News & Thoughts #7

March 27, 2023

Hey everyone 👋

Well that didn’t go as planned.

Having set out this year to write more regularly, I hadn’t factored in getting reeeally busy with freelance work. It’s a good problem to have, but it blocked my writing habit and slowed these newsletters recently. I don’t know about you but I find it’s just so hard to write when I’m overloaded. I need to find tactics to get around this problem.

If you’re a new subscriber this month, welcome. I’m really pleased to have you join us 👋

FlowLdn

I went to FlowLdn the other day and it was amazing. Jack and his brothers did an amazing job putting together this London Webflow meetup – a chance to spend time with Webflow friends, including some I’ve been talking to for years but never met!

Freelance work

Q4 last year was unusually quiet, which was unsettling. I’ve been freelance a long time and it never gets easier to deal with the quiet patches, so I worked hard on my exposure and chasing down leads towards the end of the year.

Maybe it was that, maybe it was other factors, but 2023 has been totally different so far. I’m now doing freelance support on design + development for three separate companies (two on Webflow, one on WordPress). These don’t quite fill my schedule yet, so I have availability if anyone knows of a need.

Updated portfolio

Earlier in March, I quietly rebuilt my design portfolio in Webflow. The previous version was always just a hasty stop-gap, so it needed doing. Another motivation was to get some more practice using the client-first framework.

NoCode Sale

In January, I sold another one of my side projects – makerdemos.com. I sold it at nocodesale.com, a fun, new regular event for selling small, unwanted projects. You can read an article on the sale here. I also helped with the branding of the event.

Purchasing Parity

I’m always keen for my info products’ prices to reflect the cost of living where my customers are located. So when Gumroad started offering a Purchasing Parity option recently I immediately added it to my store.

Deck of Carrd revenue

Deck of Carrd (an inspiration gallery site fr Carrd) is a tiny no-code project I started 3 years ago. It’s grown in popularity to the point it's getting 400+ visits a month. Not bad for a small niche project. I’m also pleased to say it’s now achieving ~$80MRR, through sponsorship, and has a newsletter.

AI developments

AI continues to dominate conversations in indie maker circles. A couple of things that caught my eye recently were chatterdocs.ai (a tool to build AI chatbots trained on your own data), and this article about using ChatGPT to write and build a landing page for your product.

OK, that’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll be back in your inbox again soon!

Thanks for reading.

Mark