I bought Intro Maker (then IntroCave) midway through 2018, so I've now owned it for 5 full years!
Thinking back about the biggest projects over the years, it looks something like:
I worked less on Intro Maker in 2023 than any of the previous five years (including the half year in 2018!), but the work might a have been the most impactful. For the first time since I bought the business, it really does feel "hands off." The web server has always been stable, but after the big traffic spike early in the year I hit a true "I'm fed up with this" moment and did a ground-up rewrite of the entire render server. I don't have to think about the app much at all these days!
What about financials? After migrating domains in late 2021, I hired a paid SEO agency to do outreach and linkbuilding all through 2022. That ate most of the cashflow for the year, but it seemed a worthwhile bet to make after doing the big domain migration. I dropped them down to a $1k/mo retainer in 2023, and thanks to this post just remembered to cancel them for good at the end of this month. I don't think they did a bad job, but the internet is changing and that money would probably be better spent on ads (or in my pocket!).
Traffic and MRR grew through the year, but dropped off pretty hard in December. The MRR is likely at a plateau in the $1,500-$2k range unless I start doing paid ads (which I suspect would be a better use of that SEO budget) or figure out some new traffic sources.
Revenue has been pretty stable: $22k -> $26k -> $54k -> $47k -> $54k -> $58k
Hosting costs are pretty low (even lower if I bothered to go cancel a few things!), so 2023 was my best year ever with SDE of $52k! (This doesn't count the SEO agency which was paid ~$14k for the year but will finally drop off this year.)
I used a line of credit to buy the business in 2018, and I finally repaid the last bit midway through 2023. I keep one more milestone in my acquisition spreadsheet. Including expected taxes for '23, I've paid around $20k in taxes on the business income (some of which is shielded by depreciation and a solo 401k). After another $4k of profits (roughly a month or two), I'll finally be at true "zero impact" on the family budget. Except theoretically the business itself is also a $250k-$300k asset if I get more serious about a sale!
My day job is in AI, so there's a bit of FOMO when it comes to how many things are blowing up in the indie hacker space. Intro Maker feels extremely optimized at this point, but the ceiling on "intro videos" is pretty low at $50k/yr. I can't remember a time when so many indie hackers are doing so well, and I have exactly the skills for this moment!
But I also like my day job, and building a competitive product wouldn't sit well with me. I could probably do something in image-gen or video, but I haven't had the time to sit down and really figure out hosting for those yet.
I've also got a couple of game ideas (prototyped years ago at this point!) still rattling around in my head that need to get out. At some point the generative art is going to be good enough that I can be happy as a "studio of one" on some of those projects.
It's only 2 weeks in, but (unless something crazy happens) I think 2024 is going to be a "harvest" year. My goal with Intro Maker is to do as little as possible and see how well it can continue to throw off cash.
$4,661.83 in gross profits (-4.8%)
Traffic was down a bit, but mostly a chill month. Average render time was the best ever! (1:03 avg across 47k videos).
Support volume continues to be super low (I barely even remembered to check email when I was in Hawaii for 10 days). I went back and looked at how many emails I had to respond to in the last few months:
Pretty smooth! There's not a ton of emails, but they mostly break down into 4 categories:
(There's also a ton of requests for paid blog placement or paid blog offerings, but I just ignore those!)
It's tempting to hook these up to an AI triage system, but the volume is so low it's not worth it! Gmail templates already do most of the work.