I am still at very low MRR, that is all coming from my books published 4 years ago. I am still trying to build a product that can bring me a bit of revenue, even a couple of hundred bucks per month. So far no luck. I am wondering, maybe they all look like vitamin products, instead I should build some painkiller, and something that comes from my own pain(s).

Right now I have a few things going on in parallel, and I am focusing a day of the week to each of them.

Data Internships

I have made a few improvements to the website in the past weeks, I added a filter for positions and salary estimation data for the job listings. I also made a proper form, for companies to submit their internship. There is also an option to buy a Premium spot on the job board now. Nobody has bought yet, I need more traffic to be able to sell my first spot. With only 250 users per month, it’s not likely someone will want to advertise.

Google doesn’t love me, after the last update in March I have lost 80% of my traffic from search. I am not ranking anymore for queries like “data science internships” or “data analyst internships”. I am not sure why, I cannot see anything wrong with my Search Console dashboard. Right now even Bing sends me more traffic than Google.

Subscribers growth last month was about 3.5%, and I reached 210 subs in total. Growing steadily, but I am trying to be more active on LinkedIn and posting twice a week instead of once. This has the potential to bring me even more traffic.

Stoic Quotes

I shut it down last month, letting the domain expire. It started as an SEO experiment, following the famous Danny Postma tweet about building a business without an audience. I probably was very naive and went for an idea with little potential for monetization. I cannot say that I didn’t try it all. I tried to get traffic through SEO, Twitter, through Reddit, created merch and also published a book. In the end, I couldn’t make even $1 from it. Probably it’s a winner take it all market. It’s always hard to know why something failed, there could be a million reasons.

One takeaway from this, it’s not ok to follow someone else path, no matter how famous he is. Play your own strengths and learn from your own experiences. There are many good lessons in entrepreneurship, but there is no playbook.

X Topics

This is the project I launched last month. Some people subscribed, but I don’t have paying users yet. I have 15 early subscribers. Some of them have used the product only once. Most of them have just subscribed and never used the product. I have sent an email with updates on the tool (added the possibility to upload multiple files and working now on AI generated tweets) and 3 out of 15 people opened, which suggests me only a small fraction of the users even remembers about the tool.

I am also chatting with a few people trying to understand better the market for this kind of product. I am experimenting with a chat based on your past tweets now, fine-tuning existing models on the tweet history of users. I am going to share the updates in public and see if it sparks some interest.

At this point, with 0 users, it’s not useful to invest time in fixing bugs, the UX or adding features. It’s better to play more with the tech, talk to potential users, and see if it can pivot into something interesting.

Soccrbets

This is more an SEO experiment, a way to bring more people to my books about Soccer Betting. The idea is to write an article every month (or even more) on common questions around soccer betting and start to rank on Google.

I have written an article on BTTS this month. Once I have another 2 or 3 articles, I will start to focus on backlinks.

New products

When I was freelancing the main pain was to find new clients, so I am toying with an idea can build something that helps with that. I have been in touch with a few people with whom I worked in the past year and other people that are starting out as freelancers.

My idea is to deliver them a few opportunities per month, from companies that are likely to hire agencies or freelancers. A bit like a lead generation agency, but specific for Data Science. From the conversation I had, it is something that could solve a problem, but I didn’t hear the screams of pain from the people I talked to. Instead, I heard some excitement around the idea of a community of people who are freelancing in Data Science, to share their wins, their strategies and their struggles. Could this be the way forward? A paid community? I heard communities are extremely hard to build and to keep alive, but it could really be something that people want and could solve a pain point, for Data Science agency founders that feel a bit alone in their journey.

For now, I have set up a landing page, focused on generating leads for the people who subscribe. It’s called datafreelance.

The cashflow

As always, let’s take a close look at the revenue and expenses this month.

Record income from my books on Amazon. I don’t know exactly why, April has been my worst-performing month in the past years. I even stopped the ads in March because they didn’t look that profitable. Could it be a long-term effect of the ads? People see the book, maybe they save it in their wish list and then buy it later? Let’s see if the trend continues or if it’s been a one-time thing.

I have made a little investment in a Telegram course too. I consider it as a business expense, because it will give me the opportunity to explore another channel, with the goal to turn it into a revenue generating activity. It looks interesting and it caught my attention. I have seen it first on a tweet, followed the landing page, the copy looked convincing, and I bought after a few days. I almost never buy this kind of products, so I analyzed my behavior and those are the things that I noticed:

• I saw the author message multiple times before finally buying, and visited the landing page a few times before convincing myself to finally pull out my card.
• The author mentioned how much she makes from the channels she manages ($5k).
• I liked that the author has a similar story to mine (Analyst to Entrepreneur).
• The author spent time replying to my questions on X.
• The discounted price sounds right (most courses are around $50-100).
• She had testimonials. Even if the course is not ready, there was a good review about the author, that made me confident the purchase is worth the money I am paying.

I think there is a lot to learn from the points above, and I will try to take inspiration from them to market my products.

Life

This month I also travelled quite a lot. Visited Tallinn, and I had a great time. The city center reminded me of one of my favorite games, Patrician 3. And most importantly, I (quite randomly) met Daniele, who is an Italian Digital entrepreneur living abroad. Dan is one of these guys who are not very vocal on X. He does not have a huge following, does not make much noise. He builds good software, speaks to his customers and has a great healthy business, that gives him stability and the freedom to experiment with new ideas. It was great meeting with him in person, more of us should meet in person more often.