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.