Year in review, 2024
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2024 was the year I got back and amongst the community, and it felt great to be back!
BlogI published 33 new blog posts. As a whole, my blog garnered 353k views from 255k visitors. About half of them came through Google search. This is down from 2023... but the decline is offset by more people reading my content through my newsletter nowadays. Most read blog posts:
NewsletterI began taking my newsletter seriously in 2023 and sticking to a regular cadence. As I explained here, my one regret as a content creator is not starting a newsletter sooner! Today, we have a community of 13k readers. In 2024, I published 50 issues with an average open rate of 52% and a click rate of 3%. Most popular issues (by open rate):
ConsultingThe consulting market was dead in 2023 but showed signs of recovery in 2024. Many agencies had been in crisis mode for months, and my consulting business had been quiet as well. Luckily, as an independent consultant, I have few operational costs. I also diversified my revenue streams early on, and my training business picked up the slack. This year, I helped two clients launch their MVPs. One of them is an AI-powered code review tool currently in beta. We'd appreciate your feedback if you could try it out. To sign up for a free personal account, go to evolua.io. We're working on support for teams and the ability to upgrade to a paid account so you can unlock unlimited code reviews. In addition to these two projects, I also conducted some architecture reviews, ran several private workshops, and spoke at a few private events (e.g. internal developer conferences). If you want to work with me, check out my consulting services here. Production-Ready ServerlessI had, by far, the biggest year with my Production-Ready Serverless workshop. Over 350 students participated across five workshops in 2024, and over 100 have already signed up for the Jan 2025 cohort. That's nearly double the number of participants in 2023! I'm not able to attribute the improvement to any one thing, but it's likely a combination of:
I worked with a marketing agency at the end of 2023 and invested ~$10,000 in the endeavour. But sadly, we could only attribute a handful of sign-ups directly to the ad campaigns. It was an expensive way to learn what doesn't work! Instead, 30% of students said they found out about the workshop through a friend or colleague. And another 30% came through my social media posts. Also, since I started the workshop in 2020, ~15% of the students have done it more than once. That's a fair amount of repeat customers. So, as far as marketing goes, this is what I think works:
If they (potential customers) trust you, they will come. If you do a good job, they will come back for more! Plans for 2025I'm adding a new Terraform track for the Jan 2025 cohort. Combined with the existing CDK and Serverless Framework tracks, this is essentially 3 courses for the price of 1. I'm not raising the price of the workshop. The new track is about adding value and making it useful to more students. Furthermore, since many students return after 1-2 years, I have created an exclusive offer for them. After paying full price for the workshop at least once, they can sign up for a continuous learning plan. A yearly subscription that's about 10% of the full price and gives them unlimited access to future updates. I'm serious about making Production-Ready Serverless the best serverless training money can buy, if it isn't already ;-) Online CoursesIn total, ~1000 students signed up for my on-demand courses, including 187 students who signed up for my new (free) course, Building real-time applications with Momento. I'm a big fan of the Momento platform. This course teaches you how to build real-time applications using their serverless cache and topics. It includes three working demo projects:
Public speakingI delivered 31 public talks at conferences/user groups/webinars. Most of these were online, as I took it easy after recovering from my medical woes in 2023. However, I attended in-person events in the second half of 2024 and visited 11 cities - including Milan, Barcelona, Cardiff and Munich. I wrapped up the year with a week in Vegas for re:Invent 2024. ICYMI, here are the biggest serverless announcements during re:Invent and just before re:Invent (aka pre:Invent). I will return to in-person events in 2025, and I hope to see you around! PodcastIn 2024, I published 16 episodes, which were downloaded 17k times across podcasting platforms and viewed 26k times on YouTube. Most listened/watched episodes:
YouTubeI uploaded 34 videos. In total, my channel received 130k views and 6,500 hours watched in 2024. Most watched videos:
Social mediaLinkedIn has become my favourite social media platform. It's not without problems, but I currently find much better engagement and conversations on LinkedIn than anywhere else. In 2024, I had:
Most of these comments are people asking questions or giving genuine feedback. Thank you for all the wonderful questions over the year! 🙏 Aside from LinkedIn, I have joined Bluesky along with many from tech Twitter. If you're there, you can find me as @theburningmonk.com. And that's it for 2024, hope to see you in 2025 👋 Wish you a merry xmas and happy new year! |
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