Side Project Review: A Year of No Growth

2024 has been a year of pretty much no growth for my main project, InboxReads. I did start the year with lofty ambitions but those have failed to materialise. Yet I'm still optimistic about the project.

Learning my market

I started the year thinking I knew what the market for InboxReads was and gradually learnt I was wrong.

I've been shifting my focus to a subscription model instead of advertising and I expected it to be a low price subscription that would attract a lot of signups. But instead I've found it's definitely B2B and people are willing to pay a lot more than I orginally imagined.

Now acquisition methods like advertising make a lot more sense. And I think there's still room to grow with the price and the value that's being provided.

I feel like I have a clear plan going forward here. Continue to add value to the product for business users, increase the price to match that value, and drive traffic to the website to acquire users.

Subscription growth

Speaking of the subscription, my revenue there has increased by 2.25x since last year. But advertising revenue has decreased by 30% and affiliate revenue has stayed about the same. So there is growth in the business model I want to move forward with and that's a good sign for the next year.

What users want

Data. That's the main feature that drives paid subscription and I've been doubling down on that. Exposing as much useful data as I can to paid subscribers has been my focus and likely will continue to be to keep adding value. I feel like I have a clear plan going forward here too.

Lessons Learnt

1. Finding your product's market takes a lot more time than you think. And it rarely turns out to be what you originally thought. You have to be patient here.
2. New features aren't always what you need. Improving existing features and using existing data in new ways can be more successful.
3. December is a huge month for this product that I need to capitalise on more in the future.
4. Putting features behind a paywall isn't a bad thing. You have to recognise the value of the work you're putting in, even if it seems trivial.

What's Next?

From the product perspective, I'm going to continue adding more data points and visualisations that my users are interested in. And lots of ways to make the product itself more convenient to use like submitting your newsletter and keeping it updated automatically, data exporting, and tracking more historical trends.

I'll also be focused on significantly growing the number of newsletters I have, particularly to include more newsletters from large publishers.

For marketing, I'm going to spend more time on growing paid subscribers through advertising. If I can find a profitable campaign here then the subscription growth can really kick off.

Despite the lack of growth I think the underlying metrics when my revenue is broken down is very positive. 2025, I think will be an important year in determining if InboxReads on its own can achieve my goals of being my main source of income or if it's time to diversify into other projects.

Either way I'll be learning something big.