July 2022: Aftermath of a viral tweet
I gained 1,500 new users, but how many will convert? And other updates in July 2022...
Hello everyone! Tony here 👋
This month, I want to share with you some updates:
🚚 Moving to Substack
🔥 Aftermath of a viral tweet (1,500 new users!)
🎤 Info about my public speech in October 2022
📊 Revenue Updates
👀 Other small updates.
Let’s go!
🚚 Moving to Substack
I have decided to move my newsletter from Revue to Substack.
I have imported all of your emails to Substack.
👉 No action is needed from you. However, to make sure you will receive future emails from me, please consider:
Add the sender of this email to your contact list.
Move it out of your “Promotion” tab (if it’s in there)
Mark it as “Not Spam” (if it’s in your spam)
Thank you very much!
As for the reasons, there are many reasons for this move.
The most significant one is that Revue has had a lot of outages lately, where the whole site just went down 2 times in total this month.


Also, Revue also doesn’t seem to be improved a single bit since I started using it last year. It looks like Twitter (Revue’s owner) is focusing on something else.
So… I’m coming back to Substack 😄
🔥 Aftermath of a viral tweet
In July, Black Magic was mentioned in a viral tweet 🔥
Website traffic:
Brought in a lot of visitors, and ~1,500 new users.
At peak, there were 689 new users in a single day.
I was super excited! 😱
My usual Sign Up → Subscribe conversion rate is about 4%.
So let’s do some math 📐
If I convert 4% of these 1,500 new users, that means I’ll have ~60 new subscribers.
And if each user contributes $14 MRR on average…
That means I will have +$840 new MRR, right? 😱
Well, the answer is… no.
I got 9 new subscribers (so far). The conversion rate is about 0.6%.
I’m still very happy! But still somewhat disappointed.
Maybe they have not converted yet?
It’s been ~20 days since they signed up, 4 days passed their trial period.
If they want to subscribe, they would have already.
Besides, on average, 45% of my customers subscribe in the first 2 days.
More than 75% of customers subscribe before day 17.
Now on day 20, I don’t think I will be able to convert those 1,500 new users anymore.
Maybe when I release a killer feature in the future, they’ll come back. But as of now, I think that’s all.
🤔 So why the conversion rate is suddenly so low?
I have no idea, but I have a guess.
The viral tweet was tweeted by Matt (thank you, Matt! ❤️).
By looking at the data, I can clearly see that we have a very small audience overlap.
Only 2,775 common followers.
👀 Btw, this data is public and provided by Black Magic.
You can check your audience overlap with me on my Glance page.
Actually, you can check your audience overlap with anyone!
For this reason, I think the tweet has reached a much wider audience outside of my bubble, where the conversion rate is naturally much lower.
What do you think?
Is my analysis correct?
Feel free to let me know or suggest other ideas by replying below 😄
🎤 I’ll speak at Jom Launch 2022
It has been almost 1 year since I quit my job! (September 2021).
In October 2022, I will share my story from being a normal developer to a solo indie hacker (or you can say a more fancy name, “startup founder”).
If you are interested and able to make it to Malaysia, register here 😄
📊 Revenue Updates
By the end of July 2022:
Black Magic has reached $9,778 MRR
DevUtils reached $5,256 in revenue
Xnapper reached $3,555 in revenue
👀 Other small updates
I shared about how I manage time and context switching while running multiple products.
Base Camp is using Xnapper for their social media posts!
New update to Black Magic’s landing page. What do you think?
I learned to surf! 🏄♂️ (in Da Nang, My Khe beach)
A big YouTuber made a video about Xnapper! ❤️
I released a new version for DevUtils.
👋 That’s all for now!
Thank you all so much for the constant support!
Next month will conclude 1 year after quitting my job.
I’m thinking of writing a long piece to share my story again in the last year.
Writing is hard and time-consuming.
On one hand, my lazy ass can’t bother to write. This newsletter is free, after all.
On the other hand, I want to share my story and inspire more people to join the indie startup journey like me.
So I’ll try to write as much as I can, let's see! 😂
Alright!
See you all next month 👋
- Tony
Reading your story inspired me to do a monthly post. Thanks man!
Lovely update. Lot of insight as usual, Tony!
Keep up the good works. And rememeber to write your story on 1-year full time indie hacking! People love to hear that 💯💪🏻!