This month I shifted the focus to the book about Euro 2024. I finished writing it, published it and actively marketed it for the whole month.

I haven’t spent much time working on anything else, but I have a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the future. I have also spent a couple of days researching how to make a Chrome extension and built one that shows the YouTube channels of the people I follow on X. I might launch it in my spare time.

Euro 2024 book

I started to write the book in May, you can see how I developed the idea in my previous blog post. I already set up the pre-order page in May, but I finished writing it and published it on Gumroad and Amazon in June.

I have spent the rest of the month promoting it in different communities, mainly

• r/soccerbetting
• r/soccer
• r/sportsbook
• r/euro2024
• r/dataisbeautiful
• Amazon ads (US and UK markets)

The first two subreddits are extremely hostile to promotion, so all my posts got deleted from r/soccer and I got banned by r/soccerbetting after posting a few times. I have always been a contributor to the sub and also maintained a free tool in the past, and I also didn’t break any rules. But I am not here to complain. The other subs were ok. I posted two types of content. I posted a visualization related to the Euros in r/dataisbeautiful, with a link to the soccrbets website where there is the extended article. In all other subreddits, I posted the predictions of each match of the Group stage, together with a link to my blog post at the end.

Overall I estimate I got around 1 million views on r/dataisbeautiful and 60k views on all the other subreddits. This translated into roughly 1.1k unique users to the soccrbets website in a 30 days span. So, more or less a 0.1% conversion rate from the Reddit post. A bit low if you ask me, but maybe it’s in the right ballpark. Of those 1.1k users, I can estimate 350 or so navigated to my Gumroad page, which is around 31%, so not that bad. Of those, only 21 ended up buying one of my products, for a conversion rate of 6%. I made $160 from those, so that is $0.14 for each visit to the website. I remember seeing a tweet by Marc Lou, he considers product-market fit to be $1/visit. So this is not it, probably. Unless I manage to increase the price 10x without losing customers. Unlikely.

I have also experimented with ads on Amazon. I focused on the US and UK markets, which are historically the best ones for me. As of today. I spent around $80 but didn’t manage to get any sales. At this point, I am not sure if I will keep running the ads until the end of the tournament. Probably it’s a failed experiment.

My goal with this book is to reach 100 sales by the end of July. For now, I have only sold 50 and, given that there will be no sale after mid-July when the Euros are over, it seems unlikely I will break the 100 sales wall.

Data Internships

My mailing list has kept growing. I have been recommended by another mailing list on ConvertKit (now Kit) and I have grown past 1000 subscribers now. I am not sure that they are all my target audience, but I will only find out once I send the next newsletters. If they unsubscribe, it’s not for them.

I plan to resume working on it once the Euros are over. I will start using a proxy to keep scraping LinkedIn and see what happens.

X Topics

Nothing to report. I have been using it though, to understand what to tweet about. And it played a part in my viral tweet definitely (more on this later).

Data Freelance

This is low on my priority list right now. Building a community is a lot of work and I haven’t seen high enough demand for this yet.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month. Should have increased thanks to the book revenues.

Even without the new book, my old book sales would have almost doubled the amount I sold in May last year. Again, this is something to be optimistic about, as the content seems even more interesting after 1 year. I am also talking more to my readers, and this has been useful. For example, one of them told me that he heard about my book from a YouTube channel. I even watched all their videos, but couldn’t find a mention of my name or one of my books there. Bummer.

Twitter (ops… X)

This deserves its own chapter because on June 20 one of my posts on X went viral. I scheduled it for 9 am and went on with my day. I checked as usual around 12 pm, and it was doing well, so I went for lunch and took a quick nap.

When I woke up my phone was exploding. I had hundreds of likes and comments. I started to reply to all comments as I usually do, but they kept coming faster than I could reply. I remember I replied to some of my friends and engaged in back-and-forth conversations, but after 1 hour I couldn’t keep up.

By 3 pm my tweet had 100k impressions and I started to get DMs, so I started to reply to DMs only. Many people asked for advice, some congratulated me for the tweet, some thanked me and a couple of them even offered me a job.

Around 5 pm my post crossed 500k impressions and I checked my email. A journalist from Business Insider wanted to interview me about how moving back to Italy with your wife was a huge mistake. Which was the topic of the post of course. I was tempted but didn’t reply straight away and instead thought about it for a day. I asked for advice from Pieter Levels because I remembered he had a few experiences talking to journalists. He advised me to reject the offer. Too much risk that they twist my words.

After replying to almost all DMs I went on with my day. Once your post is viral, there is not much you can do about it. I enjoyed reading the comments from time to time and was curious if it would cross 1 Million impressions. When I went to bed, I checked again and bet with my wife if it had crossed 1 Million impressions. She was sure of it, but I wasn’t. It reached 1 Million around midnight, and it kept growing.

The morning after it was already at 1.5 Million, and it is now at around 1.9 Million views. This post alone brought me almost 1k new followers in 2 days. It almost doubled my follower count.

This was not a special post. It’s one of my regular posts where I talk about my experience, and I try to be entertaining and insightful. The only thing that changed recently is that I have been posting more regularly for a few weeks now, and at the beginning of June I started to post twice a day instead of once a day, plus the usual commenting on people’s posts. And also, probably, the X algorithm changed. Although I think that might be overestimated. I posted the same content on Threads too, and it flew there too, reaching 170k views, more than 1000 times my usual reach.

I write my tweets on Sunday. I book 1 or 2 hours in front of my laptop, check the drafts I write on ilo.so, let my mind flow, and also look for inspiration in my previous posts and Reddit comments. Reddit’s comments are a gold mine. The ones where I get the most likes are usually very good and can be repurposed easily into X posts.

So yeah that’s it for this month. Let me know if you like these recaps, if you have any questions, write me an email or a DM on Twitter or LinkedIn (links on the left). Always happy to chat.