I have the impression that September flew past me. Life has accelerated a lot after my daughter was born.

In general, I have not accomplished much this month, but I have reduced my focus to only two activities that are the most likely to bring me revenue going forwards. And yes, it’s all about marketing.

Data Internships

I only sent one newsletter in September. Even if the subscribers have been growing constantly and are now 1700, I have not been able to monetize so far. I tried contacting the employers in the past, but I have always been ignored or ghosted. I might look into charging the job-seekers, like I read in the latest High Signal newsletter.

But for now, this project is not bringing any revenue, so I push the pause button until I have more time.

X Topics

I have added a few small features to the tool, like the possibility to filter topics by date. This greatly improves the experience, since you can now have a more short term overview of what are the trending topics for your audience, and exclude some old posts that are no longer relevant. The product is still quite simple, with the only feature being the topic analysis of all your posts on threads.net.

I sold one more LTD this month, which brings the total revenue to $60. This was the result of a post that went viral (more than 100k views overall). Not a very repeatable marketing strategy, but it’s good anyway. In terms of costs, I am happy I am managing to keep the costs very low, under $2/month. This is because I am using a custom model deployed on HuggingFace and not the monster LLMs of OpenAI. Bad news, I had a bug and let the machine run idle for days and I accumulated a $12 bill this month, still lower than OpenAI bill I guess.

This project brings money, I see some potential, so I am going to explore it further next month. My plans is to:

• Engage every day on threads.net with potential users of the product
• Add testimonials to the landing page
• Make 1 or 2 small product features

At the moment I have got 4 paying users. My goal is to get 3 more by the end of October.

Soccrbets

This is a blog that I created with the idea to write content to drive traffic to my books. I published another blog post at the end of September and this will be part of my strategy for October too. I have noticed that people are still interested in the betting picks predicted by the AI model, especially on Reddit. So I have started to work on a pipeline that automatically creates predictions for the top European leagues every weekend and will post content on Reddit and on my blog about that.

I have seen an increase in traffic to the soccrbets blog, but it’s still not significant enough to correlate with more Gumroad sales. I will have to figure out with more data in October.

Again, this is my main source of income right now, so it’s worth exploring how much it can grow. This is what I am going to do in October:

• write 3 analytics blog posts and promote on social media
• generate weekly prediction articles
• acquire 5 new backlinks
• open a Telegram channel to post content there too

I have no idea how these backlinks work to be honest. I have submitted the link to 7 different places in the last month, but none of them appear in ahrefs yet, and my DR has now decreased to 5.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month.

The revenue is just above $200 this month, and it still heavily depends on the book sales. I have got more money from shitposting on X and a new LTD on Xtopics. Expenses are still constant, with the additional expense for Typefully, given that the old X scheduler I was using is now closing down.

Nothing is really moving upwards, and it’s been already more than 6 months like that. I also have less time to work and maybe another 6 months of runway before I need to start looking for a freelancing job again. Not the time to panic, but definitely time to evaluate what I am doing and spend less time on things that do not bring a direct financial reward.