I quit my “normal” job at the end of 2022 to make a go at earning money independently in 2023. To give me focus & discipline, I committed to doing Seven Things, then graded my performance after the year ended.
Having these commitments really helped, so I repeated the process and committed to Six Things in 2024. It’s now 2025 (and I’ve already committed to One Thing this year), which means it’s time to grade my 2024 performance on each of the items.
Commitment #1:
“Sell → I spent last year building & launching, Did You Do it Today?, but it’s now time to get the word out to market & sell it. What will that look like? I have no idea — part of why I’m doing this is to learn all aspects of running a digital business, and I certainly have a lot to learn about sales. I’ll also be doing this, to a lesser extent, with Snack Pantry.”
Grade = D–
This probably should be an F, but the fact that I was able to convince some folks to subscribe means it wasn’t a total failure. Also, my fixed & variable costs (not including my labor lol) are pretty low (one of the reasons I like starting online businesses), so I was almost able to break even.
But I didn’t even come close to getting the number of subscribers I had hoped to, and never broke out of selling to friends & family — I know every person that subscribed.
I knew selling subscriptions to an app that nobody truly needs (but, they do…), and with an infinitive number of competitors, was going to be hard, but didn’t realize how much I wasn’t go to enjoy selling, or do well doing it.*
Why?
- To truly sell a self-help app like DYDit online using only social media (which is all I really tried), you need to become a guru, or pretend you are, and then continually yell at the internet to believe in, follow, & pay you. I just wasn’t willing to become, or pretend I was, this guru.
- Another way to sell online using only social media is to already have an audience, and then convince them to buy. I had no prior audience to convince.
- Yet another way to sell online is via SEO on the site. My site was atrocious for SEO, and I never began the long slog to improve it.
- You also always need to be selling in the offline world. So, I should have brought the app up in every new conversation with someone, and then put the squeeze on them. I had no desire to do this, or, just plain forgot.
- I always intended to establish some partnerships with complementary products or services, but didn’t want to start trying to build these until I had some good subscriber numbers under my belt. I never got those numbers, so never started this project
So, what’s the future of DYDit?
The app is still up & running, I still actively work on & support it, and current subscribers are still using & getting results from it. None of this will change, and I plan to keep the app out there for a long, long time. I just need to figure out a better way to sell it (eg. do one of the things I list above), or a different way to make money from it.
DYDit is not my One Thing in 2025, but that doesn’t mean it’s nothing — I’m still going to continue thinking about it, and figuring out how to get it to survive & thrive in the cutthroat app world.
*This eval only addresses the act of selling, and whether I did a good job of it in 2024. Whether the app was good enough to sell, and people to pay for, is a totally different discussion, best done over beers.
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