In this video and blog post, we're going to dig deep into the numbers, the heart and soul of my business.
We'll uncover how many YouTube videos I've created, the number of Instagram posts I've shared, the revenue I've generated, and, most importantly, how much I've been able to pay myself in the third quarter of this year.
This is the quarter when I opened a membership, had my vacation, designed a new calendar including 12 amigurumi patterns as well as hosted an amigurumi design contest. A lot has shaped this quarter and I’m so excited to dig into it with you!
Happy reading (and watching)!
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO!
CONTENT JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
Youtube: 12 videos
Live streams and webinars: 9
Blog posts: 3
Instagram feed posts: 27
Short video content (reels): 18
Except for the content mentioned above, I also share behind-the-scenes from my business almost daily on my Instagram stories. I also post regularly in my Facebook group, Facebook page, and on the YouTube community tab.
Between July and September (the third quartal) I released 0 new patterns in the webshop, but designed 14. 11 of these patterns are designed for the Amigurumi Calendar 2024. The calendar is space-themed and available in the webshop.
Emerald the Dragon was the mystery amigurumi we crocheted together inside the Happy Amigurumi Club in July. I also released an exclusive banana hat pattern for Happy the Monkey that was released inside the club.
The graph above illustrates where most of my customers come from. The 3 biggest chunks are USA, and Europe (including Sweden and Finland). I sell mainly patterns in English but occasionally I also translate them into Swedish. During Q4 I'm gonna start a big project and translate my patterns into Finnish, starting with my bestsellers.
FOLLOWERS JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
Instagram: +100
Email: +218
Facebook page: +5
Fb group: -5
Pinterest total w/m: 246 160
Youtube: +249
I take these numbers with a grain of salt because I know that these numbers don't determine if a business is successful or not, but I still like to track them just to see that they are going up and not down. This quarter everything seems to have grown, which is a positive turn.
WEBSITE VISITORS JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
I've started tracking my website visitors again after a break due to the new Google Analytics update. It was really fun to dig into these numbers and see a steady growth of people visiting my website. Most visitors come from finding my free strawberry pattern on Pinterest but I also get a decent amount of people visiting my website from Instagram, Ravelry, and Facebook.
SALES JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
Crochet along tickets: 0
Yarn kits: 92
Crochet patterns: 49
Amigurumi Calendar 2023 + 2024: 68
Courses / workshops: 2
Membership sales: 176
Sales have definitely picked up this quarter compared to quarter 2 which was very slow.
In August a local museum reached out to me and asked if I would like to make a yarn kit for them. I happily accepted the challenge and realized that if one museum is interested in yarn kits maybe more would be, so I sent out emails to a couple of more museums and they all said yes. So far I've sold 80 yarn kits to 4 different museums. I hope that selling yarn kits B2B could be a new revenue stream for my business.
Happy Amigurumi Club is continuing to grow and bringing in more money and I'm so excited to see how the club is growing and evolving. This is also one of the income streams that I put most of my time into.
REVENUE JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
The revenue is a mix of sales of yarn kits, yarn, crochet patterns, amigurumi calendars, YouTube adds, and membership sales.
Remember! This is not my salary. Some of it goes to paying taxes (~24%) and other costs like websites, domains, editing programs, bookkeeping, transaction fees, shipping, and so on.
SALARY JULY-SEPTEMBER 2023
1400€ (200€ + 500€ + 700€)
My goal this Q3 is to pay myself 500€ per month. My income support ended in August so I will eventually need to start paying myself more to be able to pay for rent and food but right now most of my profit goes to buying inventory for the Craft and Design market in Tampere in November.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!
I hope this will give you some courage or inspiration if you've been thinking about starting a creative business of your own. I'm cheering you on wherever you are! Thank you for reading! ❤
