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11 Comments

January 2021 Income Report: $4,341.29 Profit

submitted this link to
Income Reports
on February 3, 2021
  1. 3

    Hey everyone! Now that there's an Income Reports space, sharing mine here :)

    Here's the TL;DR -

    In 2020, I made devastatingly little income after the pandemic demolished the growth trajectory of both my travel blog and SaaS business.

    I managed to kind of turn it around by the end of the year despite spending most of it bleeding money. It was still net negative, but on an upward trend.

    So in January, my net profit reached $4,341.29! To summarize:

    • Net profit: $4,341.29
    • Total revenue: $6,212.16
    • Expenses: -$1,870.87

    I have three main projects contributing to this number: a travel blog started 5 years ago (~$1K), a SaaS started 2 years ago (~$400), and a newsletter and community started 9 months ago (~$3,300).

    This year my goal is to kind of "rebalance" this portfolio. Happy to answer any questions if it'd be helpful from the income report :)

    1. 1

      Awesome stuff! Congratulations on turning it around!

      Was wondering what field/area your newsletter and community is in and how you generate the bulk of the revenue of that? Is it a paid community?

      1. 1

        Thanks! Yeah this is explained quite a bit inside actual link:
        https://monicalent.com/income-report-jan-2021/

        In short it's a paid community + I took on newsletter sponsors last month.

    2. 1

      Good job, Monica. Keep it up! 👏

      Love your work. Was just going through "blogging for dev" earlier today to remember all the tips and tricks you'd shared there. ✨

      1. 1

        I'm happy you liked it, Anton! Appreciate the encouragement :)

  2. 1

    Nice work! The newsletter is a very interesting idea. It's gotten me thinking about how I could incorporate something like that in my business 🤔

    1. 1

      Totally! I think newsletters are a great way to launch a business by now, as you've locked in such an effective distribution channel (email) and your exact target market can opt-in. I suck at ads so I'd never be able to target "developers who blog" with some kind of programmatic advertising.

  3. 1

    Thnx for sharing. What are your plans for rebalancing?

    1. 1

      I want to grow my SaaS from now $400 MRR to $1-2K MRR this year, as it's more scalable in terms of replacing my salary than a larger community would be. I'm also hoping the travel blog will become more profitable again + plan to add some digital products there that have been requested, like PDF travel guides combining information from several posts into an ebook.

      So in short, I have a lot of plans for marketing experiments this year. Is your question more specifically about that, or just general what I meant by rebalancing?

      1. 1

        Monica thnx, I was just curious if you would put more energy in your SaaS/ blog or your newsletter (with the biggest income). There are so many guru's online that will tell you to focus on one thing at a time. The newsletter sounds like the obvious one but you rock them just all at the same time. Kudos on you!

        1. 2

          Ah yeah, I am happy with the steady growth of the community and newsletter. I don't need to it become super huge, just sustainable :) So I don't feel like I need to grow it faster than it's already growing!

          So that gives me the bandwidth to work on my less profitable projects ahaha :D

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