May 2023: Newsletter(s) and more

First Monthly update

Kiru.io

Jun 1, 2023

Hello Dear Reader,

This is my first monthly newsletter on the projects I am working on. The main purpose is to keep you posted about any project updates. Apart from that, it is useful for me to sit down and reflect on the progress I made.

Starting PromptMonthly.com

There are two reasons for why I started an AI Newsletter. Firstly, I use MidJourney to build landing pages (some examples are: FlashDictation.com, WhatDinner.com and of course PromptMonthly.com) and one of the main issues was knowing how to write prompts. I thought it was easy, but then realized it’s more of a skill you develop. I thought it would be helpful to get some inspirations monthly.

Secondly: I went to a talk by Noemi about how she started FreshFonts.io and her story gave me the last push needed to try it out.

For now, I added a simple landing page, connected it with EmailOctupus and voilà. There are already 20 people who subscribed. Granted, not many, but I haven’t advertised it yet either. So, if you are reading this in your mail client and are also subscribed to PromptMonthly: Thank you so much for subscribing! 🙏

I kept the landing page on purpose “empty”. Once I published the first issue, I can add it to the main page and showcase how it should look like. The plan for next month would be to publish it more widely across the internet.

In case you are interested, this is how a newsletter looks like (I omitted the prompts):

Experimenting with Twitter Blue

I started taking Twitter more seriously and started tweeting at least every two days. The following charts show the effects:

There is a clear trend between my follower growth and my tweeting. My goal is to find out if there is any effect by having Twitter Blue, so I paid for the subscription for a month. I will continue tweeting every two days as well and see if there is any difference.

The following three tweets are the most viewed ones:

Updates on SlashDreamer

SlashDreamer is a project I did a few months ago. Initially as proof of concept to see if I can generate images directly via Notion. Published the project on Twitter and some people were interested, so I extend it to a full fledge service.

To my surprise, it still gets regular traffic with users subscribing to the service.

I fixed a few bugs this month (only relevant if you are a user):

The quota was not correctly shown (it was not reset after each month)
Upgrading to a different plan was not reflected in the code. That was fixed, now you get more quota once you upgrade.
Performance improvement (due to Notion API limitation, I can’t generate images immediately, but I found a way to improve the performance nevertheless)

More ads on Reversle

I am not a fan of pages with a lot of ads, but I changed my mind about having ads on my websites. I am OK to put ads to cover my costs and development costs. Furthermore, I added an extra ad to cover any coming costs.

For Reverlse it seems a good pricing model (imho). I plan to spend more time in the coming days to work on Reversle. I have a backlog of requests from users, I haven’t found the time to do so.

Next month, I am trying to add the following features:

Ability to play older puzzles (archive):
- This is one of the most requested features!
More statistics about play count and success rate
- This would be useful for me to decide what features to work on in the future
Add a proper help page with explanation video on how to play
Add a resource section with helpful questions and answers

Personal website

One of my goals is to write more generally. I push myself to publish more online, even something tiny like a TIL (Today I Learned entry).

This month, I published the following articles:

The following chart shows the visitor count. I guess you can easily spot when I published the above articles:

Thank you

Thank you very much for reading this far. As usual, I am very happy for any feedback (via mail `feedback` at my website or @kiru_io on Twitter)