December Recap – Happy New Year!

December is a notoriously slow month because of the holidays. I also decided to take some time off to reflect on things and spend time with family, so this recap will be relatively short. (Still interesting, I promise!)

Daily Active Users

Since Insomnia is mostly used in the workplace, holiday vacation time made a large dent in the usage numbers this month. The daily active users chart below shows clear growth at the start of the month but begins to drop off near the end, and is cut in half during the last week. This should bounce back quickly though.

Monthly Recurring Revenue

Much like usage, monthly recurring revenue (MRR) also seemed to be affected by the holiday season (although it's hard to tell with such small numbers). In December, MRR increased by 67%, ending the month at $45.78 MRR. The following chart shows MRR over the last five months.

To put this into perspective, $50 MRR is 1% of a moderate salary where I live, meaning that success will require 100x growth. The finish line is in sight, but very far away.

In order to reach the magic $5000/mo mark before my savings run dry, I will need to grow MRR by 50% per month for the next twelve months. This seems like a difficult goal but I hope the launch of teams in January will help get there.

This Month's Wins and Losses

This month I wanted to force myself to think back on more specific things that happened, so this section is a new attempt at doing that. It's not very organized, but here's a list of noteworthy things that happened this month.

• WIN: Got Insomnia featured on the Electron home page
• WIN: Finished and deployed the web interface to manage Insomnia accounts
• WIN: Someone donated $100!
• WIN: Had a blog post do well on Reddit
• WIN: deleted custom (buggy) DNS resolution code after discovering the proper way to do it
• LOSS: Didn't finish Teams on time
• LOSS: Didn't hit any set goals

Next Month Goals

Last month I set three goals for myself and failed to meet all of them. I failed to launch Teams and reach $100 MRR, didn't publish content once a week, and didn't start reacting to more actionable metrics. I did make a sizable dent in all of them, but more important things came up and prevented their completion.

This month I chose only important and achievable goals. Here's what I plan to accomplish in January.

Get first paying team:
Teams wasn't completed in December, but most of the work is now done. I've set a hard launch date of Wednesday January 11th, which should leave enough time to get the first team on board (even if it requires cold emails and hand-holding).

Finish console.rest integration:
Console.rest is an open source project started by the folks at Paw. I have most of the integration work completed, so wrapping it up should take a few days at most.

Wrap Up

Well, that's it for 2016! It's been almost exactly six months since I quit my job to take on Insomnia full-time. I'm super excited to have passed the $1 MRR milestone and can't wait to see what happens in 2017.

If you feel that I left anything out of this post or have questions, feel free to leave a comment below and I'll respond ASAP.