This time the report comes more or less on time. In May, I still spent quite a lot of time travelling, but I also managed to find time to do a few new things

• I started to work on a new feature for xTopics. I keep postponing the launch, but I should be able to launch in June at some point.
• I found one new client to freelance. It’s not a big contract, but it is very interesting and helps me pay the bills.
• I attended a Startup conference in Moscow and met a few interesting founders.

Quick update on all my projects. Let’s see how they went in May.

Data Freelance

I interviewed Dominique. Super-interesting guy that went into freelancing fresh off of Zurich ETH and made $100k in a bit more than one year. Dominique’s a very inspiring story that my readers loved. I shared the interview on X and got some new subscribers because of that. Lesson: I should share everything more often and on more platforms. I have now 57 members, which is 12 more than last month.

Data Internships

This one is paused right now. Didn’t have time to work on it and I didn’t even send newsletters. Which is probably very stupid since it’s the project that gets more traffic overall (mostly from SEO). I think the only way forward for this project is to automate more the job selection process so that I don’t spend hours curating jobs, and at the same time start sending massive cold emails to companies looking for sponsors.

Subscribers were stable in May at a total of 2030.

xTopics

As I mentioned in the intro, I am developing a Product Hunt trend tracker. The initial idea was to launch it quickly on Product Hunt in order to do some product marketing for xTopics. As I kept working on it, I started to see more potential, and I plan to integrate the feature inside the main product. The screenshots I posted online attracted some attention, and I might even think of pivoting out from Threads.

The reason I am thinking of leaving the Threads’ audience is that I get almost no traffic from that platform. Instead, I get much more visits from X. Even if I make more impressions with my posts on Threads. For example, an interesting thing happened this week. I saw a post on X by Gumroad, they were looking for ideas and were ready to pay people. I replied plugging my product and this got ~100 clicks and something around 8 new free subscribers to the tool. Looks like the landing page is converting after all. But of these 8 subscribers nobody connected their Threads account. Probably they don’t have a Threads account, after all they come from X. But it would be stupid to ignore this strong signal. So I wonder what to do.

1. Maybe I am targeting the wrong audience. Maybe I should target the X audience and make a tool for them (but I will need to pay for the X API).
2. Maybe I need to broaden my scope and make a tool that shows trending topics across various platforms (like Product Hunt, HackerNews and GitHub).
3. Maybe I should try this marketing strategy on Threads as well and stick to the original idea.

I think the less effort path is number 3. I need to find a few keywords and accounts to target and start commenting on their posts daily. Sounds like a good marketing effort. Let’s see if it pays off this month.

Soccrbets

The season is over and in May I published my last prediction before the football starts again in 2 months. I didn’t make any new video.

There is more football this Summer with the Club World Cup starting in June. Would be interesting to write something about that, maybe a video, maybe an article analyzing the various teams. It sounds like a lot of effort though, between getting the data and trying to get some sense out of it. Probably better to focus on something else.

I have got now 40 subscribers on my YT channel, unchanged from last month and the subscribers on the TG channel grew to 71, only 3 more than last month. I am now relying only on word of mouth to acquire new subscribers, since my Reddit ban.

Freelancing

I kept freelancing in May, lost one client, but found another one. Here I am not going to post the earnings, but enough to say that they range between 2.5k and 4k a month, depending on what I do. And I am doing very interesting work, and although I am not saving anything, it helps me and my family pay the bills.

The cashflow

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

Going back to positive territory again, after the big drop in book sales that happened last month. But I should think like a startup and invest every bit of profit from my projects back into the business. There are a few things that come to mind

1. Turn on Amazon ads for my soccer betting books.
2. Pay for X API and expand xTopics in the X/Twitter niche.
3. Pay for a service that lets me send hundreds of cold emails to potential B2B leads.
4. Pay for an AI API to build an AI first product (probably something around image generation for B2B).

This month I will try Amazon Ads. I have already done it before, but it didn’t really work well, and I spent more money than I earned in the end. But I got in touch with Alexandra this month, she was super-kind to give me some pointers on which keywords to target, and I am going to give it another shot, since there is also Prime Day and in general book sales go up for me in the Summer. By the way, follow Alexandra, very interesting person and great content both on X ad YT.

The future

Re-reading this update, I think I am doing too many things at once. I am definitely trying the strategy of throwing spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, but I am sticking with spagetti projects that don’t work for too long. Spending time on things that don’t work is not a good idea, but I also have a hard time letting go and understanding what is not worth my time anymore. Maybe I will give one full month of attention to each of my projects and if it doesn’t get traction I kill it? Sounds like a good strategy to move faster.