Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 16, 2019

Is It Keto

I’m going to start paying a bit more attention to Is It Keto given that it’s my only project that grows and earns revenue.

• Wrote a guest post about strength training for a local gym’s blog (still pending publication, but they reviewed it and plan to post)
  • Their domain is DR=55 on ahrefs and DA=47 on Moz, so hopefully a link from their blog helps with Is It Keto’s search engine rankings.
• Continued trying to use Pinterest
  • Currently at 12 pins (+9 from last week) and 17 followers (+9 from last week)
• Wrote a new article explaining why cherries aren’t keto

What Got Done

• Realized routes were broken for a bunch of static resources (including favicon), so now the tab icon actually shows up
• Found a better way of implementing Golang HTTP route handler funcs so that I don’t have to manually check the HTTP verb in each function.
• Continued working on prepping the site for the backburner.

mtlynch.io

• Published “The Dumbest Task I Ever Outsourced”

Zestful

• Zestful earned $15k in revenue in just two days, blowing away its previous record of around $200
  • …but it turned out to be a mistake and the customer meant to spend far less than $15k
• There were a few sources of confusion
  • The pricing page on RapidAPI, Zestful’s payment gateway
    • Zestful costs $0.02 per ingredient parse, but allows up to 100 ingredients per request
    • The pricing page said the pricing units were results which is vague, though the hovertext did say “each parsed ingredient counts as a separate result”
    • The price is listed as “$0.02 / use,” which is ambiguous and might imply that it’s $0.02 per request rather than per ingredient
  • RapidAPI had three days of latency between the customer’s first API call and the first charge appearing in their account.
    • In other words, during the time they were using the service and for three days after, the customer’s balance showed $0. On day 4, the balance suddenly jumped from $0 to $15k.
    • The customer was surprised, as they had no visibility into what they were being charged in the meantime.
  • The customer thought it was $0.02 per request, so they expected to pay ~$150. But because they were sending 100 ingredients per request, the bill came to $15,000, far more than they expected.
  • We compromised on a forgiveness of the charges down to $750, so it’s still Zestful’s biggest week ever of revenue
• Remediations
  • I’ve updated the pricing page so that the pricing unit is called ingredients instead of results
  • I’ve asked RapidAPI if they can change the wording on the page to read “$0.02 / object” rather than “$0.02 / use”

Dusty VCR

• Had a prep meeting for our next episode

Beekeeping

• Did my first honey harvest!
• Worked with a cartoonist to create a logo so I can make custom labels for my bottles of honey

Misc

• Realized there’s a software company in my small town that I had no idea existed, so I reached out to them to see if they want to attend the next Indie Hackers Western Mass meetup.
• Bought a weight bench
• Sold an old rug that had been sitting in my house for a year