My December was slow, as it’s usual this month, with all the holidays piling up and almost a third of the month spent buying and packing gifts, travelling back and forth and doing little work. Great business for travel agencies and candy shops. Not for freelancers and wannabe entrepreneurs like me. I took an almost complete break over the holidays, didn’t even play with new techs or built a funny app like I used to do a couple of years ago. Well, I wrote a blog post about my 2023 and all the ups and downs of it. But nothing else.

Work-wise, in December I stopped working with a client. So now I have quite a bit more free time. I can now spend some of that time focusing on my side projects, which is what I was wishing for in last months recap. Beware what you wish for. Ah, I also found out one of my clients hasn’t paid any of my invoices since August. There might have been some miscommunication here, I definitely need to get better at this and check that my finances are ok more often. Otherwise, what’s the point of showing off my monthly revenue in these posts.

So I paid for Twitter Blue. That happened in January but let’s put it in December for accounting purposes. In general, not a great month. A bit of a setback from my previous month, where I broke the $8k mark. And there is still a long way to go before breaking the $10k mark, which I will not do unless I either focus 100% of my time on freelancing, or find a way to generate revenue for my side projects.

It looks like book sales are still quite strong. In general, they are always strong in December, with all gifts and extra cash going around, but this year was better than usual. Looking at the stats, December is my best month on KDP since I launched my books. I wish I could replicate this success with some other project. Maybe another book?

I am going to keep freelancing for 2 clients in the next months, but I already know that there will be some reduced hours. So I expect the income from freelancing to shrink a bit. It will probably stay around the same as this month, which is fine and covers me and my wife’s basic expenses. Mostly my wife’s.

Speaking about side projects, datainternships.co is slowing down a bit. The traffic in December was lower than in November, which I can understand since in November I went viral with a post on reddit. I am now doing 600 visits per month roughly and less than 10 subscribers to the newsletter per month, which makes a 2% conversion rate. Which sucks. I would expect much more than that, so I am going to focus on improving the conversion rate, improving automation and increasing the number of interesting jobs on the site. I have a couple of ideas for stoicquotes.co too. I need to target more long tail keywords, to increase the traffic. I also want to try to make the site more appealing. The UI is not great right now, and it could do with some nicer fonts and improved navigability. Also, I think those quotes will fit nicely into a book, or maybe a daily diary. I might try that in the new year.