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Build in public - July 2022 - Report

Build in public report. I share the results of my work on Zillow Data Exporter and the progress made during the month of July 2022.
Published onJul 31, 2022
YH
Yann Hulot
Image of a notebook with a pen next to it

Image of a blank notebook with a pen.

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Google developer console
  3. Plausible
  4. Chrome Web store
  5. Reaching ramen profitability
  6. What's next?

Introduction

Zillow Data Exporter is a browser extension that allows you to export data from Zillow.

It's a tool that I've been using for a while and I've been wanting to share it with the world. I've been working on it for a little while and I'm happy to share the progress with you.

In this report, I'll go over the progress made in July 2022 and analyze a few key metrics that I keep track of.

Google developer console

The Google developer console is a tool that is used to analyze how often does zillowdataexporter.com's links show up in the Google search results.

Image of the Google developer console

Screenshot of the Google developer console.

From the screenshot, we learn that zillowdataexporter.com showed up 31 times in Google's search results. Although it's not a lot, it's a good start.

We can also see that nobody actually clicked on the links, which is a bit disappointing but I'm not too worried about it.

SEO is a long-term game and I'm happy to see that the website is showing up in the search results at all to be honest.

Hopefully, I'll be able to improve the SEO in the future.

Plausible

Plausible is a tool that I use to track the number of visitors to zillowdataexporter.com. It is very useful because it's privacy-friendly and does not track users across the web.

It's not free but it's very cheap and it's worth it. I can recommend it to anyone who wants to track the number of visitors to their website while at the same time respecting their users' privacy.

Image of the Plausible dashboard

Screenshot of Plausible dashboard.

From the screenshot, we can see that there were 16 unique visitors on zillowdataexporter.com in July 2022.

NOTE: I purposely did not include visitors from Stockholm because this is where I am located and I don't want to count myself in the statistics. I also do not include any traffic coming from Twitter as this traffic is not what I am interested in. Finally I also do not count the users landing on the install page.

Chrome Web store

Image of the Chrome Web store

Screenshot of the Chrome web store

In July 2022, there was only 1 user who installed the extension and it was probably me. It is not a surprise because I've been working on the extension for a while and I've been testing it on my own computer.

I am happy to see that the extension is finally available on the Chrome Web store and I hope that more people will install it in the future.

Reaching ramen profitability

According to the Four Week MBA website, Ramen profitability can be defined as follows:

A startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000 a month, reaches ramen profitability because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders that can live on practically nothing.

Revenues of $3000 a month do not mean the company has succeeded. But it does share something with the one that's profitable in the traditional way: they don't need to raise money to survive.

The goal of Zillow Data Exporter is to reach ramen profitability as soon as possible. I understand that to some people, asking users to pay for a service is not something that comes naturally.

Unfortunately, keeping up with the changes on Zillow is a full time job. To keep delivering value to my users, I need to spend a lot of time on the development of Zillow Data Exporter.

In my case what is my ramen profitability?

If I add my rent, food and utilities, I would need to generate USD $3000 per month to reach ramen profitability.

How does it work in practice?

A competitor extension is charging USD $30/month to export unlimited listings from Zillow.

If I were to charge the same amount per month, I would be able to reach ramen profitability if I had 100 paying users. If we assume that only 20% of the total number of users using Zillow Data Exporter are paid users, then the extension will need to have around 500 active users.

If I am optimistic, I could gain 10 users (paid and unpaid) per week to reach ramen profitability within 12 months.

Obviously, this is not ideal. To speed up growth, I am planning to increase the marketing outreach and start advertising on various channels.

What's next?

The plan is simple but not easy:

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