July 2020 income report

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.

MonthGross revenueDelta
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.

TypeAmountDelta
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:

10k MRR

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.

TypeAmountDelta
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