I use these posts are part of my effort to build in public. They are intended to provide an imperfect snapshot of what I am working on and progress towards goals. If nothing else, they are useful to me as record keeping. If you want to get these updates in your inbox, join the newsletter!
Overview
I spent the majority of last week focused on on my Mapbox and React Deep Dives series and switching my personal site over from MailChimp to ConvertKit. Initially the idea of a newsletter or mailing list made me cringe (it feels too salesy). The process of building in public has made me re-evaluate my categorically bad assessment of things like SEO, newsletters, Twitter, and marketing though. It has been refreshing to have this previously held ideas challenged.
Irons in the Fire
- Mapbox & React Deep Dives series
- Scoped - A Scoping & Budget Planning Tool for Freelancers (free/pay what you want)
- Newsletter
- Personal site redesign
Metrics
Making just about everything transparent and accessible.
- You can check out the Growth Dashboard I mentioned below
Here are the things I worked on during the last week.
Growth Dashboard
The What
- growth analytics dashboard built on top of Google Sheets and Google Data Studio. Access it here.
- bare bones at this point. Opting for simplicity as it increases the likelihood of me updating the metrics.
- eventually would like to bring greater automation to the process
The Why
- to understand how various aspects of efforts are/are not working
- easy way to visualize targets and progress towards them
Newsletter & Mailing List
The What
- Switched over from MailChimp to ConvertKit
- Redesigned my personal site home page to more prominently feature newsletter
- Started strategizing more around newsletter/mailing list (despite my initial opposition)
The Why
- necessary to promote my products and hopefully help people.
Personal Site Improvements
The What
- Redesigned my personal site home page to more prominently feature newsletter
- Added a newsletter sign up page
- Improved layout and other style issues throughout the site
The Why
- Wanted to more prominently feature the newsletter and convert that into sign ups
- Fix some styling issues that had been bothering me for a while
Writing
The What
- Published two blog posts
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Top comments (3)
Good stuff,
Though I personally avoid trying to track metrics cause then I get anxiety,
I get anxiety just by looking at my github stars sometimes.
Though, glad to know, I should probably add a mailing list for new posts as well, maybe add a bot into github to mail when I merge a new post pull request.
Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah I can see how metrics could cause anxiety. I don't read too much into them but instead use them as a rough north start and to gauge if I am heading in the right general direction.
Make sense, if I could control myself from checking it every now and then, I’ll add them in the future