This is the second open financial report of my business as an independent creator and consultant.
Let’s start with the summary first and do a break-down further down this post. If all you care about is “how much money is Mattias making", you can probably stop looking after the first table.
My income comes from, as of this month, 4 main sources: DNS Spy, Oh Dear!, consultancy and cron.weekly advertising.
| Total revenue | Total costs | Net profit | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| €3,564.25 | €1,659.00 | €1,905.25 | +71% |
These numbers don’t mean much in and of themselves, so let’s dive in.
Business costs
Last month had pretty high accounting costs for the start of the business. Things have cooled down a lot now.
Overall, most money was spent on:
- Social security, healthcare & pension plan
- Digital Ocean server equipment
- Internet, cell phone subscription, electricity & gas for my home office
This was a quiet period with little to no special costs: €1,493.00.
Oh Dear
Oh Dear! is the monitoring SaaS that Freek & I are building. We employ a 30/35/35 rule for our revenue: 30% of our revenue gets re-invested in the company (advertising, art designs, external freelancers, …), 35% goes to Freek, 35% goes to me.
| Type | Amount | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue (VAT excluded) | €5,536.88 | +6,5% |
| Costs | €500.00 | - |
| 30% to marketing/investment | €1,510,08 | +7,2% |
| 35% to Freek/Me | €1,762.91 | +7,2% |
Note 1: costs are averaged and rounded to the upside, to keep budget available for sudden spikes in activity (aka: more server capacity needed).
DNS Spy
DNS Spy is a much simpler product than Oh Dear. It has less features and only focusses on DNS, a much more narrow use case. As a result, its proceeds are also lower.
DNS Spy is owned and operated by me, so all profits flow to me directly.
| Type | Amount | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue (VAT excluded) | €1,526.34 | +36% |
| Server costs | €95.00 | - |
| Total profit | €1,431.34 | +39% |
I had a killer month for DNS Spy. I’ve been able to capitalize on a popular Hacker News article that Cloudflare deleted DNS records. I promoted DNS Spy in that thread and it got several new signups because of that.
Lesson learned: always be selling!
Consultancy
I didn’t take any consultancy assignments in February, all energy & timed was focussed on a new redesign of Oh Dear, further automation of cron.weekly & working on a new, still secret, SaaS.
cron.weekly
The weekly newsletter is accepting sponsorships, and it’s already booked until the end of April. Some of those sponsorships are paid in advance, but I want to show them as monthly income here (so I’ll count the weeks that the sponsored content has appeared in the newsletter).
In February, there was a single issue of the newsletter with sponsored content. Next few months are fully booked, so this revenue is guaranteed to rise in the upcoming months.
| Type | Amount | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue (VAT excluded) | €275.00 | - |
| Newsletter costs | €71.00 | - |
| Total profit | €204.00 | - |
Costs are pretty fixed for the newsletter, so profit will increase greatly over the next few months.
Summary
To summarize, here’s the revenue and costs per income stream.
| Revenue | Costs | Profit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oh Dear! | €1,762.91 | - | €1,762.91 |
| DNS Spy | €1,526.34 | -€95.00 | €1,431.34 |
| Consultancy | €0.00 | - | €0.00 |
| cron.weekly | €275.00 | -€71.00 | €204.00 |
| Business costs | -€1,493.00 | - €1,493.00 | |
| Total profit | €1,905.25 |
Gross revenue of €3,564.25, which adds €1,905.25 net profit to the bank.
Net results
I paid myself the same net salary of €1,000.00 as January. Things are looking better, financially, but I want to keep a buffer in the bank for unexpected expenses.
Extra note: because I now own a business, I get to (partially) pay things like my home office internet, electricity, heating, … with pre-tax revenue. This allows me to receive a lower-than-before salary while keeping the same standard of living.
Hours worked vs Money made
I received an interesting question on Twitter as feedback of last months’ report: how much time did I spend working to get that revenue?
This leads me to an interesting statistic I want to keep track of: what am I worth per hour?
For February, it comes down to:
- Hours worked per week: 30h (= 120h in the month)
- Total revenue: €3,564.25
- Hourly revenue: €29.70
It’ll be exciting to see how that hourly revenue evolves!