This month I split myself. In the first part, I focused on marketing my Euro 2024 book. In the second part, I experimented with a few ideas, which will lead me to launch a new product in August and almost certainly another one in September.

Euro 2024 book

I followed an established strategy for marketing the book. On each match day, I posted my models’ predictions on Reddit and created an updated visualization of the teams still in the Tournament. I got banned from r/soccerbetting but I kept posting on r/sportsbook and r/euro2024. I also posted the visualization on r/dataisbeautiful, where I got a lot of attention (the most popular post got 1.8M views) but I don’t think I got many sales from it.

Reddit was a huge source of traffic for the whole month of June and the first half of July, but it dried out pretty quickly once I stopped posting after the Euro 2024. It was an interesting experiment though, I will keep posting there once the European football starts again around the end of August.

The Amazon KDP ads were a bit underwhelming. I only got 1 sale out of them and I spent more than $100 and got one sale (less than $10) back from it. Not worth it, or I am doing something very wrong.

Putting together all the sales from Gumroad and Amazon, I have sold 85 copies of the book, which is not the 100 target I set for myself, but it’s not too far from it. I feel like I have only half failed here. Moreover, people are still buying the book, even after the Tournament, so it might reach 100 copies sold, at some point this year, after all.

Data Internships

My mailing list has now more than 1500 subscribers, many of them from other newsletters’ recommendations. I sent 3 newsletters in July, but the new subscribers do not seem as engaged as the historical ones. The Open rate dropped from 55% to 27% and the Click Rate dropped from an average of 7% to an average of 2% now. I am not complaining, since those are still good numbers, given the volume of subscribers. However, I plan to clean up the list in the next weeks to avoid sending emails to subscribers who are not interested in receiving them.

X Topics

This has seen some progress in the last couple of weeks. Given that I have been more active on social media lately, I have had the experience of going viral on X and Threads 2 or 3 times. This has sparked the idea of marketing X Topics as a viral tool, given it helped me write viral posts on both platforms.

Moreover, Threads released its API in June, and it feels like it’s a great opportunity to start an analytics tool for the platform. Luca and Mattia jumped also very fast on it with their BlackTwist, and are doing a great job.

With X Topics I want to create something similar but with a different angle, using AI to generate insights on the right topics to talk about. This was very difficult to do with X, where the API is impossibly expensive. But on Threads, the API is free, and I think people are sleeping on it. I am fixing the latest bugs right now, already opened the app to a few Beta testers, and I am launching in the next few days.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month.

Drop in revenue of almost $100, mainly due to the drop in book sales on Gumroad. I need to add a few more small bets and revenue streams to the collection above, as I have been struggling to generate any revenue other than books for the past 5 months now. Soon I will not have that much time anymore, and I will need to go back to freelancing. Hopefully, I have a few more months of runway ahead of me before needing to start to look for a job.

Going viral

As I mentioned before, I went viral again. This time it was with a much shorter post, still about Italy, and it touched more nerves than last time. It got again, almost 2M impressions on X, more than 100k impressions on Threads, and I got a few angry messages, people straight up insulting me and calling me a failure. But I realized, not only I don’t care about it. Quite the opposite, it kind of fuels me and gives me some kind of energy and motivation to work harder and better.