2024 income report - I earned five-figures LESS than last year 📉

what you're going to see in these numbers today friends is the financial cost of burnout I've been producing an income report for 7 years now only a couple years on YouTube but more than that over my blog and this is the first year that I am reporting a decrease on the previous year's income and actually when it comes to my content creator business I'm reporting on the lowest level of income since I first started writing these reports I won't go into too much detail about bout in this video here cuz I've made two other videos on it that you can go watch and if you'd like to hear more I've had to scale way back on running my business over the last year as I've dealt with burnout been trying to recover and as you're going to see as a result of that my income streams have taken quite a hit so let's get into it

and you know what we're going to rip the Band-Aid off and start with my content category of income which is where I saw the biggest losses in the past year I earned £ 6,158 from content and that is a 90% decrease on the income that I earned in this category compared to last year around half of this income came from my channel sponsorship that I had with figma and then a further like 38 is% came from AdSense from ads on YouTube videos 7% was from affiliate commissions a very small amount just £438 and then an even smaller percentage from content sponsorships and this actually just represents one sponsorship that I got on my newsletter in the past year I have been saying for years in these reports that I need to decrease the Reliance that my business has on content income and this is why when I'm not making content I can't charge for a channel sponsorship I can't take on like new video sponsors and even though I have a backlog of videos off on my channel that are like Evergreen and people you know um are still watching them all the time my AdSense income decreased a lot too because when you're not uploading as much YouTube just doesn't prioritize you in the algorithm and of course with affiliate commissions if I'm not talking about the tools that I use to do my work in my content then that's less chance to like share my links out there for other folks to maybe try them out this is just wild to me the fact that last year I was earning an extra life £1,000 through making content and now it's down to like a little over 6,000 overall content made up about 55% of my business income for the year and that is more like the percentage when we think about the income stream split that I was hoping to reach with content but I really wanted to reach it by increasing the other income streams not just like suddenly losing all this content inome let's move on to some slightly more positive news in my products and services income category now this category saw a 61% increase on the previous year's earnings which I am very proud of but I will say that the

majority of the like work and effort that went into that increase did happen before I accepted that I was in bone out and kind of put a pause on things in total I earned 4,845 in this category and this is a category I have been building up very intentionally trying to add like one new product or service each year we'll start with what made it the smallest chunk of this category though which was font sales my font grayscale which I launched I can't remember when 2020 I believe so you know it's around 4 years old now it only bought in £314 this year but that's okay I haven't done a whole lot of promoting of it but I still am really proud of that font and think it's great and it's nice to see like you know sales trickle in every now and then so you can check it out if you're interested next is my Vector pack called scribbles this is something that I sell through the figma community and it earned me around £363 this year which I'm really excited about for a product that only costs like $5 for people to buy we'll skip this next one actually for a second just go to mentoring which earned me £ 622 quite a large decrease in this category but I'm not surprised cuz I only took mentoring calls for around 3 months of the financial year that I'm reporting on I still haven't started them back up again and quite honestly I don't know when I will I'm sure I will at some point but like that might be a few years away I'm finding that because I now lead a team of five people and I'm on one-on-one calls and like mentoring my team every single week I just haven't had the energy to put into offering this as a service again but moving on to the new product that I added to my business in the past year and that is my crafting a personal brand Workshop I really enjoy speaking at conferences hosting workshops like running trainings for people helping them have that aha moment where they learn something and honestly they're like invitations to speak at events ones that actually like pay well fit with my schedule Etc there've been few and far between the past few years and so I decided I was going to host my own event I have always been a big believer in the power of personal branding it's gotten me really far in my career and with the state of the tech industry and job hunting Etc I knew that my approach to personal branding if I put it into a framework that people can follow it could really help folks stand out in their job hunting or maybe if they're trying to like kick off a freelancing career and so I created the crafting and personal brand Workshop this ran in August and I sold tickets to it for $39 each although I did do a early bird uh discount as well but all in all the live event earned me £ 3,061 Which is far more than the biggest like speaking fee I've ever been paid I think the most that to speak at a conference is like $1,500 and so I'm really proud that this bit paid off it was obviously a lot more work to sell tickets myself and like you know do the marketing for the event myself but I got really great feedback from folks who are on the live stream and I decided to sell the recording of the live stream two folks as well along with access to the workbook that I put together to go through the framework and so um I've also earned this is what this one is here 10% of the products category came from on demand Workshop sales and that earned me about £485 I would really like to run this Workshop live again I don't know if that's something that I'm going to have the energy to do by the end of the year or maybe it'll be something that I do at the start of the Year sort of like a new year type thing but if you're interested and you need some personal brand training now you can check out the on demand Workshop Linked In the description and I'm also including for anyone who buys the on demand Workshop like free access to the next live event that I put on as well so just saying speaking of this workshop and honestly I wasn't sure if I was going to address this in this video because I mean technically it was it's a zero when it comes to an income stream I did try to host a live like inperson version of this Workshop in ockland my friend Ellen has an amazing content Studio I thought it'd be so fun to like put together an event there uh in April when I was there visiting my family sad I underestimated how difficult it would be to sell tickets that cost a couple hundred New Zealand dollars to kiwis about the personal brand I don't know um I definitely could have put more effort into the marketing and I reached this point during the promotion period maybe some of you even heard me talk about it where I was like okay I either need to double down or say no to this for now and given my energy levels and the burnout I decided I'd say no to it for now so I refunded the like two people who had bought tickets um and I moved on and if you want to know more about that we did record an episode on the design Life podcast about this so I'll leave that linked but we're going to move on now cuz this is a income stream video and not a things that didn't earn me income video so let's go on to the

