The video of this post is here

I got into the habit of starting every month with a list of activities I want to get done by the end of the month. For November, I had two main goals

• Get 3 or more paying users for Xtopics.
• Get more traffic to my Gumroad page.

During the month I also spent some time setting up a Telegram channel to publish content related to my experience as a Freelance Data Scientist, and placed an “open to offers” button on Data Internships website.

Data Freelance

One year ago I wrote a blog post that I also linked on Reddit about my experience as a Data freelancer and apparently Google decided to index it and show it to everybody that looks for keywords like “freelance Data Scientist”. The result is that to this day there are a few people that write me a DM on X or LinkedIn every month. They usually want to ask me questions about how to start freelancing as a Data Analyst/Scientist/Engineer, what are the best channels to get leads, where to start from. So I thought it’s a good idea to collect all these conversations and create a channel to publish more detailed replies to all questions.

My goal is to publish one article per week, and grow this channel to 1k+ members, so that I can eventually monetize it and use it as a marketing channel for future projects. For now, there are 7 subs, let’s see how it goes.

Data Internships

This month I saw an article on the High Signal newsletter that caught my eye. Greg Isenberg has created a button that you can easily add to your website, to receive acquisition offers. I said to myself, why not, looks easy to implement, and I am not actively working on the project right now, so I might as well get some acquisition offers.

The button is live on the website, and I managed to customize it to show some info that can be interesting to the buyer. Data Internships has 2k+ newsletter subscribers, mostly Data Science students, and has an average 30% open rate in the last months.

X Topics

This month I spent most of the time implementing new features requested by my current users, with the goal to improve the product and make it more useful.

• Added color coding for the most popular topics and posts.
• Added a topic leaderboard to show what are the trending topics on Threads right now.

I already use the product a lot, and it is quite important for me when I sit on my desk every Sunday and write the content for the coming week. I hope others find it useful too, but from what I can see from the analytics, very few users are coming back to the product every week. I think I must build some kind of reminder, so that people are motivated to come to the tool more often. Probably a weekly automated email that shows personalized statistics on their best topics of the week could do the trick.

I increased the price this month, from $15 to $25 for the lifetime deal. Pretty steep increase, but I think it was not sustainable at the previous price, and I am adding more value to the tool, so hopefully people will keep buying.

My goal this month was to add 3 more paying users. Although I had a few signups, none of them converted to paid, so November has been the first month when I didn’t acquire new paying users after the launch. It’s probably time to find the famous marketing channel that will consistently bring new customers every month.

Soccrbets

I have worked on improving the existing automations, to reduce the manual effort of writing articles and creating predictions to a minimum. I have managed to automate more stuff and right now the only manual thing that is left for me to do is to post on Reddit. Everything else is running on its own, hopefully without bugs.

The initial goal with the website, was to drive traffic to my Gumroad page and acquire more readers for my books. This doesn’t look like it worked, because I can only see 4 users coming from the website and none of them bought anything. But I will keep posting, since the TG channel has doubled the number of subscribers in one month, and we are now at 22 subs. This could be another marketing channel. I am not going to promote anything there yet, but I think once we reach 100+ subscribers it can become an interesting marketing channel for my books, and a source of ideas for other products related to soccer analytics.

I have also posted a new video about creating a soccer betting model on YT. In this period I went from 5 to 15 subscribers and reached more than 200 views. Small numbers, but I am confident they can grow if I keep publishing videos in the next months.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month.

A bit of a jump in revenue, certainly due to the Black Friday deals on my books. I advertised the deal on several online directories and made good sales, although less than expected. In comparison, I made 70 sales on Gumroad last year in November. This year, only 20.s Last year, I made $8k+ in November, it was one of my most successful months as a freelancer and solopreneur. It shows that things change quickly and not always for the better.

Tax season is coming in Italy, which means I will have to pay taxes on my 2023 revenue as a freelancer soon. Should be around €10k+ which will cut my runway quite a bit. I am already finding myself looking at Upwork and various job offers. I would like not to go back to a job, but I might not have a choice.