Wow. It’s almost May, and I am only now starting to write the March report.

This has been a very busy month, but I feel like I accomplished nothing, and I am probably right. I thought that by the time my daughter turned 6 months I would be able to go back to working at least 30 hours per week, but it has not happened. And since I need to focus on my freelancing at least 20 hours per week, this doesn’t leave me any time for pursuing side projects seriously.

To be fair, I still can spend 1-2 hours per day to work on my projects, but those are usually late night, after 9 pm. Which is not the best time to be productive. My daughter wakes up at 6.30 am, so I cannot really work in the early morning either. And during the day, I am lucky if I can work 30 minutes without interruption, which clearly kills my productivity. Losing focus, it takes me twice as long to finish a task.

I guess I am screwed, and I don’t even know if it makes sense anymore to pursue this crazy dream of indie hacking, when my main aim right now is to earn enough money to survive. Which is a sad state of things, considering that I am almost 42 and by now I should have a house (still renting), some sizeable investment assets (I have less than 15k) and I should at least not spend more than I earn (I am biting into my savings at the rate of 2k per month). At this rate, drastic choices would need to be made that could change not only my professional path but also my life path.

Anyway, let’s just fill the numbers and go back to try to work. Right now I am traveling, and I have even less time to do this.

Data Freelance

I wrote two new articles in March. I think those are good and helpful, but nobody is subscribing to the channel. I have now 39 members, which is 12 more than last month.

Data Internships

I have sent 1 newsletter this month. Even here, more unsubscribes than subscribers and still nobody that wants to pay for a spot in the newsletter or the site.

I lost 2 subscribers in March, total is 2054 now.

X Topics

No time to work on this. I renewed the domain for another year anyway. It’s very hard to promote this project. Even when I go viral on Threads nobody visits the website, so I need to find a reliable way to bring people to visit it.

Soccrbets

Usual work, with weekly posting on Reddit and on the TG channel. Unfortunately the bets are not going very well, which is really the only thing that matters to get new subscribers.

I have got now 38 subscribers on my YT channel, 5 more than last week and the subscribers on the TG channel grew to 60, 13 more than last month. I hope to get to 100 before the end of the football season, but it’s going to be hard.

Freelancing

Most of the time went on freelancing this month. I hope it’s enough to pay the bills. After taxes, I am afraid I am still under a few hundreds.

I paid the Italian taxes for 2023 this month. Roughly 10k taxes for 22k earnings. What the fuck!

The cashflow

I am scared to look at the income for this month.

Book sales are really going down. I am looking at April data so far, and they look even worse. It might be that some competitor books entered the space or simply the audience is not interested anymore. At this point I don’t think this is temporary. At this rate the book sales will not cover the other expenses.

X paid itself again this month. I wish those views would turn into customer, but I imagine I am not targeting the right group of people, plus I don’t have something compelling to sell.

I am experimenting with DeepSeek and it might as well replace the HF instance that I spin up for the Xtopics analytics. It seems to be a bit less expensive and could allow me to simplify the infrastructure. But this is really a cost saving thing that I should not be worried about right now.

As I said last month, it doesn’t make sense to keep a positive balance here. It might be better to reinvest everything that I earn with my side projects into the projects themselves. For example, I could run ads or purchase services that could make me market my existing projects better. If you know any tool that could help me, I would be happy to look into it.

Thanks! And see you next month for the April report!