June Report: 67,657 Page Views, 4,992 Email Subscribers And $36.76

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#1

Hey, Bootstrappers! I am Rich, maker of Failory, a side-project in which I publish interviews with failed and successful entrepreneurs. A few months ago I decided to began to share Failory numbers and strategies openly. Today, I have just published June report.

Check it out to learn about the marketing strategies I carried out, the project monthly numbers, a revenue & expenses report and my objectives for next month.

 

But in case you don’t have time to read it all, here are some of the key points:

Many great things happened in June. The three most important were:

These were Google Analytics numbers in June:

  • :family_woman_woman_girl_boy: Users: 18,791
  • :bowing_man:‍♂️ New Users: 17,911
  • :computer_mouse:️ Sessions: 23,058
  • :1234: Number of Sessions per User: 1.23
  • :eyes: Page Views: 67,973
  • :dart: Pages/Session: 2.95
  • :alarm_clock: Avg. Session Duration: 00:02:24

The 18,725 came from different channels:

  • :two_men_holding_hands: Social: 9,232 (49.13%)
  • :mag_right: Organic Search: 4,875 (25.94%)
  • :link: Direct: 3,770 (20.06%)
  • :telephone_receiver: Referral: 1,062 (5.65%)
  • :gear:️ Other: 145 (0.77%)
  • :email:️ Email: 2 (0.01%)

Regarding our email newsletter, here are some numbers:

  • :envelope_with_arrow: Email Subscribers in May: 4,690
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Email Subscribers in June: 4,992
  • :new: New Subscribers: 302
  • :bar_chart: Growth Rate: 6.44%
  • :date: New Email Subscribers per Day: 10.06

We also analyzed our Twitter numbers in comparison to May:

  • :chart_with_downwards_trend: Tweets: 84 (:arrow_down:️ 25%)
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Tweet Impressions: 63.3K (:arrow_up:️ 38%)
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Profile Visits: 1,162 (:arrow_up:️ 321%)
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Mentions: 27 (:arrow_up:️ 3.8%)
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Followers: 701 (:arrow_up:️ 67)

What about revenue and expenses?

:moneybag: Revenue: $36.76

  • Sponsorships: 0$
  • Ads: 0$
  • Amazon Affiliates: $36.76
  • Other: 0$

:credit_card: Expenses: $20

  • Webflow Hosting: $20

:heavy_dollar_sign: Profit: $16.76

We have set some goals for July. These are:

  • :eyes: Get +20,000 page views
  • :email:️ Get +300 email subscribers
  • :money_with_wings: Sell one sponsorship
  • :rocket: Launch a cool page or project

That’s all for June report. Remember to check it out here!

2 Likes
July Report: 49,112 Page Visits, 5,242 Email Subscribers and $435,79
#2

Thanks for the report, it’s really interesting to see those numbers.

Those are great numbers imho, I’m sure you will be able to monetise this traffic.

One idea: Since you have high quality traffic (i.e developers & entrepreneurs from HN ) you could add a “Tool” part in your interviews, where people talk about the most important tools that helped them, and get paid through referral programs or PPC ?

As a frequent reader of your website, I don’t care about affiliate links and referrals, but I would hate to see ads!

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#3

AFAIK, HN is not a high quality traffic. It is a bunch of eternal wannabi’s, most of whom do not ever move a finger.

#4

Waouh. What a strong opinion on HN.

HN provides a huge traffic, in this traffic, lots of people have side projects / even “eternal wannabi’s”.
It’s the perfect audience for developer tools / SaaS for SMBs !

1 Like
#5

Very cool. Especially your full June Report is very interesting. When have you started this project or how long did it take you to get almost 5000 subscribers?

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#6

On a few occasions I heard “HN first page brought my lots of traffic, but no conversions”.

In addition, their posts seem to focus more on the technical side of IT than on the business side.

#7

I’ve seen this first hand. My friend’s site spent a few hours in HN position #1. He got a ton of traffic but negligible sales from it. It was sobering to observe.

However I can see HN traffic being useful for a site like Failory, which doesn’t seem to sell directly to visitors.

A problem with the “front page of HN” strategy (as well as the related “lots of Reddit upvotes” strategy or “#1 on Product Hunt” strategy), even if it does lead to sales, is the traffic is fleeting. You get no traffic yesterday, a ton of traffic today, and almost no traffic tomorrow. Much, much better for most of us is a marketing strategy that leads to solid, ongoing traffic.

#8

Uhm, I’ve got at least $20k in sales from two submissions getting to the HN front page. Also even if HN is “full of wannabes” in terms of entrepreneurship, most of them are power users who are ready to pay for good products.

#9

@ivm, that’s a great result! It is good to hear a story when getting on the HN front page actually led to significant sales.

After each HN spike, did your ongoing monthly sales noticeably increase, compared to before the spike?

#10

Mein Gott! What did you sell to those wannabies?!

#11

Hard to say because the first time it was recently launched and the second time I was doing lots of other promotion and SEO. But when you hit 250-300 points, there’s a 2-3 months tail of people coming from multiple newsletters based on the top HN submissions.

HN literally bootstrapped our business because on its own the app was making $750-1,200 monthly in the first year. It would be much harder to work on it full-time without the initial boost.

The same privacy-focused time tracking app.

#12

Do you have a way to track if those buyers started to use the app? If yes, did they use it for long? Do they still use it?

I mean, those are IT folks with quite a high income. They may be affected by shiny object syndrome. Not that it makes them any less valuable as revenue stream; I’m just trying to defend my “wannabies” stance. :slight_smile:

#13

No, we don’t track any data except for macOS version and language. HN is definitely not uniform compared to something like PH and you’ll find all kinds of people there.

Also it’s more development-centered than entrepreneur-centered. But even when entrepreneurship-related discussions arise, many business owners are just too busy to comment (this is a big problem in communities like Indie Hackers and /r/Entrepreneur).

#14

Hey Kevin, sorry for my delay and thanks for your kind words :wink: I have been thinking about building something like that, but instead of asking our interviewees, asking famous online entrepreneurs. Does it sound like a cool idea?

#15

Hey! So sorry for my big delay :wink: I started the project around 10 months ago. The launch meant 600 subscribers. Our eBook launch meant another 500 subscribers. Around 2,000 subscribers were caused by a few of our interviews getting viral on Hacker News and Reddit. The other 1,900 are from SEO traffic and other communities.