Deep into our second lockdown, the daily numbers of new cases have dropped significantly. Vaccines are starting to become widely available. For the first time, I'm starting to see light at the end of the tunnel with this pandemic!
Though the economy's still relatively in the shitter, I managed to make out really well this past month in terms of project income; and had an absolutely absurd portfolio growth due to cryptocurrency.
How absurd?
My entire investment portfolio grew by over 50% this month.
More on that later. For now, let's dig into my income numbers for the first month of 2021.
I managed $1,231.61 in gross revenue from my various side projects this month; which is certainly not bad for the month right after the holidays. I beat my numbers from January of last year by > $200, and was in equal part just shy of my numbers from last month. Pretty good.
The breakdown:
- $585 from Nicehash mining. No surprise here, it continues to be a strong performer.
- $245 from flipping, which performs relatively consistetly
- $118 from Youtube ad revenue; not bad considering January sees > 50% drop in RPM
- $105 in 3D Print sales, purely from Ebay
- $83 from Print on Demand, namely Society6 and Redbubble. As of yet to get any sales on Teepublic or Zazzle.
- $64 between my two homebrew trading bots and singular Gekko trading bot. Seeing slow & steady growth in trading value, though still not breached back above my starting base
- $20 from 3d model sales on MyMiniFactory
- $19 from 3d print sales on Shapeways
- $0.14 from Lbry (lol). I forgot all about it. I've made 14 cents in LBC tokens
- -$11 from my dividend funds from quarterly RBC fees
Sadly, still no Patrons on Patreon, although I did rejig my reward tiers to be more valuable to potential patreon supporters. I think the issue may have more to do with my audience, which tends to be older and skew towards people less likely to be interested in subscription-based content in the first place.
This month, I managed to mostly bring my new Zazzle print on demand sales channel to parity with TeePublic; as it stands now, I'm only six listings short of parity--which I actually intend to complete by the end of today. As of yet, I've yet to see significant traffic on this sales channel, much like TeePublic. Although, most of my listings were only put up in the last two weeks, so I'm going to give it a bit for it to rank in search results. I've gotten a few hits, but nothing approaching my Redbubble or Society6 visitor numbers.
One cool thing you'll note that I added to my spreadsheet's line items, is Lbry (pronounced 'library'). It's a decentralized Youtube alternative that runs on the blockchain, where you earn LBC tokens from views, uploads, and mostly via tips from viewers. You stake your earnings in your videos to make them stand out in search results, which in turn (in theory) leads to more viewers and more tips. To my surprise, when I checked in on it for the first time in a long while, I've gotten a decent amount of views & tips! I'm at 55 LBC tokens currently, which--as shown in the line item--equates to a whopping 14 cents in $CAD!
With my trading bots, I'm continuing to see slow but steady growth. I implemented some dynamic order timeouts; that default to 12 hours and two days for buy and sell orders, respectively; while under my starting base value. Once it recovers to my starting amount and becomes profitable, the timeout will scale linearly with how much value my portfolio has. If, for instance, I am at double my starting amount (up by 100%), sell orders will only timeout after four days; at 10x my starting value (up 900%), it will timeout after 20 days; so on and so forth. And even then, it will only cancel buy & sell orders if the token value is outside of a 5% threshhold of the price of the order.
I need to start tracking where my two bots are from month to month, so here's where I'm at: My Binance bot is still down by 76.34% (up from a low of -80%!), and my Bittrex bot is down by 53.32%.
With manual trading on Coinsquare, I've seen a huge improvement in BTC value. I've come back up from my low of last month; I'm now up 5.33% over my base value! I'm being a little more careful with what trade suggestions my bot makes that I proceed to make, and giving it days (or weeks) to fill sell orders seems to be helping in the long run. Time will tell on this front.
With Youtube; it's normal to see a huge drop in the month right after the holidays--my RPM is down to about half of what it was last month. It will climb back up over the next couple of months. Overall, my metrics have seen a gradual decline since December as well; being an outdoors channel in the colder months can be unfortunate. I've been putting out some high quality videos to try and smooth out the decline; generating some good content for when interest picks back up in the warmer months.
In January, I also plotted out some growth rate trajectories for my channel; which I'm already falling short of... let's go into the metrics breakdown:
- Published four videos, on track with goal of one main video every week.
- Currently at 2408 subscribers, up 241 over last month
- Subscriber growth rate: 11.12%, a decrease over last month's 13.34%
- Average daily views throughout January: 801, down over last month's 812, or a decrease of -1.35%
- Average daily subscribers throughout January: 8, down over lasth month's 9, or an 11.11% decrease
Next up, let's take a look at the work items I had in place for January and how I managed:
- Four main Mike in the Woods Youtube videos, plus one 'What's Up With Mike' test video
Got the four main videos, but didn't do the WUWM test video. Gonna hold off on this and just focus on more quality on the main videos - 3 new Shapeways/MyMiniFactory listings
Yep, managed 5 actually! - 3 new Print on Demand listings
Fell short here, only did two - Finish uploading back catalogue of artwork to Zazzle
Almost completed; I'm only six listings shy of being at parity--aiming to get this completed by end of today, so I'll count this as completed - Refurbish Patreon tiers for Youtube
Yep!
So, all in, I did pretty good this month in terms of work items I wanted to tackle! In addition to what my goals were, I also managed to put up six flipping listings, which was a stretch goal I didn't bother mentioning last update!
Here's what my goals are for February:
- For main Mike in the Woods Youtube videos
- 3 new Shapeways/MyMiniFactory listings
- 3 new Print on Demand listings
- Apply to Displate to be a seller (new sales channel for Print on Demand)
- Sign up for (& apply if necessary) being a seller on TeeFury (new sales channel for Print on Demand)
- Six new flipping listings
- Repair GPUs with broken fans on mining rigs, and work on new instability issues
Pretty full work queue for February. Probably more than I can realistically handle, but I guess we'll see, won't we? I'll push hard.
Last up, is, of course, a look at my investment portfolio and how it's doing; as I'm sure you're eager to see after I mentioned my massive growth this month.
A 53.92% month-on-month growth rate is certainly better than my target of 6.5%.... Yet again, I manage to somehow beat that insane monthly target, with an even more insane actual rate.
As I always mention, the earlier I see more growth, the better it is further down the line as I reach my $2,000,000 by age 40 goal. Compound growth is a heck of a thing.
Like I mentioned, this month's growth was almost entirely due to crypto continuing to grow dramatically. My Coinsquare account value is starting to be quite scary, and I am quickly nearing my next financial milestone of $25k saved. Which, if you saw last month's blog post, you would know is a target I was aiming to reach at some point this year--at this rate, it's going to be sooner, rather than later!
I'm excited for what this year is going to bring, with hope on the horizon for getting back to our old form of normalcy.
If you find these posts helpful, and you are interested in cryptocurrency, try signing up for Binance! It's a widely-known cyrptocurrency exchange (think stock exchange, but for crypto). It's free to do so, and by using my referral link we'll both earn 10% of any trading fees you pay.
https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=WZKZ16ZW
See you next post!
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