It’s that time of the year again, it’s time to look back and reflect on my professional journey in 2024.

I feel like I can split my year in 3 parts. From January to February, I was still working as a freelancer, finishing the last projects and preparing to jump into entrepreneurship full time. From April to August, I didn’t do any client work and focused on launching and marketing my own products. From September to December, I just focused on my newborn daughter and set aside all my professional ambition. I hope not forever because that’s not gonna work financially, and we’ll end up under a bridge.

So yeah let’s focus on what went well and what didn’t go so well in these 3 periods.

Freelancing (January-February)

At the beginning of the year it became clear to me that I wanted to reduce the time spent freelancing and spend more time building and growing my own products. The idea was to still freelance a bit on the side, maybe 2 days per week, but the circumstances led me to closing all my collaborations and focusing on my products instead.

One of clients I was working with, never paid me. In January, they had 6 months old invoices not paid. I wrote the CEO of the company (he is Italian) if they forgot to pay them. He candidly replied me they didn’t hear from me since a long time, so they thought I was not interested anymore. I had sent them weekly updates via email and Slack, but apparently if you are not in the office you don’t exist for these people. They had more than €3k in unpaid invoices.

Another Italian client was eager to keep working with me, but when they heard I was planning to spend a significant amount of time in Moscow in 2024, since my wife was expecting a baby and wanted to be close to her family, they backed down. Russia is in the black list of many organizations. You are not allowed to work from here even if you are not under sanctions. Even Upwork blocks its site to users from Russia.

So, at the end of the month, I found myself without clients and I chose not to look for new ones, since my plan was to bootstrap a business anyway.

Bootstrapping a business (March-August)

Once I closed all my contracts I looked at the opportunities I had. In 2023 I had built two SEO based websites, Data Internships and Stoic Quotes. The idea was to grow them via SEO and monetize them eventually.

I worked on Data Internships quite a lot in the first part of the year. Launched a free salary calculator for internships and actively looked for companies (mainly writing on LinkedIn) potentially interested in advertising their open positions on the website. I could not get any customer and also Google’s update in mid-March killed my SEO reach, bringing it from 500 to 20 impressions per day. The only win, I was able to grow the newsletter to 2000 subscribers, thanks to recommendations from other creators. I have now put a banner on the website, I am open to acquisition offers.

I let the Stoic Quotes website die in June and did not renew the domain. But instead I decided to pivot a bit and write a book with all the quotes I had collected in the past year. It took me a few days and I published on Gumroad and Amazon at the beginning of February. I sold only one copy, in November.

In June 2024 I decided to take advantage of the Euro 2024 tournament and decided to publish a book on how to build a betting model for it. I advertised it to my previous readers, who I knew might be very interested in such a model. I got a lot of interest and even a few pre-orders, so I devoted an entire month writing the code and the book. In the end I sold over 100 copies on both Gumroad and Amazon. Small success.

To promote my existing books, I decided to open a blog about soccer betting, in which I started to publish some articles in the hope of intercepting potential readers who are looking for a guide on how to build a betting model and how to use statistics in soccer. I published an average of 2 articles per month in 2024 and I have got only 20 visits to my Gumroad page. Definitely not getting good results yet, but I’ll re-evaluate in the next months.

Given that nothing seemed to work I decided to work on a new product, Xtopics. I launched Xtopics in March, after working on it for 2-3 weeks. The idea was to build a topic analytics tool for X. Unfortunately, I don’t have the budget for the very expensive X API, so I went for a solution that would allow the users to upload their tweets and get the analytics. Very few people registered and none bought the lifetime subscription. It was a total flop. Later in June, Threads opened up their API and I saw an opportunity to pivot as a Threads topic analytics tool. I launched at the end of August, got 27 upvotes and even sold a few lifetime licenses. In the months after I got a few more signups but in November and December things have slowed down. Small success but needs work.

Fatherhood (September-December)

This has been the best thing happening to me this year. Of course, becoming a father is a unique experience, but I’m not gonna write about the joys of fatherhood here, but rather what this means for my professional activity.

Since my daughter was born I have decided to prioritize family. We have no help, it’s just the 3 of us, and my role is to make sure that both mother and daughter live in a comfortable environment. Which means I take care of the house, grocery, cleaning, cooking. Combine this with the inevitable lack of sleep and this means I have roughly 5-10 hours to dedicate to work every week. I have decided to dedicate this time to marketing, which means writing on socials, blog posts and video. And I have set aside new projects and implementation of new features on old ones.

However, I feel like what I have going on right now is not enough. I don’t see a path where I can scale 10x Xtopics, or the sales of my books. I have tried, it doesn’t seem to work. So the best course of action should be to try and launch new things, now that I have some experience (read failures) under my belt.

The recap

Let’s recap the projects I juggled in 2024 and the revenue they brought.

Out of 5 projects, maybe only 2 can be called a success. And both are books. I am not sure about Xtopics. It’s an interesting project, there seems to be some demand, I can get paying customers. But I feel like I don’t have the time to make it grow. It just seems not to fit with my lifestyle right now.

In general, I am not in a good place financially. My runway ends soon and in 2025 I will need to at least 10x my revenue to cover my expenses. Maybe I will have to go back freelancing? But again, it just doesn’t fit my lifestyle right now. I don’t have 20 free hours per week. Another possibility would be to open up new sources of revenue, doubling down on what works, which are books. I could write more books on the same style on different topics, maybe collaborating with other people to cover aspects and sports I am not too familiar with. This seems to be a strategy that is working for Greg and a few others out there.

Let’s hope for a better 2025, I will work hard to make it happen.