Friday December 31st, 2021
During my 30-hour journey from England to Australia, 4 crazy tiny projects events coincidentally all happened at the exact same time - it was actually bizarre.
Here's what happened:
You couldn't have made it up - during my layover in Dubai, I opened my phone and saw hundreds of transaction attempts against my card for the first batch of emoji domain names I purchased for Mailoji.
I didn't think this would happen for another month, so I didn't have the funds ready to pay for them - meaning a lot of the transactions failed.
I was worried this could've resulted in me losing all the domain names - which would've been a catastrophic disaster - but fortunately I still own 🐐.kz for another year. It was just very sneaky behaviour by the domain registrar.
Exactly two weeks before I hopped on this plane, my blog post about Paper Website blew up, resulting in loads of people signing up for a 14-day free trial.
Mid-flight, a lot of these users started converting from free users to paid users. I'm happy to report that my decision to offer a free trial was a great success!
Trial conversion rate is currently sitting at 30%, with overall conversion rate now at 0.3% - this is double what it was a month ago!
I had 6 hours to kill at Heathrow airport, so naturally I was just dossing about on my phone/laptop.
At one point I decided I'd tweet about my travel plans, so tweeted a cliché picture of my laptop and passport. I got on the plane, then didn't check my phone again until I landed in Dubai about 8-9 hours later.
When I opened twitter again, I'd gained nearly 1k followers and the tweet had over 1.5k likes.
Perhaps I should ditch the coding and become a travel influencer.
Because of this tweet, Paper website got a lot of page views and I ended up selling more annual subscriptions and custom notebooks.
I didn't end up taking my notebook stock with my on my travels, but my super kind mum is helping me post the rest of them until I establish a base in Australia.
Paper Website has not really stopped growing since launch. Most things I launch experience big initial traction, then die off massively. I still think this could happen with PW, but so far it's looking really promising.
Soon PW will be approaching $10K ARR, which is insane. I predict it will overtake Mailoji revenue at some point next year.
On the topic of new years, happy new year! 2021 has been one hell of a year for me. I have some cool plans on how I want to change my Tiny Projects approach going into 2022 - but I'll save that for next year.
I'm ashamed I made that joke.