For earlier issues, please see the overview.
In this post I 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 |
|---|---|---|
| July 2020 | €5,467.00 | -10.9% |
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) | €8,246.81 | +17% |
| Costs | €950.00 | - |
| 35% to Freek/Me | €2,886.00 | +17% |
It’s been incredible watching Oh Dear grow month-over-month.
The numbers above are without VAT, but we had a celebratory moment a few days ago:
We’ve breached the €10,000.00 monthly recurring revenue (MRR)! 🥳
This is including VAT, which in Belgium means 21% of it goes back to our government. It doesn’t take away the specialness of seeing that number though!
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.
Have a look at the previous reports to see how it’s been doing, it’s pretty much stable. I’m saving myself some time no longer copy/pasting that here. 😄
cron.weekly
Revenue from weekly newsletter comes from sponsored posts and advertisements.
I took a few breaks in July, which means revenue has obviously dropped. I made up for that with a jobs section in July, it allowed me to get more revenue out of the available 2 issues that month.
| Type | Amount | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue (VAT excluded) | €1600.00 | -27% |
| Newsletter costs | €80.00 | - |
| Total profit | €1,520.00 | -28% |
I have a few spots left for September, reach out if you’d like to promote your product or service!
Conclusion
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?
July had some holidays, which means I had even less working hours than I normally have. 😅
The working hours are estimates, as I don’t accurately track my time.
- Hours worked per week: 20h (~80h in the month)
- Gross revenue: €5,467.00
- Hourly revenue: €68,34