Rishi's Newsletter: Pika at $410 MRR, Light bulb environment UI, and poetry by Ahmad Faraz

Jul 27, 2022

Hi 👋, this is Rishi! This newsletter is about updates on my side-projects, experiments and new discoveries in tech, design, apps and memes space.

Also, I would like thank you and 15 new amazing people for subscribing to this newsletter since the last issue.

Side Project Updates

Stats for Pika.style:

MRR: $410(up from last month’s $250)
Page views: 27K(down from 91K in last month)
Churns: record breaking 😅

I was aiming to cross $500 MRR this month and worked towards it by sending cold emails and what not, but it didn’t work 😅. This month has seen a lot of churns too, otherwise it would’ve cross 500 mark. Currently my only churn recovery technique is to send emails to users(and how do you even deal with “I don’t need the product anymore” reason).

Plans for this month:

Revamp some pages for improving conversions
Learn and implement techniques to reduce churns
Write guides on how to use app features
Bug fixes, add more features requested by users
From last month: setup roadmap/changelog channel

Didn’t do much with Kizie.co except for disabling new sign-ups. Kizie is seeing 5 to 15 signups on average every day, but it’s not converting much. I’m keen to start rewriting Kizie soon, this time with plans also to monetise it and make it second product to contribute to my SaaS revenue.

Experiments

A lot of my time was going into writing code, so one weekend I took a break to do some design stuff in Figma and created this random graphic about "fixing circles":

I had also experimented with toast UI and interactive toasts for Pika, and also made it live.

Catch the chameleon

A video with amazing transitions.

Dmitry Volny 🇺🇦🕊 @VolnyPro

Catch the Chameleon

Light bulb environment

Fun interaction UI created by Cristi

Cristi @cristicrtu

Light bulb reading environment; don't strain your eyes!

Hidden macOS app

A free app for macOS to let you hide icons in menu bar.

hidden: An ultra-light MacOS utility that helps hide menu bar icons — github.com An ultra-light MacOS utility that helps hide menu bar icons - GitHub - dwarvesf/hidden: An ultra-light MacOS utility that helps hide menu bar icons

Steve Jobs

I admire Jobs’s vision. You have to be very talented to foresee the future and work towards it. Something to aspire for.

Tim Cook @tim_cook

Today, Steve was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. He was a visionary who challenged us to see the world not for what it is, but for what it could be. We cherish his memory and we’ll continue building on his legacy.

A black and white photo of Steve Jobs glancing upward with a wide smile.

Lines by Ahmad Faraz

I like reading poetry, and I’m currently reading “Best of Ahmad Faraz” by Kuldip Salil. Faraz is is also one of my favourite poets, he’s a legend for his way of depicting complex expressions into simple yet beautiful writing. Sharing these beautiful lines by him which I read multiple times.