Riding The Revenue Rollercoaster

Happy Monday.

I’ll keep the intro short this week. Turns out there’s a theme running through this issue, even though I didn’t fully plan it that way… taking the stress down a notch.

One piece on the revenue rollercoaster we all ride as solopreneurs. Another on the WordPress busywork that quietly eats your sanity. Both really come down to the same thing: building a business that doesn’t keep you up at night.

Alright, let’s dive in.

Riding The Revenue Rollercoaster

A couple weeks back, I admitted I was sitting at 42% of last year’s revenue at the halfway mark. Just a thing I need to look at since I still have half the year left here.

But, I’ve definitely ridden the revenue rollercoaster in my business. I’ve had days where I’ve made $20,000 in one evening (during a launch)… and weeks where I barely cracked through $500.

And I know that, for solopreneurs especially, that revenue rollercoaster can be a huge source of stress. It was for me, too. After all, revenue can rise and fall (sometimes drastically), but bills don’t go away.

Today, I don’t stress about it as much. Not that my business doesn’t still see ebbs and flows, but it isn’t nearly as dramatic as it used to be. It is more like a cruise ship than a little raft on a choppy sea.

Let me share a few things I do. None of it is groundbreaking. It is just what I do.

Focus In On Recurring Revenue

Again, nothing groundbreaking here. But, when you have a base of recurring revenue, it makes things much easier. I’d take a recurring revenue over a large income spike any day.

In my case, I pivoted the entire business into Concierge. It is a productized service that recurs. Service is ongoing. And while I have other income that comes in every month, Concierge monthly rebills are definitely the income stability for the business.

I know in my line of work, a lot of people think “membership site”. With online courses and other functions that people pay monthly or annually for. And that works. But, don’t get tunnel vision into thinking that’s your only option. Concierge is a client-facing SERVICE, not a bunch of training. And when you get right down to it, almost ANY business can do recurring. Even a local A/C repair technician could offer monthly/annual maintenance plans.

Turn A Reserve Fund Into A Budget Item

We all have a tendency to make the amount of money we NEED. And we’ll spend the remainder on stupid stuff. But, having a reserve fund is super important.

A reserve fund is a pool of money for buying things the business needs… or even just a buffer account you can tap when absolutely needed. I think putting 10% at least into Reserves every month is a good idea. Thing is…

It needs to be a line item on your monthly budget. Not “we’ll see what’s left after the bills are paid”. No, it needs to BE a bill on par with your hosting bill. Treat it as such… and you’ll build those reserves. And magically, you’ll find a way to make the money.

Make Idle Money Work For You

Don’t just keep idle money sitting in your checking account. The interest rates paid out by banks these days are pathetic and you’re literally losing purchasing power by way of inflation.

Two things I do…

One, annualized expenses. There are bills I know are coming… the yearly software renewals, the taxes, the stuff that hits once a year. I set that money aside in a separate high-yield savings or money market account. It sits there earning interest until the bill is actually due. Same money I was going to spend anyway, but it works for me on the way out the door. I turn annual bills into monthly ones internally…. and set that money aside every month.

Two, business reserves go somewhere that beats inflation. At a minimum, get it into a high-yield account. You can also look at putting a conservative portion into the market or other investments for a real return.

I’m in no way offering investment advice here…. it’s just what I have done. But, my business has a Fidelity brokerage account so certain pools of money can be invested into the market (index funds, mostly). And a high-interest savings account. I use my checking account solely for month-to-month expenses and I don’t leave much in there.

And Lastly…

I’ve talked to many solopreneurs who pay out large amounts of money to CPAs, or fancy accounting software. They think “it is just what businesses do”. But, in a lot of cases, I think it is a waste of money.

For one, most business accounting software does stuff you never even use. Most solopreneurs use the basic ledger and a couple of reports and not much else. So, why pay the monthly fee for that software? Even free accounting software – or a spreadsheet! – can do that. Couple days ago, I even watched a video of a dude who used AI to build his own basic accounting dashboard and used SimpleFIN to grab transactions from his bank. Certainly a more novel solution, but point is…

Evaluate how much overhead you need to take on for such tasks. I just use TaxACT to do my taxes every year. It isn’t hard. Why would I pay a CPA $1,000+ to do something like that?

