I Made $6725 in February 2021

Written by: Adem Hodzic

Posted Mar 5, 2021

February was another record-breaking month.

I’ve managed to land another client and start taking my side project, Get Django Saas, more seriously on the marketing side.

TL;DR I made $6725 for 128 hours of work on two projects. I have no other projects in the pipeline.

Projects

Client #1 ($4800 for 96 hours of work)

Except for hiring more engineers, there isn’t anything new with Client #1.

I’m still working with them three days a week for a weekly retainer of $1200.

Client #2 ($1925 for 32 hours of work)

As you might have guessed so far, I’ve landed another client this month.

I wasn’t looking for another client but Sahil shared this Hacker News thread and this one person caught my attention so I decided to reach out.

This client is working in niche and tech stack I’m very familiar with so it wasn’t a tough sell.

To make an already short story shorter, I’ve signed a three-months contract at a $60 hourly rate.

Woo hoo!

Get Django Saas ($0 for ? hours of work)

As I’ve mentioned in January report, I’ve started building a Django/Vue Saas boilerplate.

I didn’t track time on this project but I’ve got a couple of major things done:

• Switched up colors on the landing page not to look like every other template
• Started implementing a blog by watching this Gatsby from Scratch YouTube playlist
• Wired up authentication (which I’ll probably need to rewrite at some point)
• Integrated Sendgrid for sending confirmation emails. Originally wanted to do this either via MailChimp or EmailOctopus but these products are used more for email marketing rather than transactional emails
• Created the most of common components

Some things I want to do before launching are:

• Finish up common components library
• Authorization
• Teams
• Payment provider integration. Stripe is not supported in my country so I have no idea how I’ll pull that off
• Documentation

I plan to launch on Gumroad and then start building out sample micro-saas products to demo the boilerplate.

Here’s how my Trello is looking like right now.

Red tags are critical.

Blue ones are 0.1 release which is when I’ll try to get some beta users and do a soft launch.

Indigo ones are either nice-to-haves or something I’ll implement after I get a sale or two to validate that this is a product worth working on.

Leads

I’ve currently got no leads in the pipeline.

I don’t know if you’d consider Client#2 a lead since it took us a week from the initial meeting to start working together.

Expenses

Of course, with more revenues comes more expenses.

Currently, the biggest expense after taxes is transaction fees. I’ve had better rates when I used PayPal instead of wiring money directly into my bank account but PayPal would often refuse to transfer money.

Taxes are a bit higher than the amount I made since I’ve received around $1600 that was locked out in my PayPal account since November.

International transfer fees are bullshit.

Last month I forgot to include a $10 monthly subscription to Google Workspace. I use it just to have a custom email address. I know you can set up custom email via a domain provider like Namecheap but with those emails I can’t send or receive any files which is a problem.

If you want details about any other expense on the list you can reference the January report.

Conclusion

February of 2021 was a record-breaking month.

I forecast that March will be too since I started working for Client #2 in the middle of the month.

And I charged him for only 24 out of 32 logged hours because I was looking at the timesheet for the past two weeks instead of the whole month. Oops.

In total, I’ve made $6725 in gross revenue. If we take out $1810 of expenses, I’m left out with $4915 of profit.

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See you again in a month,

Adem Hodzic