December 2014 Review
A bit late to this review party, but a monthly review is a practice I very much want to become a part of my routine.
Not procrastinating is also something I’m working on. So instead of waiting until the end of January to start my monthly review, I might as well start asap. Even if my OCD nature doesn’t love doing an end of the month review in the middle of a month. 🙂
The End Of An Era – SpicePanda Is Dead… Long Live SpicePanda!
During NYE, I was with a small group of friends and we went around the room sharing our biggest win and our biggest hardship in 2014. I had to pass on identifying the hardship the first time around the room and when the spotlight came back to me later, I still had nothing to share.
That’s not to say there were no hardships.
But as my wife so nicely put it on NYE, I tend to identify the positives of a hardship before I even recognize the hardship itself. This makes it difficult for me to really call anything a hardship.
For instance: I shut down the subscription spice box in December. This was my big project for all of 2014 and based on my initial goals, a huge failure.
But here are the positives from it:
- A major sense of relief – The creation and promotion of each box had become a burden on me and I didn’t fully realize how much it weighed me down until I made the decision to let the project go.
- A TON of learning lessons – How the logistics of a physical product work, coordinating supplier and customer orders, how to cold email people and get over the hurdle of putting myself out there, how Facebook ads work and their best practices, and a lot more…
- A new direction – Based on working with suppliers, I noticed a need for the smaller artisanal food makers to learn how to better market themselves. This led to the pivot of SpicePanda to focus on the educational side for what had once been my suppliers.
My excitement for all of these positives outweigh the sense of failure I feel over the “hardship” of ending the boxes, but there is definitely some melancholy in ending something I had worked so diligently on.
Early Success On The Latest Project
Overwhelmingly.co, a monthly service helping website owners advertise on Facebook, started in December and already out-earned my work with SpicePanda for the year.
$329 in December revenue that is billed as a recurring. This means that any new sales I book should be cumulative if I can retain these early customers.
The service is still working to solidify it’s identity, but it feels good to already have people paying. Nothing teaches me more about what will (and won’t) work then paying customers.
The service launched as a straight WPCurve.com clone, but for Facebook ads. I have already tweaked the service with an idea on trying to be more specific. The specificity (helping website owners advertise to their site traffic through retargeting ads on Facebook) should make my ability to scale a bit easier and make it easier for customers to know exactly what they are getting. We shall see!
Goals for January
With the month half over, this is a little tough… but here we go.
- $450 in monthly recurring
- Blog launched
- Blog theme to be decided and in process of being implemented (could be specific theme about Facebook retargeting or more general theme about how to reduce an entrepreneur’s workload)
- Begin initial outreach for SpicePanda pivot
- Make $750 overall when combined with my consulting revenue for leadpages and mailchimp