How much did my indie projects grow in February 2024? Let’s find out!
A summary of progress:
- Dashify’s first full month in the wild was February.
- Dashify received one update, the addition of some small graphs to show order trends
- I did some initial outreach to people on Reddit and in WordPress.org plugin forums who were looking for what Dashify provides.
- I launched the first version of a new project, LinkQR.
- I continued posting on Twitter, but not at all regularly or often.
- I didn’t do as much writing compared to previous months.
This month, I started to keep track of hours spent on each project, to see how input and results correlate.
I also want to mention that I don’t think focusing on metrics like website visitors should be the goal. It would ideally be number of people helped, which is more difficult to measure. As these projects grow, I hope to shift my focus to more meaningful metrics over vanity metrics, but for now, it’s easier to see progress this way.
| Project | Time spent (hours) | Metric | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dashify | 9 | active installs | <10 (+0) |
| " | " | revenue | $0 (+$0) |
| LinkQR | 6.3 | visitors | 9 |
| " | " | revenue | $0 |
| undo.studio | 9.4 | posts written | 4 (-3) |
| " | " | visitors | 83 (+44) |
| johnjago.com | 5.6* | posts written | 0 (-4) |
| " | " | visitors | 527 (-55) |
| 3.6 | followers | 53 (+17) |
* This time was spent redesigning instead of writing.
I removed a couple “projects” which I’m not actively working towards that were in last month’s table.
Thoughts
I worked a total of 33.9 hours on these projects. It’s likely a little more as I’m sure I forgot to record some hours. I also only record hours that I’m pretty focused, so how does it compare to a typical full time job?
Let’s say that in the average full time office job, you work a total of 40 hours each week. On the high end, each day, 4 of your 8 hours are deep work (great book, by the way), so meetings and time spent walking around an office don’t count. Each month you can work a maximum of about 87 deep work hours.
Being familiar with how office and home environments can be, even 4 hours each day is a stretch. On the safer side, if we say 3 hours, that would be about 65 hours of deep work each month.
With that in mind, I’m working about half a typical office job in terms of deep work hours, which is about right considering I’m still wrapping things up at my startup, which I hope to fully exit by April.