Day 916 - Hard truths about my Carrd plugins project - https://golifelog.com/posts/hard-truths-about-my-carrd-plugins-project-1688521643237
In the past 9 months since I went hard on Carrd plugins project, I've achieved these:
- In at least 12 distribution channels, not counting the occasional guest blog post
- 19 new plugins launched, more if I count those not published
- tripled my revenue, and looking to hit $1k from my plugins revenue alone in the next few months
- took over first page (7 out of 10) of Google for "carrd plugins"
- built up street cred/personal brand as the Carrd plugins guy
But there's some hard truths I need to face:
- **Small market:** Plugins continue to sell, but not at a volume that can help me reach my goal of $5k/m soon. Ahrefs tell me that the search volume is just 30 (i.e. average monthly number of searches for “carrd plugins” on Google in the US alone). Google Trends can’t even show me any data. So even while my SEO game is great, the search volume—and by inference, the market size—is just too small perhaps. By “small”, that’s of course with reference to my $5k/m revenue goal. After 9 months being on so many channels, realistically speaking, the most I can expect from this project is a slow and steady growth in small increments. Not reason to drop it, but not a good reason to focus on and keep hammering at it either. I need to try new bets where the market size and/or revenue steps are bigger.
- **Little to no moat:** The competitive advantage, or moat, around this project isn't huge. All it takes is someone who some dev experience to come in and start making plugins to compete. The dev don't even need to be very experienced or senior. Over the past few years, there's always been devs coming in and dropping out. But as Carrd gets more popular, I'm sure more will come. Who knows, maybe even copycats.
- **Unsustainble community contribution:** The current way of actively contributing to communities might not sustainable in the long run. It does take time and effort. Right now it's still manageable. But as the user base grows, there's more questions being asked. And there's a bit of a Schrodinger's cat paradox going on here too – my mere presence actively answering questions is bringing in more people, leading to more questions, and vicious cycle. I might have to start looking for more scalable ways, e.g. trying out ads, on Google, Facebook, Reddit.
- **Platform risk:** This is probably a remote chance, and the Carrd folks are super nice, but I'm still building on someone else's platform. Like how in March this year I had one such [black swan event for my mega navbar plugin](https://golifelog.com/posts/platform-risk-on-carrd-1678417360475). That in itself is a great reason to explore products that does not depend on a platform for it's existence. An example could be creating plugins for any website instead of just one platform.
I love this project, I love the product, the founders, the community, and I want to keep building plugins for it. But it's dawning on me that I cannot put all my chips in this project now.
I got to keep shipping new projects, to land on something else that has a bigger market, more revenue, and sustainable.
The time is now.
- In at least 12 distribution channels, not counting the occasional guest blog post
- 19 new plugins launched, more if I count those not published
- tripled my revenue, and looking to hit $1k from my plugins revenue alone in the next few months
- took over first page (7 out of 10) of Google for "carrd plugins"
- built up street cred/personal brand as the Carrd plugins guy
But there's some hard truths I need to face:
- **Small market:** Plugins continue to sell, but not at a volume that can help me reach my goal of $5k/m soon. Ahrefs tell me that the search volume is just 30 (i.e. average monthly number of searches for “carrd plugins” on Google in the US alone). Google Trends can’t even show me any data. So even while my SEO game is great, the search volume—and by inference, the market size—is just too small perhaps. By “small”, that’s of course with reference to my $5k/m revenue goal. After 9 months being on so many channels, realistically speaking, the most I can expect from this project is a slow and steady growth in small increments. Not reason to drop it, but not a good reason to focus on and keep hammering at it either. I need to try new bets where the market size and/or revenue steps are bigger.
- **Little to no moat:** The competitive advantage, or moat, around this project isn't huge. All it takes is someone who some dev experience to come in and start making plugins to compete. The dev don't even need to be very experienced or senior. Over the past few years, there's always been devs coming in and dropping out. But as Carrd gets more popular, I'm sure more will come. Who knows, maybe even copycats.
- **Unsustainble community contribution:** The current way of actively contributing to communities might not sustainable in the long run. It does take time and effort. Right now it's still manageable. But as the user base grows, there's more questions being asked. And there's a bit of a Schrodinger's cat paradox going on here too – my mere presence actively answering questions is bringing in more people, leading to more questions, and vicious cycle. I might have to start looking for more scalable ways, e.g. trying out ads, on Google, Facebook, Reddit.
- **Platform risk:** This is probably a remote chance, and the Carrd folks are super nice, but I'm still building on someone else's platform. Like how in March this year I had one such [black swan event for my mega navbar plugin](https://golifelog.com/posts/platform-risk-on-carrd-1678417360475). That in itself is a great reason to explore products that does not depend on a platform for it's existence. An example could be creating plugins for any website instead of just one platform.
I love this project, I love the product, the founders, the community, and I want to keep building plugins for it. But it's dawning on me that I cannot put all my chips in this project now.
I got to keep shipping new projects, to land on something else that has a bigger market, more revenue, and sustainable.
The time is now.
Love this detailed stream of thoughts and learnings. Thank you for sharing. I do agree with you that building your business on someone else's platform is risky. Look at what happened to folks that built there businesses on Twitter and Reddit. I think the pivot you mention is a good call i.e. keep doing Carrd, but see if you can adapt the plugins to be helpful for anyone building a website. Good luck, and thanks again for sharing your journey.
Please sign in to leave a comment.