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[2021-12-21 12:44:50 AM] : WIP, my kid just woke up :smiley:
[2021-12-21 06:57:44 AM] : The stats
• Revenue up to €3600 from ~€2000 the year before
• Made 54 sales
• Closing in on 1500 subscribers (don't know how many it were before but I guess around 600)
What didn't go well
Unfortunately I didn't write a lot of ebombs this year. I spent a lot of time contracting and struggled with focused work outside of my contract. I lost motivation at times and felt overworked. I also lacked a clear direction which made it harder to focus.
What did go well
I relaunched my course platform at profy.dev. I have a (more) solid technical foundation for expanding the platform. Before I was using a setup with Gatsby and Airtable. Now it's Next.js with a real database and CMS. I regret not doing that from the start tbh.
Apart from that I started learning more about SEO, tried out customer interviews, and just took some time to think, reorient and recover.
Investing some time into SEO was a good idea I think. I was able to purposefully rank one ebomb in the top results of some keywords. This brings in a sale here and there on autopilot.
Doing customer interviews was also very interesting. I had some insights into the journey that my customers take. Someone said that my course would perfectly connect to codecademy or Freecodecamp. At the same time he said that it may be overwhelming for devs at that stage.
Finally, I created a new free course called GitHub Minesweeper for devs to learn a professional workflow with Git and GitHub. The goal was to get exposure by word of mouth. This seems to have worked at least on a small scale. I continuously see people trying it out and it was mentioned in a list of Git resources. I put quite some time into testing the course with some beta users which was also an interesting experience.
Goals for next year
The plan is to take parental leave for one year (yay second kid). I get financial support from the government and with our savings I can take off that time from contracting. At the same time I'm
a bit under pressure because I'm not sure if I can continue my business and contracting at the same time. This year doing both was exhausting.
So the goal is to make enough money to live off until the end of 2022 (~$7k per month). That feels like a stretch but at least the starting point is quite ok.
To reach this goal I made the plan to create a new project-based course based on the insights from the customer interviews and watching my students go through the existing course. The overall idea will be similar to the existing course but it'll be split into smaller modules and start at a slightly lower level. This way it's hopefully more compatible with devs coming from codecademy and Freecodecamp.
A mistake that I made in the past was neglecting new content while building things. But my time will be very limited so I need to be efficient. A few ways I can make the best of my time could be
• Reuse content that I build for the course and share it on different channels. The main value of the course is not the content but the practice. So it's not a problem to make the content public.
• Find a way to build the course in a lean way. I could start with very rough material and make it more of a workshop at first. Then see where the students struggle, improve and iterate until I have a polished course. This could be very effective and with some live elements I could even take more money than for just the course.
• Share the journey (basically build in public) to build trust and get exposure.
The second point seems a lot like something that Alex suggested here at least a dozen times. Could have known that from the start. But hey, sometimes things need time to click :smile:
[2021-12-21 07:45:04 AM] : FWIW I had a list where I woudl sometimes share the journey, and... ran out of time to do that part, and not doing it was fine, feels like writing more ebombs was much more useful.
[2021-12-21 08:06:37 AM] : Yeah, I'm wondering how long I'll do that as well. In the end it's additional work. And a potential distraction.