As I’m preparing to write this reflection, I’m looking back at the journal entries I wrote for every day of May, and I’m realizing just how much progress can happen in only a month. Everything feels like it happened much longer ago.
In May,
- Dashify appeared as a sponsor for 4 issues of the WooWeekly newsletter. Here is the last one, with Dashify at the way bottom. I haven’t been able to correlate the newsletter sponsorship with any major change in visits or conversions, so I’m not continuing it next month.
- I launched support in Dashify for WooCommerce Subscriptions, which is essentially applying the Shopify-like theme to the subscription list and edit pages of WooCommerce Subscriptions.
- I rewrote the marketing website to be generated with Hugo.
- I stopped sharing these posts to LinkedIn.
- I added a couple testimonials to the Dashify website.
- I took a pause on Dashify to refresh one of my old projects that I only recently realized is getting a lot of traffic, and added a little donation button in case some kind stranger comes along.
- I started running Google Ads again, limiting the amount spent to $1 per day.
- Dashify got to 20, 30, and then 40 users!
- I created a public roadmap page on the Dashify website.
- I began work on a portal where people can buy and manage their licenses for Dashify Pro, an upcoming premium version of the Dashify plugin. Even with Laravel and all its conveniences, this is turning out to be a large project itself.
Time spent
I worked a total of 80.6 hours in May, which breaks down as follows.
- Dashify: 54.0 hours
- Writing: 19.6 hours (mostly this work journal)
- Other: 7.0 hours (touching up that old project and a little bit of consulting work)
That’s an average of 2.6 hours per day including weekends, or 3.5 hours per day not including weekends, which is more representative. It’s a little more than last month, where the hours were 2.3 and 3.1, respectively. However, I also had a short vacation this month to see family out in California, so if I take out those days as well, the average is 4.03 hours per day.
Since those are deep work hours, I’ll consider myself on track for what I’m aiming for!
Website traffic
In May, the Dashify website received 482 visitors, which is fewer compared to 529 in April, but it seems like that didn’t matter for growth of active installs at all! Also, many of the articles and pages on the website are getting entry traffic from search engines, so that content is hopefully providing the solutions that people are searching for!
Revenue
$0, since Dashify Pro hasn’t launched yet.
June is my big push to make this number go up.
I am ever more confident in Dashify finding success after seeing its active installs go up so quickly—and stay up—during the month of May.