Income Report Mar 2019 – Launched Youtube Channel

Welcome to my income report for March 2019

In February I have earned $131 in total.

A total deep dive over the previous month.

It is because I neglected my active income streams.

I was busy executing my side projects and completely stopped chasing quick bucks.

Without any passive income, I would be broke in March.

Fortunately, my slowly growing money tree saved my a** this time.

March

...is a month of resurrection.

I was working hard on resurrecting and relaunching two of my dream projects, that I abandoned years ago.

None of them gained any initial traction due to various reasons.

This time, I will apply the lean methodology to the whole process of building an MVP, shipping it to the larger audience, and iterating according to customers' feedback.

Good House Music Youtube Channel

The first project, that I managed to relaunch in March, is a Youtube music channel, that is focused on my DJ mixes.

Years ago I created such a channel and I thought it will be sufficient if I upload simple videos, that have the static background and audio footage.

I uploaded two videos in total and for a long time, they recorded zero views.

After three years since the first upload, my most viewed video has only over 360 views in total.

I was baffled with results and gave up the idea of having a Youtube music channel.

This time, I have a much clearer idea of what I want to achieve.

Instead of mixing random tracks, I will compose thematically focused mixes. E.g. by a record label, by artists, or by year.

Additionally, I will use live DJ mix footage to show people my tragic DJ skills :).

Another cool thing I want to add is a sliding text, that will introduce the currently playing artist and his track.

So far, I have had a blast recording and editing videos.

I feel the creativity behind the process and I can't wait the day I upload the next video.

I simply enjoy sharing good music and I am happy when people enjoy it too.

Unfortunately, I can't monetize copyrighted music, so this activity is a non-profit right from the beginning.

The pure passion for house music is what keeps me going.

Let's see how long it will last.

If you want to support my channel, then subscribe, like, and comment on my channel trailer.

It took me three weeks to put this together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSeHRHAxUkU

Financia.cz

My second project was mentioned multiple times in my blog.

The resurrection was mainly driven by the expiration of my unused domain Financia.cz.

As the domain name suggests, it will be focused on the Czech market and will have to be finance related.

You can learn more about the history and reasons, why I want to relaunch Financia.cz in this blog post.

Anyway, in March I managed to complete the whole MVP.

Learning Flask stack was a rewarding experience and I was able to build MVP quickly compared to my still secret Django React project.

Of course, Financia.cz is just a dumb static web page, not a full-fledged web app like the Django React project.

The main purpose is to show people the true structure, benefits, and cost of retail financial products sold in the Czech marketplace.

I struggled when I was researching the best products, that would bring me the most money.

I had to read long and confusing term sheets, just to understand the cost and benefit of each product.

I hope people will find it useful and it will gain some traction.

I even bought my first VPS ever at Linode, which I will use for hosting my Python Javascript PostgreSQL stack.

I spent three days comparing Linode to other cloud providers such as Digital Ocean, Amazon Lightsail, Vultr, or even some European companies, but a 20USD discount at Linode won me over :).

A Basic 5USD VPS plan should be powerful enough to handle Flask and Django projects with less than 1000 visitors a day.

I don't expect to even grow above 100 visitors a day anytime soon, maybe in a year or two :).

Now I am in the process of learning how to deploy my development codebase to Ubuntu VPS.

Learning how to set up, secure, and operate Linux distro takes so much time.

Coming from managed Apache hosting, this was quite a shock.

Hopefully, the website will be launched live by end of April. Wish me luck.

Income Breakdown

P2P Lending

This category groups all my income from investing in P2P loans.

At the end of March, I was invested in over 500 loans.

Now, 7 loans are overdue and 3 of them are without a single payment.

This is getting serious and I will have to filter out the top 3 worst ratings out of my P2P lending bot.

There is no point in having a larger portion of toxic loans in my portfolio. Additional gains from higher rates don't compensate for the potential loss.

What can be improved next month?

Business development

In April, I won't be active on Peopleperhour.com anymore and I will focus all my time and energy on my projects.

I achieved so much last month when I was not distracted with low paid gigs and I won't change the course until I finish my Django React project.

On the finance side, I made some progress with my algo trading goals.

I built a script, that connects to public API provided by IEXcloud and downloads their stock data.

The thing is, API is limited to 500000 calls a month and I can't download complete history for all stocks without breaching the limit.

So I am now trying to figure out how to prioritize API calls, how to reduce stock dimension, and how to include additional data sources.

Getting the right answers will take me at least a few months.

Project development

I will work hard on launching Financia.cz.

I don't have any expectations regarding traffic and monetization, so there is no pressure, but I want to cross it off the list asap.

On other hand, my Django React project was left behind.

I didn't make any significant progress because I struggled with designing the onboarding process, that can be used with available  Django registration packages.

The registration process in Django is not what I envisioned, but I don't know how to do my own.

In April, I want to integrate user authentication into the React frontend and Django backend.

I read many articles about the Django authentication framework and I had to learn new terms like CORS, CSRF, XSS attacks, JWT token, Session Cookie, etc.

I still don't understand properly the mechanics of user authentication, but I have few ideas on what to try next.

That would be all for this month. See ya in the next income report!