Eight months in on evenings and weekends, roughly £150 a month, which is less than I hoped and more than nothing. I keep oscillating between thinking it's about to click and thinking I should stop. I don't have a specific problem, I just don't know what a normal trajectory looks like and whether eight months is early or already a bad sign.
Set a decision date rather than deciding continuously. 'I'll review this in March and I'm not allowed to quit before then' removes an enormous amount of daily energy drain. The oscillating is more exhausting than the work.
This is the single most useful thing in the thread. Write the criteria down now, while you're calm, and judge against those in March rather than against how you feel that week.
For context, mine did about £80/month for the first year and then went to £900/month in the following six, and nothing changed except that I finally had enough past customers to get referrals. The curve is not a straight line and the first stretch is mostly invisible.
Very normal to feel this. Side projects are slow in a way that's hard to sit with because you're comparing them to a salary, which arrives on a fixed date regardless of how the month went. Different shape entirely.
Honest counterpoint — some things genuinely don't work and eight months of hope is a real cost. What would need to be true in six months for you to call it? If you can't answer that, that's the thing to work on first, not the marketing.
@churn_charlie · 2w ago · 3 replies
Eight months at £150 a month isn't a bad sign, it's an unmeasured one. The number that matters isn't the monthly total, it's the direction and where it comes from. Pull your last eight months into a list and answer two things: is month 8 bigger than month 4, and did any single month's income come from a source you could deliberately repeat?
If it's flat and every sale came from somewhere different and random, that's the actual warning. If it's slowly climbing and there's one channel doing most of the work, you're fine and you should be pouring time into that channel rather than into new ideas.
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@churn_charlie · 2w ago
Then you don't have a doubt problem, you have a focus problem. Stop building anything new for two months and just sell more of that one thing.
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@monitor_riser_mo · 2w ago
Did this. Month 8 is about triple month 4, and roughly two thirds of it comes from repeat customers of one product. That reframes things a lot.
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