Its October, pretty unbelievable actually how fast the year has gone. I know it has been a pretty torrid one with COVID-19 and that ginger-haired muppet with his $700,000 hair causing a raucous every other day, but 2020 hasn’t been all bad. In my usual monthly round-up, I will give a quick summary of highlights through September. As usual, I touch upon work, investment, and life.
Work-Life
September has been pretty busy. I had quite a lot of things on with clients, my own businesses, and of course with SAP.
FrameIT ended a strong quarter
FrameIT completed its 4th quarter of operations since go-live and saw a really good growth trajectory in what was effectively Q3 2020. The quarter covers July, August & September, and collectively it was 154% up vs. the prior 3 months. I’m not going to get rich or give up my day job on the current revenue numbers, but it’s certainly nothing to sniff at, and has been profitable from the very first month of operations.
September in isolation was a bit down on the previous 2 months, but I put this mainly down to a reduction in overall demand as Singapore started re-opening after the circuit breaker period earlier in the year. Whilst people were sat at home with nothing much to do, they took the time to try and spruce up their homes a bit, so this kind of pushed demand up for a couple of months.
Planning to soft launch FrameIT in Malaysia by year-end
Something like FrameIT requires a large addressable market, and Singapore is not that large, so even having a very good market share, will not necessarily mean a huge volume of total orders. FrameIT now has very good organic search rankings across the framing category, so I am not sure there is that much additional ceiling space to go. As a result, I probably need to find new markets to increase total orders, and therefore I am planning to launch the business in Malaysia by the end of 2020. The website will be the same as the Singapore one, but we’ll adjust to RM pricing and make a few other local tweaks.
I am just going to follow a similar path to the Singapore launch. Get it into the market with no fuss at all, work on building up organic rankings, and see how it goes. It’s a very low-risk market entry strategy as we plan to continue manufacturing from Singapore.
Did some additional how-to videos for FrameIT
I managed to produce a couple of additional videos in September for two fairly critical topics we often need to cover off with prospective customers. The first was how to correctly measure your item to ensure your frame comes in the correct size to fit the item, and the second was explaining what is a mat border. Check them out below and let me know what you think in the YouTube comments – be kind 🙂
I’ve got another pending editing on how to successfully mount your item.
Redesign and develop new Syariah Law website
I’d had this Syariah Lawyer website live maybe 12 months ago now, but it was launched with a really basic design and a few fairly thin pieces of content. Over the course of the last 12 months, it did manage to trickle in some incremental inquiries from organic search, but I felt if we overhauled it, speeded it up, and started deploying some fresh content, we might be able to increase those inquiries a touch further.
It’s now a lot better looking, much faster, and includes a lot of additional content around Muslim law in Singapore. I’ll add an about page in October to increase authenticity. I am also still working on the Legal Smart website in Singapore, and that one is also gradually starting to see rankings improve.
Investment Life
I’ve tried to adjust my approach a little over the last couple of months, focusing more on longer-term holdings and trying not to buy/sell quite so frequently. I managed to stick to this approach in September, only making a few new purchases, whilst retaining all of my other holdings, except for Apple.
- I bought back into Tesla, and this has become my second largest holding.
- I restarted a position in Pinterest.
- I started a position in Cloudflare.
- I dumped all of my Apple shares, taking a small loss. I wanted to redistribute the funds.
Personal Life
I always find this segment the most difficult to write, having forgotten most of the interesting stuff that happened in the previous month. With 2 young kids, everything really revolves around them to be fair. Robin, turned 3 months old and hes developing really well. He sleeps and eats incredibly well, and the only 2 times I have actually seen or heard him cry is when he had his vaccinations. He is just very chilled, and we hope it continues this way.
Rylie is going to be 5 years old in February next year, and shes a whole different personality [albeit its hard to compare a 5 year old to a 3 month baby]. She never stops talking and being a busy-body. It can be exhausting sometimes, but shes a cool kid. I am anticipating that Robin will be very quiet, as his sister will do enough talking for both of them.
Thats really it on the personal life last month. Its the constant daily job of looking after 2 kids. Rylie is always back and forth to school, goes to Kumon a couple of times a week, and then on a weekend she does ballet and learns Chinese at Berries.
Any way, its Sunday, so I better get back to it.
