Day 723: $1k in 1 day
Today, this happened:
Despite not working today, I made over a thousand dollars!
First, a huge caveat: This is definitely an anomaly as a whole bunch of people decided to throw money at me at the same time:
- Two people signed up for Browserflow and paid for a full year in advance
- Two people renewed their subscriptions
- One person upgraded their subscription to the highest tier possible
Tomorrow, it’s more likely than not that I’ll have revenue of $0 because I still have yet to figure out a long-term sustainable marketing and growth channel for Browserflow, but today was a nice preview of the stable state I’d eventually like to get to: separating time and money.
When I finished my 3-month meditation retreat at the end of 2018, I decided that I wanted to build a lifestyle that would let me do long retreats like that on a semi-regular basis. Unfortunately, that’s not quite compatible with a normal job as no manager is going to be excited to hear that you’re going to disappear for weeks/months. So I decided to build my own business where I can make my own rules and have full autonomy over how I spend my time.
A SaaS (software-as-a-service) business is perfect for that kind of lifestyle because it scales incredibly well. Once you build a service that people find valuable, you’re basically set because there isn’t additional work you need to do for every new user. Every additional customer is also almost entirely profit because the marginal cost of running software is close to zero.
Browserflow still isn’t at a point where I can step away for weeks at a time, mostly because of the cloud part. If I reduced Browserflow to just the extension, I actually would feel fine not touching it for a while because an extension isn’t going to suddenly stop working (barring platform changes like Manifest V3 but that happens once every several years). I’ve played with the idea of only offering the extension and removing cloud support because (1) the maintenance is basically zero and (2) many customers actually only want to use the extension and don’t care about the cloud offering, but I know that there’s a whole lot more potential for the business by supporting running flows in the cloud. It’s also just way cooler having automations run on your behalf without you having to do anything. But that means in order for me to be able to take my attention away from Browserflow for weeks at a time, I’d need to either hire someone who can fill in if things go bad or fortify the system to minimize the chances of something going bad and then just take the risk.
There’s still quite a ways to go before Browserflow is a humming money-generating machine that can fully support my lifestyle, but it feels like I’m getting closer and closer every day! So grateful that the thousands of hours spent coding and building this thing are starting to pay off.