In keeping up with my monthly progress reports, here’s an overview of what went down in March. (See also: January, February)

Preceden

One of my goals in March was to spend more time working on Preceden. I normally devote most of my free time to jMockups, but am trying to improve how I balance the two, given that Preceden actually turns a profit. I spent about 15% of my 120 hours online working on Preceden during March (up from about 5%), which is a big step in the right direction.

Preceden had 16,845 visitors during March (including embedded timelines) that generated 78,925 pageviews. There were 35 upgrades to the pro account, which generated $895 in revenue (up from $522 in January and $580 in February). However, I spent $540 in order acquiring 11 of those customers while experimenting with Google AdWords. After subtracting the hosting fees and AdWords expenses, I wound up with a profit of about $285.

While I’m disappointed that AdWords did not yield a positive ROI, I’m glad I took the time to do it. I’ve had it in my head that AdWords would be an easy road to four figure profits and as long as I believed that, I wasn’t terribly motivated to work on it (sounds stupid, I know). With the knowledge that it won’t be as easy as I once believed, I’m forced to get back into the game.

jMockups

While I continue to make a lot of good progress with jMockups, traction remains elusive. The trough of sorrow is aptly named. :)

jMockups had 9,914 visitors during March that generated 19,922 pageviews. 6,812 of those visitors were a result of posting about the launch of the new specifications tool on HackerNews.

Paid signups skyrocketed from 1 to 2 during March, yielding $38 in revenue. Subtract about $200 in monthly expenses, and I’m still out a bit each month.

On a much more positive note, I received an acquisition offer for jMockups towards the end of the month. The company a good fit, but I think I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with jMockups and it would therefore be a huge mistake to sell right now, regardless of the price. Plus, if I were to sell it, I’d start building something new almost immediately, so what would be the point of moving on as long as I’m still passionate about it?

Blog Posts

On the jMockups Blog:

The New jMockups Mockup Editor (Mar 4)

Improving the Website to Mockup Converter (Mar 8)

Share Your Website Design to Help Others Get Started with Theirs (Mar 11)

jMockups Introduces Mockup Templates to Make Web Design Easier (Mar 12)

jMockups Can Now Automatically Create Detailed Specs of Your website Mockups (Mar 20)

The Customers Have Spoken: We Want to Export Our Mockups to HTML/CSS (Mar 21)

Baby Steps Towards Mockup to HTML (Mar 28)

New Default Design for jMockups Image Elements (Mar 29)

Ajaxified Mockup Deletion (Mar 30)

On this blog:

February in Review: Life Tracking, Major jMockups Updates, and Preceden’s Best Month Yet (Mar 4)

How to Calculate Your AdWords ROI for a Freemium, One Time Purchase Web App (Mar 5)

AdWords: Week 1 Results (Mar 13)

A/B Testing Preceden’s Homepage – Round 1: 37% Improvement (Mar 13)

Preceden’s 15 Days @ $30/day AdWords Results (Mar 29)

The signal-to-noise ratio on some of these is a lower than I’d like, but these hey-here’s-what-I’m-doing posts are usually pretty quick to write and at least they get something out there (a strategy I’d recommend to anyone who wants to blog but doesn’t know what to write about).

Also, in an effort to get more involved in the local startup scene, I’ve started attending the monthly Lean Startup Circle Boston and Boston BizSpark meetups. If you attend either, drop me a note so we can hook up at the meeting.

Onward.