I cut off part of my finger

So, there I was, remodeling my basement, cutting drywall, when my razor knife slipped. One second, I’m measuring twice; the next, I’m down a piece of my finger.

Next, you know I’m running around the house screaming. My wife, who was at a work meeting, came out to yell at me for yelling, and then she realized what was going on.

The combination of adrenalin and the fact that I cut so deep the nerves were gone made the finger more tingly than painful. It was a weird experience.

Spoiler: I went to the emergency room, but they couldn’t reattach it.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, it got me thinking about the parallels between that slip-up and my attempts to make money from websites, apps, and social media.

Learning to Cut Things Off

One thing I often struggle with is the sunk cost fallacy. Basically, I’ve had projects that I invested so much time into that it was tough for me to recognize that it was time to give up.

Often, we need to just “cut off” a project to purge it from our brains and open the thought cycles for other ideas.

One project I was committed to that I could not make work was a programmatic site in the keto diet space. It took me far longer to let it go than it should have.

Had I still been focusing on that, I might not have seen the opportunity to create my AI content generator.

My Newest Project: Facebook Page Scheduler

My newest project is a scheduler for Facebook pages. It’s free, and it allows you to create text, link, image, native FB text on background color, and post the first comment.

The first comment part was the main reason I created it. It takes too many steps for me to do it in Facebook’s business manager. Some tools charge a premium for this type of functionality.

I’ll keep it free for now, but I may try to monetize it if it picks up any traction, but that’s TBD. The ideas that come to mind are:

• Display ads

• Driving affiliate offers

• Creating a full-fledged social media scheduling tool

• Create a Facebook AI content generator (or adding it to Content Goblin)

My Free Trial Experiment Goes Wrong

About a month ago, I offered a free Content Goblin trial to new users. Users who signed up were given 200 free credits to try the tool.

At first, it seemed like a massive success. Then, all of a sudden, I got an enormous spike in paid sign-ups. Almost $8,000 worth in 1 day! We average between $200 and $300 daily, meaning this was a significant anomaly.

It also turns out that someone signed up for my affiliate network and then sent through almost $10k worth of fraud charges. I ended up having to refund all the charges. Then, the scammer had the nerve to ask me to pay them after I banned their affiliate account.

After solving that issue, I noticed we have several thousand new free trial accounts using fake email addresses.

I spent some time fighting this using various tactics, but I was still getting hit with about 60 scammer accounts per day.

I finally decided that the effort to fight the abuse was not worth the reward. I had to “cut off” the free trial program.

Unfortunately, this means people genuinely interested in trying the app can no longer do it for free, but it’s my only solution.

I also had to do a mass ban on all free trial accounts to prevent these people from draining thousands of dollars in AI credits.

Running a software business has been interesting, to say the least.

-John

P.S. It’s hard for me to type without my left pointer finger 😅