membership income category this one smallest it's ever been I think a 57% decrease bringing in just £198 my share of the design life patreon bought on £81 and then a YouTube channel membership brought in £116 thank you to anyone who is still a YouTube channel member despite me not putting up many videos I seriously like no hard feelings if you want to cancel for now and maybe come back when I'm actually doing more live streaming and things again but I do really appreciate your support for the months that you have given it fem and I really need to do something about design life income cuz we really need that podcast to like pay for itself we're starting to think about sponsors for that show as the best way to go about doing that though rather than the patreon so if anyone watching by any chance would be interested in sponsoring design life it's one of the like oldest ongoing podcasts about design hosted by two women so you know hit me up okay let's go back to Good

News again and talk about design income so the income in this category comes solely from my work as creative director at convert kit soon to be kit maybe even we're called kit by the time I upload this video and overall in this category I earned 83,500 and I'm well aware that this is a lot of money and this level of income is why I can like smile my way through talking about all the decreases and losses that I've experienced in my business over the past year due to burnout because I have never had to rely on that money for paying my bills like my job as creative director more than covers it I am fine that's not to say that it is not very depressing and honestly a little embarrassing to go from having a you know content creation side business that earns I think it was like nearly £65,000 last year to earning like around 11,000 this year that is a big loss and that's on burnout it's also on me for not having set up a sustainable business where I still get paid even if I'm not producing content but yeah hindsight is 2020 um I wish I'd taken my own advice sooner and uh this is a hard lesson to learn but I also think about what earning that £65,000 last year cost me you know it cost me a lot of my peace energy and I just couldn't keep it up you know anyway let's get back to the details of this design income category around 89% % of this came from just my regular like contracted rate and my regular design work and that income stream has a small increase just because I got a promotion in November 2022 and so what we're seeing here is just the full year of me being paid at that rate and then the rest of this category is profit sharing which is where twice a year we get a share in the profits that the company has experienced over the last 6 months and for me that came to 22,31 which is a pretty sweet bonus and I'm very pleased with that moving on to totals because you basically just heard the total for my like design job as

creative director that 83,500 and the total that I earned from my design education side business this year was just £1,200 this side business made up only 6% of my total income which is the smallest percentage that it has ever made up since I started doing these reports but still overall I earned around $14,700 for the year so if we look at that number alone it was a good year financially but that was around4 43,000 or 18% less than I earned the year before so my income streams have definitely taken a hit and we can say that financially burnout has cost me more than £43,000 I'm not going to lie it was extra hard to sit down and put this report together this year I really value transparency and it's one thing to share these numbers when things are looking good you're seeing successes you can pass on those like learnings to other people so that they can try income streams for themselves but it's been a real test of that transparency to report on losses and the things that I've done wrong in my business definitely feels extra vulnerable but I hope it was useful interesting you can read the full report see all the charts over on my blog as well as see my expenses there as well which we bring that into account anyway thank you for watching thank you for being here and if you haven't yet heard about the very exciting project that I'm currently working on to Rebrand convert kit to kit and all of the like learnings and work that has entailed you can go check that out right here