Another late report. It’s becoming the norm right now, but the main reason this month is that I am traveling and have very little time. And the time that I have, I prefer to spend it working. Right now I am writing it from a cafe in St. Petersburg. I took a couple of hours and left my wife and daughter in our hotel room. I hope they will not notice my absence.

These updates will be very short in the future. I guess they still count though.

Data Freelance

Ouch. no article written this month. Too busy freelancing, but at least it gave me some material for an article or two to write. Subscribers to my TG channel kept growing slowly. I have now 45 members, which is 6 more than last month.

Data Internships

I have sent 3 newsletters this month. Only skipped one week. But I didn’t manage to sell any spot on the website. I should really push sales with cold emails and DMs for it to really work.

I lost 11 subscribers in April, total is 2030 now.

X Topics

I worked on making the landing page a bit more appealing. The main problem here is that nobody signs up. It’s not only about marketing. The product needs some love too, and I need to make something that really works and is really useful, not just a nice to have.

Soccrbets

Same as last month really.

I have got now 40 subscribers on my YT channel, 2 more than last month and the subscribers on the TG channel grew to 68, 8 more than last month. The problem is that I got banned from r/sportsbook. Too much promotion they say. I have got to find an alternative channel. Maybe I should try with Telegram ads?

Freelancing

I kept freelancing in April. I am doing very interesting work, and it definitely helps me pay the bills.

The cashflow

Time to look at the income for this month (without freelancing).

Damn, this is the first month in a few years that I am spending more than I am making. I feel like a VC funded startup right now. And it’s not a good feeling. Book sales are at an all-time low, and I don’t think this is going to change, maybe there will be a rebound at the end of the year. But in the short term I am not expecting one. I guess if publishing the translation of the book in Spanish has had any effect on the sales? I will wait until the end of May, and then I will try to take it off the market to see if it makes a difference.

The future

This might be and definitely is a problem for a distant future, or whenever I ßhave time. What to focus on? It’s clear that right now nothing is working, but it’s not clear in which direction to go. I might try to write another book, or maybe I can try to launch another product, since I have 58 different ideas for new products in my Trello board. Maybe I should launch a directory of not-validated startup ideas? Or maybe almost validated? Some of those ideas are interesting and have some validation like a viral tweet, or a feature request on a specific competitor tool. I will add this to the list. Now it’s 59.