@adlrocha - Revisiting 2019
This is just the beginning!
It has been almost 6 months already since I released the first publication of this newsletter. It all started as a 2019 New Year’s Resolution (a resolution that to be completely honest I wasn’t expecting to keep). I really love writing and sharing my knowledge and ideas. Until this newsletter I tried to start a blog, I wrote publications in Medium, etc. but I never managed to keep writing on a regular basis. Starting a weekly newsletter would force myself to, at least, write once a week. I started on July and, I insist, I didn’t expect to get this far, but I did.
The Numbers of 2019
I really value when projects and startups are open about their numbers following the Open Startups philosophy. I couldn’t be less with my project, so I went through the stats of my newsletter and drew the following conclusions of its six first months of life:
If nothing changes in the next two days, I will end up the year with 64 subscribers.
The average views of my articles the week after their publication is of around 100 views.
I can easily know if an article has been liked by my audience or not. If a publication gets over 100 views it was good stuff, if on the contrary it is below 100, it did not arouse any interest.
I know if one of my publications has moved in social media beyond my direct audience because it easily gets over 120-150 views.
My audience is very technical. Technical publications get way more views than non-technical ones (personal reflections, subjective analyses, etc.).
The bulk of my visits come from direct searches, Twitter and Linkedin (in that order).
Subscribers evolution in the last 6 months:
My Top 10
In the last six months I have written a lot. What are the articles that you have liked the most? Here’s adlrocha’s TOP10 of 2019:
@adlrocha - Enigma - 505 views
@adlrocha - A global Libra and a local Newsletter - 220 views
@adlrocha - The ZKP game - 205 views
@adlrocha - Lattice Cryptography: The Game - 195 views
@adlrocha - Hello DeFi! - 176 views
@adlrocha - WASM: A Universal Bytecode - 165 views
@adlrocha - Personal project: Financial dashboard - 133 views
@adlrocha - To serverless or not to serverless? - 132 views
@adlrocha - Deep or Tweet - 114 views
@adlrocha - Goxyq: Sequentializing the asynchronous - 110 views
What’s the future?
So what are my plans for the newsletter in 2020? I have a few things in mind, and of course I have made new New Year’s Resolution I’ll share with you through the course of 2020 (actually there is a specific project I hope I can share with all of you before January). In the meantime, for the newsletter I’ve set the following goals:
First thing’s first. In 2020 I want to consolidate my writing habit. I want to be able to keep writing every Sunday so that in 2020 I can write a publication similar to this one analyzing a whole year of content.
With my habit, I want to also consolidate my audience. I want to rise the average views of my articles from 100 to 150, and in the process reach the hundredth of subscribers. To achieve this I will probably have to start moving my articles in places apart from Twitter and Linkedin. Actually, I just tried to move one of my publications through HackerNews, see if people there enjoy my content. In short, I need more visibility and better content.
And finally, the hardest one, I want to find a sustainable way of “funding” this newsletter. Writing a new publication every single week is a lot of work. Actually, it is work I usually end up doing on my weekends, so finding an extra motivation to keep writing won’t hurt my habit. Even if I fail this ambitious goal, it will allow me to research and learn ways of scale, grow and “productisize” an idea/project.
In short, I have big plans for this newsletter in 2020.
Thank you note.
And as it couldn’t be otherwise, I’ve saved the last few words of this newsletter in 2019 to all of you that consistently read my content. Seeing week after week that you are there reading what I write gives me the strength to not skip a single Sunday, and keep finding interesting things to talk about. Best wishes to you all for 2020, and hope to see you at the other side of the article the whole 2020 :)
