The state of my solopreneurship

In this post, I want you to get familiar with who I am, what are my goals, and what are my products.

Hi all!

This is the second issue of Code Solo, and I’m happy you haven’t unsubscribed yet 🙃.

Here I’d like to take a step back and give you some background. Who am I? What is my goal? What products do I want to build?

Why do I want to become a solopreneur

My name is Yanis; I’m 37. I’m an ethical Greek born in Russia. In 2017 with my family, I relocated to beautiful Prague in the Czech Republic, where I still live.

I have a good-paying job as a lead front-end developer in a big IT corporation, which I like a lot. But my dream for a long time was to become completely independent and try to earn a living from my projects.

So why not just continue working?

Of course, it’s not about money but rather the freedom to do what I want with my life and time. I also think that as a human being, I’ll be much more efficient if I focus on what I do the best and what I like doing - building products.

For the last several years, I’ve been putting whatever free time I have into building products I thought could be interesting for more people than just me and whatever I thought people would be willing to pay for.

I want to be open with my assumptions and thinking, so let me introduce you to some of my projects.

Spoiler: my whole revenue is $25 / mo - a historical low.

Candl

Candl is a service for avid readers like myself. It allows one to track the read books, add reviews and notes, organize in multiple ways, set reading goals, etc.

The main difference from services like Goodreads is that it’s completely private. There are deliberately zero social features (no friends, no likes, everything is private), and I know many users care about this the most.

Currently, it’s being used by around 70 weekly active users (I only count users who do meaningful interactions, like adding books and notes).

Most of the new users (around 20 per week) come from organic searches like “book tracker app“, “reading tracker“, etc.

This website is my oldest serious project still alive. And it’s also the only one that generates a (modest) revenue. A paid layer ($5 / mo) unlocks several premium features (like the dark theme, better stats, etc.). Five users are subscribed at the moment. That gives a modest $25 / mo. Unfortunately, it doesn’t even cover the money spent on the infrastructure. I’m still proud.

My current expectations are low. Although I have some more ideas and features in my mind, I feel I already gave it all I could. It’s unlikely to suddenly bring more users and/or revenue after adding new features.

Still, I passively maintain it and make sure my users are comfortable.

Retaind

Retaind is a knowledge management app, but with a twist. It tries to blend in some of the spaced repetition techniques. It’s a bit like Anki but for entire notes.

Even though no one uses it besides me currently, I still feel it has great potential. It’s a unique blend that looks like nothing in the space.

It does require a lot of polishing. The logo, the value proposition, and the landing page are crap. I can’t adequately convey what this product is and why it’s so awesome. I need to do a lot of thinking on how to improve that.

I even consider changing the name. ChatGPT failed to impress me, so let me know if you have good ideas!

I also consider open-sourcing the main engine, and making it work as a desktop app with local data, because people don’t like the idea of putting their notes in the cloud these days.

CSP Hero

Products for end users are hard.

It’s relatively simple to attract an audience. But you need thousands of users. And only a tiny portion of them will consider paying you for premium features.

For example, my Candl rate is around 5%. So if I want to make a living, say $3000 / mo, I need 600 users paying $5. This means the total number of users should be 20 times more - 12K active weekly users (remember, I only have 70).

It’s easier with B2C in the sense that you can charge more from a single customer. But obviously, you still need to build a helpful niche product worth paying for.

Meet CSP Hero.

If you don’t know what a CSP is, it’s a set of rules that instructs the browser to limit which resources are allowed to load and from which sources. It’s mostly for security.

You can specify a report URL, and the browser will send all the violation reports there. Violations can happen because of someone trying to hack you or because you misconfigured the policy. In any case, it’s valuable information to have.

As a webmaster, you could specify a dedicated CSPHero URL. We will collect your reports, let you browse them, and group and set alerts in a clean and organized UI.

Well, this is the plan. It’s not built yet.

First, I added a free CSP builder, which allows anyone to create and verify CSP rules with a simple point-and-click interface.

I hope such a tool will attract some of my target audience through organic search. And this could also be a page where I would upsell them to the actual product.

I still have no idea if there’s any market for such a service. If users' flow is minimal, I will remove the website and focus on something else.

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So those are the three projects that take all my energy and free time. There are, of course, others (JustFeed mentioned in the previous article is one example - but I don’t plan to monetize it anyhow).

I would say that Retaind and CSPHero are good candidates to focus on in the nearest future.

Then I also have my books, which some of you know me for. They bring some money, but I don’t want to add those to my “solopreneur“ income as it feels like cheating. If you want, let me know, and I will make a dedicated post about the business model and finances behind it.

That’s all, friends!

Please let me know what you think and what topics you want me to focus on in the following issues!

I wish you well,

Yanis.