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The Weekly Business Review - TippyBits

A place where I am publicly tracking my progress building my consultancy. Here I'll post nearly weekly updates about my progress, stats, and what I am tracking towards.

When I started working as a developer advocate for AWS I started keeping a log of all the posts I had made, talks I gave and some of the details about them. I want to keep that same focus here. I'll be coming here once a week and want to start logging my progress. Maybe it will inspire someone else to to try what I've done. It's mostly for me though. I want to be able to see how far I've come.

I'm calling it the Weekly Business Review (WBR) after a favorite event of mine at AWS. We would get on a weekly meeting and discuss what went well, what didn't, and what goals we were tracking towards. I am using my own format here because the WBR format for AWS is protected as far as I am aware. Each section is dated with Monday's date and will cover the previous Monday-Sunday period.

I've come to realize a lot of the acronyms I am using here may not be well known. I track many things relative to their previous state. So for example, we have week over week (WoW), month over month (MoM), and not yet but hopefully 🤞 year over year (YoY).

6/3/2024

What a week! Highlights included getting my first deal signed and on the move! After signing my contract on Tuesday I worked hard to get our first deliverable out for May. Now I have a fair bit of time to work on July's deliverables. Additionally, This is the first month I'll be attempting to hold to my goals of 2 internal blogs, 1 external, and 2 videos. I feel like I may also supplement with some webinar/AMA events to drive external interest.

  • Business:
    • One lead came in from a contact I made a while back
    • Signed my first contract and delivered the first months work (this will be a recurring monthly commitment)
    • Monthly goals set to help drive traffic.
  • Content:
    • Delivered an external blog to get published
    • Finishing edits on a vector blog to be published on 6/4
    • Working on video for publishing 6/5
  • Social:
    • YouTube continues to be the biggest driver of new traffic with 849 views last week (-11% WoW). I am going to double down on my content and work on driving people to my other sites from there. I need to get better about cross linking content.
    • Website views up to 55 (+12% WoW). While I can't say I am happy about these numbers I am working on driving more traffic from external sites. A majority of website views are direct which makes it difficult to see what is/is not working. LinkedIn is the second highest driver which I would expect.
    • Twitter is essentially a no-op and I am de-prioritizing it. The content that seems to drive traffic on Twitter doesn't help me find new business. LinkedIn is much more promising with 1 website impression/275 post impressions.
  • Strategy:
    • Only slight adjustment to my strategy is working in more content syndication on 3p sites.

5/27/2024

This past week was a bit crazy for me. I believed I was going to be writing about one subject and after beginning to dive deeper I realized there was more information than I wanted to shove into one post. I've had to spin it around and now I am hopefully going to be releasing a very different type of blog.

  • Business:
    • Next blog is much more targeted to the audience I am looking to attract to my services which will hopefully start to turn out more leads for me
    • Have a follow up meeting with a client that will represent a recurring income for me
    • Also, I am looking to pivot my business to a product at this point... More to come on that
  • Content:
    • After pivoting my planned article 2-3 times last week I wasn't able to publish it in time. I'll be pushing to get it out today
    • In addition I have a wrapper of my vector blog/video going out on the OpenSearch blog this upcoming week
  • Social:
    • YouTube has really picked up with 958 views (+78% WoW) and 70 subscribers (+40% WoW). This is where I am going to be spending a majority of my time. While the content is not very well aligned with my business it is my fastest growing channel and I can't ignore that. The top video is my uConsole overview with 1600 views.
    • Website views are down again with 49 users in the last week (-85% WoW). The key here seems to be content published on third party sites. While I will be continuing to publish content on my site I think I am going to take a step back and modify my strategy.
    • Twitter and LinkedIn user growth was negligible.
  • Strategy:
    • I think I have come down on a reasonable strategy. I plan to publish two site blogs and one external blog per month. These will cover OpenSearch primarily. Then I will be aiming to publish 2-3 videos per month with one being about OpenSearch, and the remaining ones being more focused on gadgets and other tech to drive viewership. Twitter has completely dropped off my radar as a tool for business as the content there just really struggles. LinkedIn will continue to be a tool in my toolchain.

5/20/2024 Monthly Business Review (MBR)

Taking some time this week to look at my over all monthly stats and see how far I've come. I am still tracking weekly stats but I have a spreadsheet for that now. The most important thing is I've just got my first paycheck! It's off some hourly work I did a while ago but it's been enough to seriously motivate me this week! Using the 4/22-5/19 for this period.

