For earlier issues, please see the overview.
From now on, I’ll focus on the revenue & costs of each business, but skip the parts of the personal business cost structure. You can still see my salary at the bottom. 💸
Birds-eye view
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 3 main sources: DNS Spy, Oh Dear, and cron.weekly advertising.
| Month | Gross revenue | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| June 2020 | €6,137.81 | +12.9% |
These numbers don’t mean much in and of themselves, so let’s dive in.
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) | €7,042.85 | +12.7% |
| Costs | €750.00 | - |
| 35% to Freek/Me | €2,465 | +28.5% |
We had a very nice growth in June, almost entirely attributed to the expiring root certificate from Sectigo Addtrust.
We are one of the few SSL monitors that also checks for intermediate & root certificate expirations, and it seems that design choice in Oh Dear has paid off when the expired Sectigo Addtrust certificate caused downtime worldwide.
DNS Spy
DNS Spy is a much simpler product than Oh Dear. It has fewer 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) | €1,136.81 | +16.6% |
| Costs | €75.00 | - |
| Total profit | €1,061.81 | +17% |
The spiky nature of DNS Spy revenue comes from users mainly choosing yearly subscriptions, which makes the revenue harder to predict.
cron.weekly
Revenue from weekly newsletter comes from sponsored posts and advertisements.
The ad-slots were sold out for all previous weeks with a few open spots for the next few weeks.
| Type | Amount | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue (VAT excluded) | €2200.00 | -20% |
| Newsletter costs | €80.00 | -40% |
| Total profit | €2,120.00 | -18% |
Managed to save some money with a different Mailgun plan, but otherwise both the revenue and profits are as predicted.
May counted 5 Sundays, June only had 4, so I’m losing 20% of my revenue because of that (1 newsletter less to send).
Conclusion
I’m still grateful to have the revenue from cron.weekly, as Oh Dear and DNS Spy alone don’t pay the bills just yet. But combined, they provide a safe stream of income!
My salary hasn’t changed, I’m still paying myself a net salary of €1,825.00.
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
How much time did I spend working to get that revenue? In other words: what am I worth per working hour?
Since early June, kids are going back to school, which means I have my hands free some more to do actual work. Much of this is still playing catchup with old promises/deadlines that I missed, so I didn’t feel productive just yet.
The working hours are estimates, as I don’t accurately track my time.
- Hours worked per week: 24h (~96h in the month)
- Gross revenue: €6,137.81
- Hourly revenue: €64,31
In May, I had an hourly revenue of €169.75 because I could hardly get any work done, and most of the income is from recurring subscriptions. By working more, I diminished my hourly revenue by almost -62% and grew my income by +12.9%.
Weird how that math works out, hu? Working more doesn’t translate to more income in the short-term, but that should pan out in the long run.