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January 2018 Income Report: Problems With Crypto Wallet, Not Selling Horse 🐎 Website, So Long Kickfurther

Woohoo, this is the first report for the year 2018! Time flies fast! It feels like 2017 ended just yesterday… however, we are already in the first week of February 2018. It’s the first Monday of a new month and it means this is the time for a new income report!

In this blog, I write about what I am doing to create various income streams that come from online endeavors.

The monthly income reports detail my results. Why am I sharing my income publicly? I hope to gain trustworthiness with you and to keep some degree of accountability for myself.

The reports also motivate me.

I tend to forget my small achievements… and posts like this one won’t let me do it 🙂 Apart from that, they help me to remember how much I have already invested. It’s a motivation to push even harder!

Read my income report #29 to find out what happened in January 2018.

What happened in January

January was quite an eventful and stressful month. So many things happened that I feel it has been not one month but three or four! These snowy 31 days quite tested my mind for its ability to stay sane and be able to coop with unexpected difficulties. I cannot say it was the worst month ever… but it was stressful.

Let’s take a closer look 👀

Problems with my Jaxx wallet (cryptocurrency storage)

As you know already, I bought some ethers a while ago.

In January, I decided to check my balance. I re-initialized the Jaxx wallet on my smartphone and… and did not see the number I expected to see. It was almost zero 😱😱😱 just a few thousandths of ether left and that’s it. The whole balance was gone 😨

My heart sunk and tears appeared in my eyes.

“Shit! Somebody stole my Ethereum!” I exclaimed in a trembled voice.

“What? Let me see… Nah, that’s a bug. The same I had the last time,” Sam replied with a voice that was meant to be reassuring but it was not. “What did we do the last time?”

“We installed a Chrome plugin with Jaxx wallet and you saw your balance there. let’s check!”

However, the Jaxx plugin showed the same minuscule balance. I tried to clean cache, to reinitialize the wallet again and again… nothing helped.

Shooooot.

In addition, the last transaction that transferred my whole balance to some address looked very suspicious… I do not remember seeing it the last time I checked my wallet… Maybe this is the trace of the hackers who stole my ethers? It could be… but how come it was dated March 2017? Did the hacker hack the date, too??? That’s not possible… Also, last time I checked my wallet was in December 2017, after the date, and the balance was there.

Succumbing to my panic, Sam checked his wallet and it turned out he also had a very low balance. “This does look like that bug. And this ‘suspicious’ transaction, it was there before,” he said. His voice sounded more confident that 10 min ago when I got my unpleasant discovery.

Ok, maybe it is a bug… But what to do?

I did the only thing I could and filed a support ticket to Decentral Inc., the company that developed the wallet. My heart was still pumping like crazy… ok, maybe it is a bug but maybe not? And how did it happen?

Sam looked calm but he clearly was more upset than he let show. He started frantically googling the issue. I decided to take a look at the support docs for Jaxx. And there, I found some promising but weird info…

Long story short: We found a way to restore the balance. It took a lot of research, reading, and many carefully prepared transactions. In the process, I learned a lot of things about blockchains and almost remembered my wallet address by heart.

I will write a separate post about the issue and how I got out of it. Stay tuned! 😉

Not selling Horse 🐎 Website + new money transfer service

While the end of the month was all about Jaxx wallet issues, the first days of January were tainted with a different trouble: The sale of Horse 🐎 Website failed. The reason was that the website traffic seemed to be in decline for the last 6 months or so. After getting the deposit, I gave the buyer access to the stats and he firmly said no.

I understand him. Personally, I would not buy such a website myself.

No complaints.

Still, on the emotional level, I got a hit… Though it does not have much to do with his decision and it’s more about my reaction to the fact that things did not go my way (I am a bit of a stubborn control freak hehehe). I had to remind myself many times that I was not sure if I wanted to sell the website in the first place. Let’s pretend I never wanted to sell it 🙂

This was also a wake-up call for me. I need to rescue the slowly tanking website and it was due already a few months ago. More work… and more learning. I hope to be able to make a case study out of this process and present it on the blog.

This was also a good opportunity for learning more about a new money transfer service.

The potential buyer had to send me the deposit and since he lives in a different country on a different continent, using a bank transfer would be long, tedious and probably not very secure. Using OFX was not an option either since they require some offline prep steps – remember we were doing it while the Christmas / New Year holidays were in a full swing. So, I decided to try a new service called transferwise.com. The experience was good and I cannot wait to share it with you.

I plan to write a big review post comparing transferwise.com with OFX Canada and some third one I am trying right now for my personal stuff. Stay tuned!

So long Kickfurther!

But not everything was stressful and gloomy in January. Finally, I did some very concrete steps to finish my journey with Kickfurther (KF) and it makes me sooooo happy 😀 😀 😀

I have been disappointed with the platform for a long while. People not keeping their promises, backing orders failing, company heads vanishing, companies filing bankruptcy ➡️ as a result, money losses.  When a few companies that I successfully backed earlier failed to deliver (some filed bankruptcy, others simply ran), I decided that that was enough! it was time to pull the plug! In January, I finally did it.

