to earn money on my projects. Here is the tweet and small thread on how I’m planning to do this:

January

The start of the year was a bit chaotic. I had vacation on the first week of the month. Afterwards, I was trying to get back to my routine.

Most of the attempts failed because my wife and I had to prepare to moving to the next city. Hence, we had a lot of packing and goodbye parties in Tbilisi 🍻

On 1st of February we moved to Batumi — nice coastal town on the Black Sea located in the western part of Georgia.

The biggest highlights of the January:

  • ⭐️ Launched and set up this newsletter (it took me one and a half months to send my first issue)
  • ⭐️ Sold two lifetime deals for Taco Digest making $260 — our first money above a hundred dollars on the project
  • ⭐️ Sent first product update and message that we’re disabling lifetime deals for Taco Digest. We decided to focus on subscription model because it’s more sustainable
  • ⭐️ Published an extensive annual review of 2021 as a blog post and a Twitter thread. The blog post got 45 page views and the Twitter thread got 1,006 impressions + 85 engagements
  • ⭐️ Participated in the first YouTube accountability group call

February — Week #6 and Week #7

In February things started getting much better for my routine and schedule. I managed to get back to waking up at 8am making 4–5 hours for my projects before starting working around noon.

Taco Digest

Development

Taco Digest is the main priority project right now. On the week #6 I focused on the development and fixed most of the bugs we had since MVP launch.

I also switched from Sentry to Honeybadger for error tracking.

First, it’s built by indie makers. Second, Sentry disabled Slack integration for free accounts. I still want to remain as less cost as possible until we start making money. So far I’m enjoying the service.

Marketing

On the marketing week (current one) I focused on learning as much as possible about SEO and apply it to our landing.

Besides, I started creating feature‑focused extra pages on the landing for rankings.

I also realized that I can create even more pages focusing on specific data sources for each feature. For example, create a separate page “get /r/wallstreetbets email digest”. And make more of them for all the popular Subreddits. Same with popular blogs but for RSS etc.

We hit our 90th sign up but still lacking new paid subscribers. So, I’m thinking about adding some future data sources as paid only to increase attraction of the paid plan.

I also created a subreddit for Taco Digest. I hope for backlinks and ranking in the future. But, I haven’t started posting anything there yet.

So far referrals for the last 30 days on the landing look interesting. I didn’t intentionally post anything on Indie Hackers about Taco Digest but it goes first:

Simple Analytics referrals

YouTube

I already posted two videos in February. That's a win 🥳 Hopefully I can sustain this “1 week — 1 video” schedule.

I posted one video on the Russian channel and one on the English channel. Both about my top 10 countries to visit as digital nomad.

Here is the video in English:

Another cool thing that I hit 4000 hours on my Russian channel. I have 930 subscribers which means I’m going to hit monetization this month 💰

I understand it won’t give me much money at the beginning so I’ll try to experiment.

The first small experiment is to create Patreon accounts. I made it with one tier that allows you to get access to the videos 2 days early and support my channel in general: Dmitrii Pashutskii is creating YouTube videos | Patreon.

So far — you can guess it — it’s crickets. Let’s see if something will change when I mention it in the next video.

In addition, I made an ad for Taco Digest in the latest video; you can watch it here. I only published the video today so it’s hard to say if I get any leads from it.

That’s it for my first newsletter issue. I hope to hear from you and happy to answer any questions!

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter for daily updates.

Until the next time,

Dmitrii