Hi everyone!
We initially planned to return on 8th January.
But here I am a little earlier, wishing you all a Happy New Year! 🎉
With the end-of-year festivities, it's been a quiet week for React, as you'd expect.
I also take the opportunity to share a little newsletter retrospective, and thank you once again for reading the newsletter and making all this possible.
In 2024 the newsletter went from being a sustainable project to a break-even business. This allows me to invest more in the project and improve the content. Let's share some concrete figures from 2023 to 2024 :
- 📈 Subscribers: 31k ➡️ 46k - A great +15k subscribers increase this year. Not exponential as I expected, but still very nice!
- 👥 Writers: 1 ➡️ 4 - I'm no longer the sole writer of this curation newsletter: Benedikt, Matthieu and Cyril have backed me up when I was unavailable.
- 📨 Issues: 38 ➡️ 47 - Onboarding other writers allowed us to send out an email almost every week!
- 💰 Income: 47k€ ➡️ 99k€ ARR - We are getting good as sales, and have successfully convinced most companies we wanted to work with to sponsor us.
- 💸 Charges: 15k€ ➡️ 36k€ - We have increased our charges significantly this year by onboarding guest newsletter writers (14k€). The other charges are ads (12k€), SaaS (7k€) and virtual assistants (3k€).
Overall I think it has been a great 2024 year, looking forward to a promising future. I didn't reach my ambitious goal of 50k subscribers, but I'm not too far. After the summer, it became more challenging to grow, not sure why. I still reached another important symbolic milestone: having more newsletter subscribers than Twitter followers, becoming less dependent of social platforms.
In 2025, I'd like the newsletter to be more than just a list of curation emails. I plan to onboard guest writers, paying them to produce a series of articles on topics they are passionate about. If you think you'd be a great fit, reply and say hi! 👋
If you'd like to help me realize my plans, please share the newsletter with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it, or on any social platform.