Mon, 01 Jan 2024
Everyone's been posting their year-in-review composites on social media, so I sat down to make mine. I finished the free-design tier composite (i.e. the best designs of 2023) and went to look at how I formatted the text last year and made the mistake of reading the 2022 recap. And got a terrible, terrible sense of deja vu.
Last year's tagline was "It could have been worse," which honestly sums up 2023 as well. I'm not sure if "It could have been better" is more or less optimistic, but that's what I put for this year. Let's compare.
2022: It's been a complicated year, business-wise, and I wish I had a better summary than "It could have been worse." I mean, it wasn't awful or anything. I'm pretty proud of the designs I've done, and that I've been pretty good about keeping to the schedule for the Ko-Fi tiers. I've got the tutorial-writing process mostly down.
2023: It's been a complicated year, life-wise. You can see that in the progression of pictures: in March, I have the gray backdrop but had the lightbox broken down as we packed to move, so it's (terrible) natural lighting. In April, I had set up the light box in the new house but hadn't reunited it with the gray backdrop. We're still waiting on the garage to be put up so the basement, and by extension my workroom, is still crowded with boxes and equipment that will go in the wood shop. And a few months ago one of our kid's friends quit his job to go back to college, and moved in with us.
2022: But I definitely didn't make money this year. I mean, I made some, and my expenses were also fairly low, but time investment was HUGE. That's on me: the designs don't sell themselves, and I keep going "after the NEXT one, then I'll have enough of a library to start really advertising."
2023: Ugh. I've put off looking at the numbers because this year was definitely a loss. Maybe not accounting-wise, since the new embroidery machine is a capital expense (I almost typed "capital offense" which is an interesting Freudian slip). But I haven't sold much physical product because I've focused on the designs, and the house move, and the designs just... aren't selling well.
2022: I've also, as I have previously talked about, definitely underpriced the Ko-Fi tiers as compared to other folks. Most people have no designs at the $1 level, and the[ir] $5-6 level is the charm that I give away for free on the blog, and a $15-20 level is designs like the shark and snowman. And nobody's doing stuff like the pumpkin or french fries. This means I should be making it up in volume, and that's not happening... which comes back to the "not really advertising it" issue.
2023: Oof. I did price the Patreon tiers a little higher, and raised the price on Ko-Fi (by adding new corresponding tiers and marking the old ones as "legacy," so current subscribers didn't see an increase), but what I really need to do is make it up in volume. I also tried to scale back the designs to better match the levels, and I'm not sure that's working.
I mean, right now if you sign up you get Star Baby, Flopsy Frenchie, Cookie Dragon, and Cookie Unicorn for like eight bucks so... I really should push this more.
2022: I hate this but... it probably means I need to start a Facebook group.
2023: Well, I did do that, and a Discord, but I'm still not promoting either one any better than anything else. Time to set some 2024 goals.
