Happy 2022! May the omikron-variant (and the corona-virus in general) die a quick death. No other wishes… just that.
As I’ve been tracking my worky-worky time for the last two years, I continued doing that in 2021. This years report is probably less interesting than previous years, but I’m writing it for good measure.
So first, the data:
| Project | Hours | Revenue | Hourly |
| Work for hire | 1563.99 | 121,070.39 | 77.41 |
| QuizWitz | 546.9 | 18,483.01 | 33.80 |
| Quizfabriek | 247.25 | 3,479.90 | 14.07 |
| Dolumar | 6 | 27.77 | 4.63 |
| Papyri | 58.5 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Quizproject X | 57 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Administratie | 15.5 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Varia | 7 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Eukles | 2.5 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
I’ve logged a total of 2504,64 hours which amount to an average of about 52,18 hours a week (at 48 weeks / year, so holidays excluded). This is about the same as last year.
An overview
Work for hire
Work for hire still is the big one. I’ve been lucky to be working on an interesting and challenging project for the last two years. While in previous years I sometimes saw these clients jobs as a necessary evil in order to reach true goals, this has lately shifted somewhat. These days I describe my other projects as ‘hobbies’, as they never seem to get out of that stage anyway. Not meant to be bitter, but labeling them as hobbies gives me more peace of mind.
QuizWitz
Revenue from QuizWitz is down 35% since last year, and this while I’ve spend a considerable amount of money and time in improving the communication around our product. Of the €21.962,91 generated revenue (note that I include the Quizfabriek ‘revenue‘ in here as well), only €9.950 came from the online platform (was €16.727 last year). The rest came from support at events etc.
At the same time I’ve spend about €14.500 on various freelancers to improve the communication and marketing around our product, so the bottom line is that QuizWitz resulted in a net revenue of about €7000 in 2021. Whether these investments in clearer communication will result in continueing return remains to be seen.
Quizfabriek
This number is a bit unreliable as revenue from this non-profit is actually license fees for using QuizWitz at their events. De Quizfabriek has been doing pretty well the last two years and Wietse and Mathias managed to setup a pretty decent B2B sidetrack.
The tracked hours here are mostly spent on Quizfabrieks B2C events and thus aren’t really related to the revenue that is noted here.
Other projects
Not much to say about these. There are a few projects that just require maintenace to keep online but don’t really return any revenue. Sane people would probably take them offline, but I feel they still have some value.
- Dolumar is a browser based game I made when I was studying. There is one guy still playing it every day. This makes me very proud.
- Papyri is a project in the document management space that I’m still working on as a side-hustle.
- Eukles still handles all outgoing mails, slack notifications and other messages that are sent out by QuizWitz and some other projects.
One day these projects will probably suddenly appear under an open source license.
Technology
Not that much really. I guess I could label this year as ‘maintenance of older projects’.
- In accordance to our privacy policy I started automatically removing inactive user data from our servers, which resulted in some interesting edge cases in my SSO system and a huge amount of bounced emails (not doing that again!)
- I’ve automated the whole invoice flow for QuizWitz so that professional users can now request invoices without me having to hack away at the payment gateway.
- Tired of manually switching scenes during livestreams, I’ve hacked together a control panel for our Atem mini that listens for midi-notes from our QuizWitz midi generator (that we already used for controlling the light fixtures in the venue over DMX) and switches between game view and camera view at appropriate events.
- For a Quizfabriek quiz I’ve implemented a greenscreen imagick script in our Photobooth. Nothing fancy, but the end result was pretty neat.
Next up
While in 2021 I’ve spend quite some effort in re-launching QuizWitz, I feel like I’m finally done with that. Not that I will drop the project completly, there’s still an amazing bunch of people who still regularly use our software. But I’m done with trying to push to the masses. I don’t have the skills to do that, so I better just focus on what I can do: try to make sure that our existing users have the best experience possible (without hurting myself too much).
My main focus for 2022 is going to be the project I’m working on for hire. Sure, there will be QuizWitz events and other projects that just suddenly turn up, but I don’t really feel like prioritizing those anymore.
I guess I’m getting old.