WordPress News & Updates

WordPress.org’s 24-hour update delay is catching heat. Turns out the new cooldown doesn’t just slow auto-updates… it blocks one-click dashboard updates too, so you can see a security patch sitting in the changelog and still be stuck waiting up to 24 hours while the bots go hunting. Developers are pushing back hard, and the Plugins Team says changes are likely coming.

Stolen passwords are now the #1 way WordPress sites get hacked… officially passing plugin vulnerabilities, according to GoDaddy’s latest security report drawn from 34 million site scans. In one documented case, attackers logged in with valid credentials and installed a malicious plugin in under a minute. Make sure you’re using strong passwords (with a password manager), change them periodically, and put protections on your site login.

FlyingPress 5.6 added Redis object caching, which speeds up the dynamic stuff that page caching can’t touch… carts, checkouts, logged-in pages. The update is a real win if you run WooCommerce or a membership site. It also means you would no longer need a separate plugin just for your object caching to work.

The Classic block is on its way out. WordPress 7.1 will hide it from the inserter, with full removal possible as early as 7.2. Existing Classic blocks keep rendering… you just won’t be able to add new ones. If you’ve still got a foot in the pre-Gutenberg world, the clock’s ticking.

Elementor now runs on roughly a third of all WordPress sites (32.67%), per new market-share data. The native Block Editor sits at 20.6%, while wpBakery keeps sliding. Say what you want about page builders… people clearly still want them. Ironically, this heavy usage of Elementor is probably contributing to this notion that WordPress is fragile. Because… well, Elementor has a reputation for breaking stuff. 🥴

WordPress got its own AI coding agent. Automattic shipped Studio Code into the Studio desktop app… basically a WordPress-native version of Claude Code that can spin up sites, run WP-CLI, and build pages from a chat prompt. (Fun fact: it’s built on Claude Code under the hood.)

FluentCRM is getting native WhatsApp messaging. The team says campaigns and automations over WhatsApp are coming in the next release, right alongside your email flows. For the right audience, that could be a big deal.

WooCommerce 10.9 landed with built-in email logging. You can finally see every transactional email Woo tries to send, and why it failed, right in the logs… plus checkout performance tweaks and experimental “save for later” and wishlist features. If you run a store, the email logging alone is worth the update.

FluentCart made advanced product variations free. Version 1.5.0 builds multi-attribute products (sizes, colors, the works) right into the free core… no add-on, no Pro gate. Nice move if you’re selling physical products on WordPress. Also, another critical step to finally being able to fully move over from WooCommerce.

Wbcom Designs launched BuddyNext, a “community OS” for WordPress. It’s a free, GPL plugin that gives you an activity feed, spaces, member profiles, and messaging in one install… no stitching five plugins together. A potential new alternative to BuddyBoss?

Somebody built a hall of shame for annoying plugins. Dismissed.fyi catalogs more than 2,000 plugins by how aggressively they hijack your dashboard with nag screens, upsells, and “please leave a review” begging. Equal parts useful and cathartic.

A sharp take on where WordPress is heading. WP Mayor’s Jean Galea argues the market is splitting into a barbell… enterprise and commerce holding strong at the top, AI hollowing out the simple low end, and the undifferentiated middle getting crushed. His question: “do I have a moat that survives contact with an AI that can read my code?”

FluentBooking 2.2 ties your bookings straight to your CRM. The latest release wires FluentBooking and FluentCRM together more tightly, enabling you to book an appointment right from their FluentCRM profile. Several other quality-of-life improvements in this one.

The WP Engine vs. Automattic saga grinds on. Automattic won a fight to claw back private Slack messages about its trademark strategy, and the trial’s now been pushed to late October 2027. Grab a snack… this one’s not ending anytime soon.

What WordPress Burnout Is Actually Costing You

One of the (if not THE) biggest painpoints of solopreneurs and small business owners using WordPress is “WordPress Burnout”. It is pretty much the #1 tech ops pain in the ass. 😜 Agency data shows that 65% cite plugin/theme updates as their top security challenge.

