The video of this post is here

I almost didn’t write this post, but then read last year one and it was so good that I found the motivation. I want to read this blog post again next year and see how I grew. They say never compare yourself to others, only to your younger self.

Data Freelance

Slowed down a lot on this. I simply cannot find the time to take care about my family, and consistently post once a week about freelancing. Maybe once a month is a more reasonable schedule. Or whenever I feel I have something to say. People will keep coming to the TG channel anyway. My main idea was to capture those people who read my Reddit article on freelancing of 1 year ago anyway.

Quick look at the channel subscribers this month, 13 members, which is 6 more than last month.

Data Internships

I don’t know anything about SEO anymore. Or better, I know that Google decides arbitrarily when to show your website in results or not.

In March 2024 I was obliterated by one of the Google updates. In 1 week my traffic from search went from 60 clicks per day to 1 or 2. They just took all queries like “data analyst internship”, “data analyst intern”, “business analyst internship” and so on, and gave me exactly 0 impressions for those. I am sure I was put in some kind of blacklist for some reason. So I stopped working actively on the website. But look what happened at the end of December. Google just decided to give me back all the traffic, and now I already rank in first page for some of those keywords above. Strange right?

What should I do now? From one side, it looks like a great opportunity, from the other side, I don’t want to get burned again my another unfriendly Google update. Maybe the solution is to focus on it for 1 month with a clear objective in mind. That could be either selling the website or get a few customers.

I have got 2068 subscribers to the mailing list right now, and a bit more of 300 users in the last 30 days.

X Topics

Little work on the product this month. I added a few filters for the most popular topics leaderboard and implemented a filter to show only comments instead of both posts and comments. This is something that I find very useful. Every time I sit at my desk and plan the content for the following week, one of my main inspiration is the replies I made to someone else comment. It’s a quick idea to repurpose some high engagement comments into a post of its own.

The new feature made the dashboard a bit clunky. Every time you press the filter, there is a full refresh of the page that is a bit disturbing. I heard that htmx could solve this problem, by reloading only some part of the page, and I am going to try to implement it soon.

No new paying users this month, but a couple of non-paying ones, that I need to try to convert somehow. Overall, progress is very slow. I wish it was easier to convert more customers, but I am also aware that I should spend much more time doing marketing and polishing the product if I want to see it succeed.

Soccrbets

Improving automations and publishing new articles have been the main activities this month. I cannot say these have been bringing me a lot of customers, but I know that this activity has an impact, and it reflects on both my Amazon and Gumroad sales. Some people will read my posts or watch the videos and just go straight to Amazon because they like physical books.

I posted another video on YT. Now I have 25 subscribers. It was 15 a month ago, slowly improving. I will try to publish more than one video per month and maybe even stream from time to time. And I also kept posting on Reddit and my TG channel. My subscribers on the TG channel grew up to 26.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month.

Slightly below $200, which seems more or less what I have been gravitating around for the whole year. I am trying to move the needle a bit on books. On a yearly scale, I am improving the sales definitely with respect to 2023. On the other hand, the progress has not been a 10x, which makes it difficult to consider it a good reliable source of income. HF bill jumped up. I am not sure why, but I need to keep an eye on it.

What will happen in 2025? I am not sure. I will have to go back freelancing, certainly. Otherwise, I will have no money to pay the rent. And to freelance I need to find the time to do it. This week I was barely able to work for 10 hours. The rest of the time I spent it doing house chores and helping my 4-months daughter and my wife. I don’t know how people do it with a full time job.