Day 32: Setting a goal, kinda

I initially wrote the piece below as part of yesterday’s post, but it felt more appropriate as its own thing. It also gives me more time to work on Hide Feed because I’m hosting someone from out of town so I haven’t had much work time. I don’t want to make a habit of writing content in advance because I think the real-time nature of it is pretty special, so this will be an exception.

As I wrote in my blog post about turning 27, my attitude toward goals has largely changed due to my meditation practice. A mentality like “whatever happens, happens” resonates a lot more with me these days than “I really want to get to $10,000 MRR by the end of the year”. I’m happy simply trying my best with Hide Feed and seeing what comes of it.

Still, there is an implicit goal present in the question I’m exploring in Road to Ramen: “Can I make a living building things I love?” Even though making my passion projects financially sustainable would be dope, it’s also perfectly okay if it doesn’t work out that way because I’d like to accept life as it is, not the way I think it “should” be. This is difficult to explain, but it’s like I can hold a goal and work really hard at it while simulatenously recognizing that it doesn’t really matter in any fundamental sense. Sure, I’d prefer to have the freedom and flexibility to work on my projects on my own terms, but I think I’d still be happy doing other things, too.

Maybe setting goals would still be useful as a way to track progress, as long as I don’t mistake the progress (or lack thereof) to mean anything more than it actually does and don’t take the goal too seriously. Half a year after my turning-27 blog post, I still haven’t figured out what role I want goals to play in my life.

Anyway, getting Hide Feed to a point where my living expenses are covered would be a neat milestone. My living expenses right now range between $2,000 - $2,500 a month, so assuming that I stick with the $5 / month price point, I’d need 500 paying users to have my revenue meet $2,500 a month. 500 paying users sounds pretty reasonable until I consider that I’d need to get a new paying user every single day for a year and a half before it gets there. So I either need to raise prices, get users quickly, be willing to wait a while for the business to grow, or accept that Hide Feed by itself might not be enough to get there.

If 1% of users pay for Hide Feed (a made up conversion number), I’d need 50,000 users to hit that milestone. Web Timer, the extension I made back in 2011 and sold in 2016, got to 70,000 users with zero marketing so I know it’s possible, but that was also over a timeframe of 5 years.

Okay, I guess I can set an initial goal of 500 paying users / $2,500 MRR, although I’m not sure what timeframe to set because I’m not exactly in a hurry. I’m really fortunate to have enough from my savings and investments that I can afford to work on whatever I want (while keeping reasonable spending habits) without worrying about running out of money for years. But maybe it’d be fun to set a deadline just for the hell of it? Okay, let’s just do by the end of the year. I’m not sure how much setting this goal matters because I feel no qualms about changing it willy-nilly or getting rid of it entirely, but I’ll try it on and see how it feels.

Alright! Road to Ramen goal: $2500 MRR by the end of 2020