April 23 in review: >$25k month, retainers, Varna, & strong momentum
My first monthly review
Hello friends,
April has come and gone and it’s time for some reflection.
This is the first monthly review I’m publishing and I welcome any feedback you have for me.
I’m going to try and be as transparent as I can which means sharing my actual numbers in these reviews. I believe this will help you, the reader, better connect with how I think about business, and provide necessary context for future editions of this newsletter.
If this is the first time you’re reading my newsletter, here’s a bit of context.
I run two businesses, projectBI and Hawkeye Ventures. projectBI is a boutique analytics agency, and my main business. Hawkeye Ventures is a holding company which I formed late last year.
There is a single revenue-generating micro-SaaS product under Hawkeye Ventures named PulseBanner, and one product currently in development named Project Echo.
Now to the review.
April in review
Hawkeye Ventures
PulseBanner
April was a mediocre month for PulseBanner. PulseBanner generated just under $1.5k in revenue. Churn was high during the month and the active subscriber count would have fallen even further if it wasn’t for a spike in signups from the 2nd week of the month.
I still haven’t worked out what caused this new normal in daily signups.
The number of new subscribers has increased as a result of this new normal and May has started off strong.
Since PulseBanner has a 90% net profit margin, and I’m treating it as a cash cow, there isn’t much more to say about it. I spend a few hours a week monitoring the service, answering support inquires in the Discord community, and engaging a bit on Twitter with users.
This new normal in daily signups has got me excited though since it may just help grow the MRR organically which would be fantastic.
Project Echo
Project Echo is a SaaS product which makes it easy for analysts to set up alerts on their business data.
We made major strides in the development of Project Echo in April and I’m confident we can launch an alpha version of the service to the market in late May or early June.
The biggest win in April was finishing our slack integration. Users of Project Echo can now send messages to Slack when alerts are triggered. I’ve started to create alerts for one of our clients and have set up the alerts to send messages to their dedicated Slack channel. It’s fantastic to see the product in action and I can’t wait to share more of the product with you all.
projectBI
Example of the dashboards we build for clients.
Revenue collected (April): $25,595
Revenue collected (2023): $50,995
Active clients: 5
April was a good month for the agency but the revenue collected figure is a bit misleading. Included in the $25k is a large payment from a client we closed back in February on an annual contract. The 1st payment of that contract hit the bank account in April.
It’s nice to see we passed $50k in revenue collected so far this year, especially considering we had a poor start to the year. I don’t have a specific revenue target for 2023 but I’m quite confident we’ll pass $200k in revenue this year.
A major goal of mine is to get the agency to >$20k a month in recurring revenue from retainer clients. Once we’re at that point we’ll be firmly in the green with a lot of extra profits for building up runway and investments (via Hawkeye Ventures).
At the time of writing this newsletter, we’ve got 3 clients on monthly retainers totaling $12.2k. This gives us a bit of breathing room and will allow me to start rebuilding runway for the agency but ideally we need one more large retainer client to get us closer to the $20k figure.
Our focus on DTC and our partnership with Glew is really starting to bare fruit. A big milestone we hit in April was migrating a long-term client from a self-owned, legacy BI stack, to our hosted best-in-class BI stack. It was a ton of work and we’re still not completely done but we’re finally in a position where we don’t have to rewrite code to serve clients. Every DTC brand which we work with from now on will benefit from the many hours my analyst and I invested in April.
The main goals for May are to wrap up all existing projects, bring on at least one more retainer client, and kick off new projects with our existing clients.
We’re working with an 9-figure brand that is very likely to become a large retainer client. Once that deal is signed we’ll be close to that $20k a month number, and I’ll be in a position to add a part-time freelancer to the team. This will increase our capacity and help raise our standards.
I have good momentum and the plan is to keep it going in May.
My time in Romania is quickly coming to an end. I plan to publish at least 1 YouTube video before I leave summarizing my experience in Bucharest and will make sure to share it with you in a future newsletter.
Since I’m heading to Greece in July for a friends wedding, I decided to stay in Europe.
I may want to visit my sister in Spain after the wedding so I need to avoid countries in the Schengen visa treaty. This only really leaves Eastern Europe and Cyprus.
After a lot of consideration and research I decided my next destination would be Varna in Bulgaria. I did a lot of research on Varna last year before deciding to visit Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria instead.
I’ll be heading to Varna by bus directly from Bucharest which is very convenient and will only cost me 23 euro:)
I plan to be in Varna until the end of June and then I’ll make my way to Athens.
Have a great end to your week and thanks for reading.
Justin