For the last three years, I’ve done a “year in review” post to look back at what I’ve achieved in the previous year, get some future strategy ideas written down, and set some concrete goals for the next 12 months.
In this edition, I mostly talk too much about all the different kinds of pet stores I want to own. Enjoy!
SingularLabs is still dying
SingularLabs—my Windows software development business—saw its sixth consecutive year of traffic decline. 2020’s revenue was almost exactly identical to 2019, so there was some positive not negative news.
There were a total of six software releases in 2020, which was fewer than the previous year, but arguably contained more interesting improvements.
Bzzt! Image Editor was re-engineered to use the new async/await feature introduced in Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, which has made it much faster and more responsive. NET 4.5 has actually been around since 2012, but it doesn’t support Windows XP and SingularLabs still had a decent number of customers using it.
The System Ninja and CCEnhancer updates were mostly minor bug fixes, but we did please a few people by adding cleaning support for 25 addition web browsers. System Ninja notably celebrated its 10th birthday in November.
I also had to discontinue Remembr—my Windows clipboard management app—because Windows now has a clipboard manager built in. It’s the second time Microsoft has made one of my projects redundant, the first being Nucleus, which added app notifications, a notification API, and a start menu replacement to Windows 8 years before those features arrived in Windows 10.
LaunchWoo is ascending
LaunchWoo is basically my personal web design portfolio. Sure, there’s other services offered there like digital marketing and site management, but they basically exist as complimentary services to the people for whom I build websites.
Prior to 2019, LaunchWoo was called Gowland Media. The rebrand, along with the launch of the Growth Blog, Entrepreneur’s Brief, and Retail Events Calendar, was to use content marketing in the WooCommerce niche to attract new clients. This hasn’t worked at all, and to date I haven’t acquired a single new client solely through the website.
LaunchWoo’s traffic, however, more than doubled in 2020. The self-service web hosting service that the website also offers—but doesn’t actually promote—also started to pick up a bit.
It seems clear that the future of LaunchWoo isn’t to attract clients, but instead to generate passive income through digital services.
My goal in 2021 is to redesign the website to put more of an emphasis on the hosting side-business, and potentially explore other passive income streams that the content parts of the website could generate. I’ve always wanted to write an eBook…
Continued work in the pet industry
Earlier in the year I launched Aquarium Hub, which follows the shop/magazine/community/classifieds business model of Aviculure Hub. The main difference is, of course, that the new website is focused on fish instead of birds.
Since launching it has been my most neglected project, with very little content published and $0 in revenue so far. Traffic did start to pick up in December (ostensibly as the site came out of Google’s sandbox), so there is some potential on the horizon.
Aviculture Hub was the unexpected mild success in my 2019 roundup, bringing in a five-figure profit in its first year of monetization. 2020 didn’t go quite as well.
Sure, the website’s traffic doubled, but the revenue stayed completely flat. In January I lost supply of the store’s most popular product. The sales growth in other products that recouped the revenue lost was focused on the products with much slimmer profit margins, leading to a substantial overall profit drop.
The biggest growth area for traffic in 2019 was the bird sale calendar. Sadly COVID completely stopped all in-person events, so the traffic to these pages effectively became zero. Luckily the uptick in traffic to the classifieds section more than made up for it, and also presents a monetization opportunity further down the line.