And I get it. When you’re not working with WordPress every day (like I am), it can feel like this fragile game of whack-a-mole.

The Frankenstein plugin stack that fights itself every update. The PHP warnings nobody understands. The low-level dread that you’re one bad update away from your site going down… while you’re the only person who can fix it.

It’s real. And it’s exhausting.

It is because of that pain point that WordPress maintenance services exist. But, should you consider paying for such a service? WordPress maintenance services typically range anywhere from $50/mo up to $300/mo. Or… should you just use a good managed WordPress host and try to rely on their support if something happens?

Obviously, I offer Concierge services. So, this might seem self-serving in some ways to make this case. But, I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about here. So, let me make my point…

Doing it yourself isn’t free.

Most solopreneurs file “maintain my own site” under free, because no money leaves the account. But that’s not how cost works.

You’re already paying for the pieces. Hosting. Plugin licenses. A backup solution. Image optimization. Maybe a security service. You’ve just got them scattered across multiple different bills… and you’re supplying the labor on top. Usually, FREE labor you’re doing on top of the laundry list of bills you’re already paying anyway.

So the real comparison was never “free vs. paid.” It’s “a pile of separate costs plus my time vs. one bundled cost.” Those are very different sentences.

Let’s talk about your time.

I don’t want to make assumptions about what your time is worth, because frankly, a lot of solopreneurs badly undervalue their own hourly value.

So let’s lowball it. Minimum wage. A 16-year-old can go flip burgers for around $14 an hour right now. Here in Florida, that’s the current minimum wage.

Is your time worth at least that much?

Because when you blow three or four hours debugging why an update nuked your site… at burger-flipping wages, that one afternoon just cost you fifty bucks. Do that a couple times a month, throw in the routine update-and-pray sessions, and you’re easily at $100+ a month in time alone. At minimum wage.

And we all know it isn’t just about updates. It could be “why does that student not have access to what they bought?”…. or “Why is my site throwing an error whenever I open up one particular page to try to edit it?”.… or “How do I make the page look better on mobile?”

Your time. Spent doing the DIY. Spinning your wheels trying to figure things out… all because you THINK your time is free. But, it isn’t. If you think your time is free, then literally the pimply faced teenager at McDonalds is making more money than you are. 😜

And let’s be real… your time’s worth a lot more than that. If it isn’t, we have a different conversation to have.

Most maintenance services only solve half the problem.

So a maintenance service starts to make sense. The going rate runs somewhere around $50 to $300 a month, and for a lot of people the math already tips toward paying it.

But here’s the gap… Most services run your updates and backups mechanically and call it a day. When something actually breaks, you’re still on your own… or filing a ticket with someone who’s never laid eyes on your site before.

That’s the part that keeps you up at night. And it’s the part most services don’t touch.

This is exactly why I built Concierge the way I did. Concierge Core isn’t a typical maintenance service. Yes, I do all the maintenance stuff… but it goes well past that.

• It includes the hosting.
• It includes plugin licenses you’d otherwise buy yourself.
• It includes image optimization.
• It includes the monitoring, the security, the firewall, the backups.
• And it includes a human who actually knows your site and can jump in when something’s wrong.

Concierge Essentials is just $49/mo. Where it starts to get more interesting is the Concierge Core plan, which is $99/mo. You can see the plans here.

Add up what you’re already paying for those pieces separately, then add even a few hours of your time at any honest hourly value… and for most people, Concierge Core lands cheaper than doing it all yourself. By A LOT. Before you even count the peace of mind.

This isn’t to say that, if you’re in Concierge, you’re not still DIYing some stuff. Most of my Concierge clients still do plenty on their own. But, you know what happens a lot? They catch themselves when they’re spending TOO much time trying to figure something out. And, they just tell me. And I can almost always handle it much, MUCH faster. This is what I do all day. And I have tools at my disposal that they don’t.

So, I know this seems self-serving. Like this article was one big pitch for Concierge. But, frankly, I look at it as a basic case of solopreneur arithmetic.

So, is it worth it?

The primary article this week was about financial calm… making a down month feel like a Tuesday. This is the same idea pointed at your website. Operational calm.

Burnout isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a cost. And for most people, it’s an optional one.