  • Business:
    • No new inquiries from my website since I've launched. Several have come from other sources such as old partner relationships but none have panned out yet although 3 are still ongoing. 2 Site inquries, and 6 overall.
    • First paying client! - I've gotten my first payment and while it's less than 1/4 month's living expenses before taxes I am thrilled.
  • Content:
  • Social:
    • Website has had 683 users with 681 being new users to the site. Discovery is good but I need to work on broadening my distribution channels as the content isn't getting the distribution I used to have with Medium.
    • YouTube is been my secret winner with 943 views, 60.9 hours of watch time, and now up to 50 subscribers. This is probably going to be one of my primary ways of driving traffic is producing blogs then, creating a video using the blog.
    • Twitter isn't really doing as much for me as I would like. With 24,905 impressions I have only gotten 148 link clicks and gained 66 new followers. This feels low and while I am going to keep engaging there I will probably be spending less time.
    • LinkedIn seems to be the best investment for impressions and engagements. With 13 posts (including re-posts) I have gotten the same 25,517 impressions and 319 engagements. Plus this is where I believe my clients will eventually stem from.
  • Overall Strategy: This next month I need to aggressively pursue content creation and distribution on channels other than the ones I own. I have set a hard deadline to get my first contract at July 1. If I can't get a revenue stream that will begin to sustain me by then I will go back to finding my next gig.

5/13/2024

This weeks review is a little hard to write. Much of the excitement around my site and content has died down and that is showing heavily in the metrics. Speaking of I probably need a spreadsheet that will let me track these better over time. So much work just to track business.

  • Business: No new inquiries - When I reflect on what drove the first few inquiries for my company I realized most people had seen me on a channel where I mentioned what consulting I did. I'm still not ready to take a goal around this until I get my first few contracts signed. If my contracts signed end up being 3 months then I may only need 2 inquires per month.
    • Following up with 2 proposals in the next week
    • Met with one new potential client and sent them a proposal
    • Deployed K8's cluster for testing and content generation
  • Content:
  • Social:
    • YouTube was the top gainer with 323 views (+587% WoW) and 5 new subscribers (+13% WoW)
    • Website had 77 new users (-77% WoW) - I feel this is mostly because I did not generate any new blogs over the last week which are what drove a majority of traffic to the site. What is confusing is of these 77 users most of them directly clicked a link meaning there was no referring site. I'm not certain how they found those links which is worth diving into.
    • Twitter followers NC
    • LinkedIn 1485 followers (+1.3% WoW) and 5429 impressions
  • Other:

5/6/2024

  • Business:
    • No new inquires - probably need to create a goal around this
    • Talked with another consultant for OpenSearch and shared a bit of my experience
    • Found an insurance provider
    • Need to create goals that will help drive business
    • Rewrote 1 proposal to better suite the companies needs and budget
    • Writing 1 new proposal for a client
      • Included finishing the code to make the deployment process as smooth as possible
      • Probably ~75 hours went into the repo, deploying the site and setting up the mailing provider
  • Content:
  • Social:
    • Website had 323 users (+50% WoW), 97% of which were new users
    • Twitter followers 860 (+2% WoW)
    • LinkedIn followers (+1% WoW)
    • No YT growth
The end of vendor-backed open source?
The license changes of Redis and Elasticsearch may harken the end of open-source projects backed by solo vendors. Let’s work through what that means.
InfoWorldDavid Tippett

4/29/2024

  • Business:
    • Launched my website on Monday on LinkedIn and Twitter
    • When to Charlottesville VA for Haystack US
      • Met with 7 people/companies
      • 3 potential clients (2 proposals sent)
      • 3 companies who may refer clients
      • 1 collaboration possibility
    • Created account on Wave for invoicing and Chase for banking
  • Content:
    • Finished editing a post for launching on the next Monday (4/29)
    • Wrote the first page of my books introduction
  • Social:
    • Twitter thread got 786 impressions
    • LinkedIn post got 11,500 impressions
    • LinkedIn followers: 1445
    • Twitter followers: 843
    • YouTube followers: 36 🥲
    • Website had 215 users 99% of which were new users
    • Inquiries through my website: 2

4/22/2024

  • This was the week I talked with Alex DeBrie (Wed 4/17/2024) and got convinced to start consulting
  • Thursday created my Ghost site
  • Migrated my blog from Medium
  • By some miracle shared my idea with some people who may turn into my first clients
  • Wrote my blog on my next steps after AWS
  • Created services page and Calendy account for people to schedule with me