Hey, it’s Patrick. Sliding into 2023 was a huge challenge for me. I was working quite hard, churn was high, and I may end this month with a revenue decrease of 35%. Let’s start with some good things first.
Table of Contents
The good things:
WP Tavern Podcast
I had the pleasure of being a guest on the WPTavern Podcast. Nathan and I talked about Simply Static and all things static WordPress. I will link the episode once it’s out right here!
It was the first time I was invited to a Podcast, and I was quite nervous about that.
- Do I have something interesting to say?
- Will it be good enough?
- Is my technical setup okayish?
Besides that, there is also kind of a language barrier. I’m a native German speaker, and while I write and speak English daily, I still feel it’s not good enough for recorded audio.
Thankfully, Nathan is such a great person, and all my hesitations went away after our first minutes. I highly recommend attending a podcast if you can – it’s really not that hard and a pretty rewarding experience.
Passster 4.0 Release
I managed to finish the huge 4.0 update for Passster now. This was my one major goal for January, and I’m happy I made that happen.
I’ve spent more than 85 hours in total on that project. I did not even implement new features. I reinvented the entire admin UI and UX and questioned all parts of the plugin to make the experience as smooth as possible.
We will see if that will result in a larger adoption of the plugin or if I just overengineered here, but I learned quite a lot in the process, and I’m still trying to future-proof all of my existing main products.
It now has a completely optimized UX and UX (based on React and Block Editor Components), and I couldn’t be happier with the result.
I also created a little overview video for you right here:
The bad things:
Migrating Passwords from LastPass to NordPass
As some of you have heard, LastPass was hacked. Again. And again. So I spent a lot of time migrating and changing all my passwords from LastPass to a new provider. In my case, I decided to go with the free tier of NordPass.
It was frustrating and time-consuming. As someone who is always short on time, I would not like to spend time on this, but I had no choice. Sure, they still try to convince people that they will do better in the future. Still, I imagine the company will soon vanish for being disastrous in communicating and not providing a good solution for their single business use case.
Being a Solopreneur sucks (sometimes)
January was kind of a disaster. Revenue broke down by 35%, and the amount of cancellation and refund requests went up. I also started to sleep less, was overall stressed, hadn’t done any sport, and ate quite unhealthily.
This is one of those months where solopreneurship sucks. You never know when (and if) something like this happens, and you spend way too much time questioning your decisions and the path you follow.
I’m glad I’m quite fit (mentally and physically), and I’m not new to the game of entrepreneurship, but I have to admit these times are still hard.
I have to remind myself that things are coming back to normal, and it doesn’t matter if I go above and beyond right now, as the results will only show in a couple of months and not now. Staying in the game and being consistent always worked better than overworking and getting burnout.
If you made it to the end of this article and sometimes feel the same, feel free to hit me on Twitter. I’m always happy sharing my experiences and how I try to navigate my business through tough times, reminding myself how lucky I got and that the world will not end if I don’t hit the revenue goal each month.
Cheers,
Patrick