I requested the money that was sitting in my KF account to be transferred to my US bank account. I am not a US citizen and I could not use the KF built-in system to register my bank to do direct deposits (I needed an SSN). So, KF suggested I request an e-check. Usually, e-checks come with a hefty fee of $25; however, in my case, they waived it. I only paid the regular withdraw commission that was $38-something; you will see it in my expenses.

I do not add the amount I withdrew ($864) to the revenue. This is because I already included my Kickfurther income in my past revenue numbers when the pay-offs actually were paid.

For now, I am not closing my account yet. There are still a few consignments that have a pending status. Most likely, I will need to do a withdrawn at least one more time.

For example, in January, I got a bit of money coming in. It was a bonus payout from DooKashi Second Round (they makes odor elimination product that can be used in animal habitats). After the coop completed, the KF system showed they still owned almost a dollar per backer so it was a payment to address this balance.

Writing this section for January feels so much better than for the previous months 🙂 I am finally getting rid of the KF burden!

Writer slamming a door in my face

After the great writer I found in December 2017 quit (she found a new offline job), I started looking for new writers. I still use Upwork because of its flexibility and ease of hiring/firing. However, it is hard to find decent not-super-expensive freelancers.

First, I got a bad hire and fired her after 2nd article.

Then, I got a good candidate… only to see her storming out of the virtual door of my project 3 tasks later. There were no signs of a possible crisis going under the cover. She did a test article well and I hired her. Then she did the 2nd task without any problems… But after I assigned her the task #3, she exploded 🤯

I have to say it’s the longest, most complex I’ve ever received and I’ve been working on Upwork as a top freelancer for 6 years.

Wow.

When she sent the message, I was in a meeting at my day job with a laptop open in front of me. I keep my personal Gmail account open and her message came as an email popup. I saw it and my heart sank. I wanted to do something immediately but I was at work at a meeting and it would be very unethical to ignore it and work on my personal project…

I was sitting there and smiling (thank god I did not need to present anything or talk) and watching more messages coming from her.

She ranted about me and my tasks for a while… and then she canceled the job. I did not know freelancers could close the job too. I saw the cancellation email… shi…t… Really? She was a good writer and maybe I could still do something? After my meeting got finally over, I wrote her “Can I change your decision somehow?”

I never received a reply.

Hacked websites with garbage PNG links

While researching one of Horse 🐎 Website competitors, I noticed it had a lot of weird backlinks that were coming from legitimate websites. These pages had no text but tons and tons of png files that had nothing in common with the website topic. First, I thought these were PBNs in disguise. But then I looked closer to the “clean” part of the sites and realized that they were probably hacked…

Turns out it seems to be indeed a new hacking trend. Shortly after my discovery, I saw this blog post on thesempost.com: How Hackers are Hiding Content & Links via PNG Files. Looks like these sites fell victims of a similar attack. After reading this, I hurriedly checked all my websites (well most of it – I have soo many ehehe) and it seems we are all clean.

I plan to contact the owners of the hacked sites I found and tell them about it.

Be vigilant guys! Check your websites! Maybe you have also become a link farm in disguise.

Guest posting for Elephant 🐘 Website

Guest posting has been in full swing but not very fruitful. During the most of January, I did not get leads but in the last few days, I got 4 leads and closed 1. Not bad for a whole month of nothing. Now I need to close these leads ASAP and for that, I need to hire a new writer.

As I hoped in December 2017, MailShake indeed makes it easier to send and track cold emails. I am happy I got it.

Personal Life

In January, we had funny weather. The temperature was swinging between -15C (5F) to +5C (41F). Sometimes, it felt like winter, sometimes like spring. It was snowing and raining…

…and it all ended up with a freezing rain #notmyfavoriteweather

My elder cat got problems with her teeth (again 🙁 ) and we had to make her undergo a surgery (it’s the second one already). Before and after the surgery I was giving her painkillers and she got high on it 😸 here’s my stoned kitty:

Goofing around on Sunday while Sam works hard 🙂 he got a tight deadline at work and had to work non-stop including weekends.

And in the end, a photo of one of my lunches at the day job: A mix of the best of French and English cuisines! 😋😋😋

 

Ok, now let’s go back to the business!

Expenses

In January, I again had high expenses. My VA was working hard and logged 28 hours total. She’s pretty good, I am happy to have her. As of writers, I did not get a stable one and had to spend some money on test articles.

Income

Income was pretty low. The non-refundable deposit I got for providing the access to Horse 🐎 Website sweetened it up a bit.

Totals

Here are my totals for January 2018.

Total income $842.20 minus total expenses $531.89 makes a net profit of $310.31.

Here is the chart with my revenue vs expenses history for the last 13 months. I changed the chart timeline from 12 months to 13 in order to show you how the current month performed compared to the last year.

February 2018 Plans

In February 2018, guest posting will be my focus #1. I got a good system in place and can start making it more and more efficient.

Rescuing Horse 🐎 Website will be the focus #2. With my new VA, it seems I am getting an extra free time that can be spent in this area. I hope it will be a good learning experience and more content for my blog.

Speaking of the blog, I have at least 3 topics in mind to write about. I plan to write about problems I had with Jaxx wallet (nerve wrecking stuff!) and a comparison of three money transfer services. The third topic is a secret for now 😉

Since I am not sure about my posting schedule… you should stay tuned by subscribing to my emails!

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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do!