Tony Dinh’s Newsletter

By Tony Dinh

March 2022: $5,316 MRR and my journey to 30K followers

#14・ Apr 2, 2022

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Tony Dinh

@tdinh_me

Hello everyone! 👋

I’m happy to share that this newsletter has now reached 2,000 subscribers, yay! 🥳

I’m very grateful to have your support and I hope what I shared here has been helpful for you!

Let’s dig in, here is what happened in March 2022.

📊 Reached $5K MRR, but it's slowing down

In early March, Black Magic has reached $5K MRR. At the time of writing this, it’s $5,316.

Revenue update

As you can see from the growth curve, it’s slowing down by a lot. I think the reasons are:

I gained a lot of new customers in Jan - Feb and a lot of them decided not to renew their subscriptions after 1 or 2 months.
There has been no significant marketing effort in March.

I’m not too much concerned about this. There are still new customers coming in, mostly via my Twitter profile.

$5K MRR is quite enough for me, so I have not been stressed to do much marketing as I should. As long as it doesn’t go down, I’m happy to continue doing what I love: building features 😂

👥 My journey to 30K followers!

In March, I also reached 30K followers! I know a lot of you came to this newsletter via Twitter, so thank you! 🙏

To celebrate this, I have prepared something special:

Alternative title: "How I get started on Twitter".

It’s not a Twitter course. You can get it for free (for a limited time) on my Gumroad:

My Twitter Journey: 100 → 30K followers

This mini-ebook is the document of my entire Twitter journey from the very beginning, as a developer.

I thought of doing this at 10K followers, but then I got lazy and postponed it to 20K followers, then I got lazy again. Finally, I decided to do it at 30K followers (otherwise I may never do it at all 😂).

It took me 2 whole days.

So here you go! I hope the document is helpful for you!

🔨 I worked on Black Magic

The list of features in my backlog is long, and I’m all excited about these new features. In March, I delivered some major features:

Daily and weekly email report (and people like it a lot!)
Make the sidebar work in DM.
Schedule tweets with media.
A new way to browse Twitter.

My Twitter report on a good day

To see the full list of the new feature, check out the latest Changelog Newsletter I published a few days ago.

👨‍🔬 New version for DevUtils.app

In March, I also got back to working with Swift.

I’m working on a new version of DevUtils.app with a lot of new features and improvements. Noticeably the Group feature, Frequently Used section, and scripts runtime.

PHP Scripts Runtime in DevUtils (with the groups in the sidebar)

This is an exciting update because it will set the foundation for a lot of customizations in the later versions.

Eventually, the users will be able to create custom tools with their favorite scripting language (JS, Python, PHP, etc.)

The work is still in progress and I’m recruiting beta users for this new version to help find bugs. There is also a public Discord if you want to join!

💫 Other small updates

I got COVID, thankfully it was not very bad. I recovered after ~7 days.
I created a Paddle Sellers community on Twitter.
I sent a feature request to the Twitter API team (go vote for it if you want the feature to be available in Black Magic! 😁).
I learned that you can rent a cloud macOS for ~$30. I used this to test DevUtils.app on old macOS versions.

✋ Q&A

This month, I’ll answer one of the questions I received via my AMA form. This question is from Francesco:

Hey Tony, I’m not sure at which point I should create a company out of my app. At the moment I have only a few users, so it doesn’t make sense for sure. However, soon I would like to start asking for money and I am not sure if I should establish a company to reduce my liability. What’s your take on this? And when did you decide to set up a legal company did you do it? Thanks!

I don’t think it’s necessary to create a company just to ask for money. The liability protection is nice but I think 99% of the time you don’t need to use it. However, if you want to cover that 1% chance, and are ready to spend the time to learn and go through complexity, you can create a company.

I created an LLC in the US using Firstbase for both of my apps recently (at around $1K MRR or so), but mostly I do it just to learn what’s it like to run a company.

Also, depending on your country, your tax situation can be different between individual and company, so you may save some tax money there (but again, only makes sense if you are already making a lot of money 😂)

👋 And that's all for now!

What do you think about the recent issues? What do you want to read more in this newsletter? Feel free to reply to this email, I read every responds 😊

Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next month!

Tony.

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Tony Dinh @tdinh_me

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