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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).

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:
    • Still 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