Happy 2021! May all your pharmacy stock pay off and may your hodling enhance your riches!
What a crazy year it was. Covid-19 forced everyone to work from home and online conferencing tools almost brought down the internet… and (spoilers ahead) introduced the mass market to online streaming quiz games.
Last year I started extensive timetracking on anything work related and this year I did the same. Slightly less hobby projects this year, as QuizWitz took a bit of a jump and caused some gear shifting on our side. So only 9 projects this year (excluding the 3 projects I worked on under ‘Work for hire’).
| Project | Hours | Revenue | Hourly |
| Quizkalender | 0,00 | € 73,24 | € 73,24 |
| Work for hire | 1.523,33 | € 102.970,72 | € 67,60 |
| QuizWitz | 748,00 | € 32.958,94 | € 44,06 |
| Dolumar | 4,00 | € 22,56 | € 5,64 |
| Quizfabriek | 218,50 | € 1.000,00 | € 4,58 |
| Photobooth | 53,00 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Eukles | 18,50 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| Administratie | 15,50 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
| CatLab Drinks | 4,50 | € 0,00 | € 0,00 |
I’ve logged a total of 2585,33 hours which amounts to an average of about 53,86 hours a week (at 48 weeks / year, so holidays excluded). A fair bit more than the 44 hours I logged last year.
An overview
Isn’t it great when a project generates revenue without having to work on it? That’s how a silly website as www.quizkalender.com managed to jump to the top of my project list at €73,24 (google ads) revenue for 0 hours of work. That is an infinitive amount of revenue per hour! If only I had spent slightly more time on it…
Secondly, same message as last year: don’t quit your dayjob just yet. Working for the man still pays the bills. When comparing the numbers to last year, I must admit that I’m a little annoyed with myself for trading a 15% price cut for the convenience of working close to home, especially at a time when working from home is the default. No rights to complain ofcourse, but bills were paid 15% faster last year 😉
Thirdly, the big one. QuizWitz. Suddenly teleconferencing became huge and people had to be entertained. I managed to quickly adapt the software to take the streaming delay of YouTube and Twitch into account without affecting the gameplay too much and together with de Quizfabriek we started replaying old live-quizzes on YouTube. A few additional changes soon followed and we fairly quickly gained a bit of an online following.
After testing on a small scale, QuizWitz grabbed the attention of a few bigger players and after some nerve-wracking meetings, tests and experiments we supported a whole series of quizzes at www.huiskamerquiz.be with hosts like (start <namedropping>) Belpop Bonanza (Jan Delvaux & DJ Bobby Ewing), Nerdland (Lieven Scheire & Bart Van Peer), Bahamontes, Sofie Engelen, Xander De Rycke. Not to mention a whole bunch of these livestreams were filmed on the old Studio Mussle location where Mosselen om half twee was recorded for a while. (end </namedropping>)
Meeting your heroes whilst stressing out over the stability of your software and servers: big check! (Having your servers crash on one of these events and working through the night to fix them by next evening: also check.) We’ve also worked with Sitting Bull and Roularta to organise livestream quizzes.
Meanwhile de Quizfabriek started doing their own teambuilding activities. It’s awesome to see that something you helped setting up suddenly kicks into gear and starts accelerating without you pushing it forward.
While the events were ofcourse a strong push for QuizWitz, another thing started happening in april: online sales of the regular platform jumped to heights we had never seen. As soon as the surge started I started concentrating on usability and compatibility of the game and the platform (at this point it was mostly tested on google Chrome only, as this was the platform used at the events). We also wrote a manual on how to use the software in various situations and this seemed to help the sales as well.
QuizWitz made €10.358,82 in work (support at events, excluding extra hands) and €23.600,12 in licenses (including €1.445,01 on Airconsole). Of those licenses, €16.727,17 was made through online sales and €6.872,95 was made through livestream license fees.
As I try to conduct business in an open and transparant fashion (and maybe also because I hope one day an investor will cold call me) I’ve started sharing the QuizWitz key metrics in a publicly available online dashboard. It takes a while to load so be patient.
So yes, QuizWitz took a fairly big part of the year again.
Fourthly Dolumar. Hardly did any work, hardly made any money. Not much to talk about. There’s still a few people playing it, and that games is now 13 years old. Yay me.
Fifthly, we’ve already talked about Quizfabriek in the QuizWitz section. The €1.000,00 revenue I took for licensing is already included in the QuizWitz calculations above (that’s why the total license income doesn’t match the column at the top). While I am taking a little distance from the non-profit organisation, I’m still putting in a quite a few hours 🙂
Technology
And finally, the fun (open source) projects. The CatLab Photobooth project was a rather silly attempt to combine the NFC scanners (that we use at de Quizfabriek for digital drink vouchers) with a remote controller DSLR camera to generate a photobooth that was aware of who it was taking a picture of.
We’ve used it for the Harry Potter quiz to make sure we had a picture of each individual quiz team. It then uploads these pictures to an Amazon S3 bucket and we then used those to generate a little memento of the quiz and mail it to the players. The photobooth project only took care of taking and uploading the pictures, the rest was done by Mathias (from de Quizfabriek) in Python.
I also spent some time on Eukles, a project that currently doesn’t do much more than gathering events from various websites, send emails and send Slack notifications. But hey, at least QuizWitz users now finally receive a receipt when making a purchase.
The CatLab Drinks project also need(ed/s) some fixes. We’ve used it extensively (and by third party bar people) on the Harry Potter quiz and it is … almost stable. We still have some trouble with people moving the card away from the scanner too soon … but it is mostly safe.
Oh, and Tine and I bought a house.
Next up
Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve started talking to a few people on how to keep the QuizWitz ball roling. I poured a lot of hours in the project again and every release it feels slightly more production ready. Getting the damn thing to the market keeps being the real problem and I’m realising it’s not one I can fix alone. The end of the covid crisis will likely result in a drop of the salesnumbers as well, so getting some kind of marketing ball rolling will likely be very important.
I should probably look into getting that Work for hire average back to 2019 level. Even though I’m quite happy with the projects I’m doing at the moment, knowing that there are more lucrative deals out there sometimes stings a bit.
And, as soon as these vaccines are finally rolled out globaly, go on a long holiday and enjoy life a little more. That should probably be a little higher on this list 🙂
Thanks for reading and take care! See you in 12 months.