Welcome to another year in review, my second on this site (you can read last year’s here). As usual I’ve grouped it into the same format as last year.
Family life
2024 was a big milestone for us as a family. Zach started school. This is a massive change for him (he was a victim of abuse at the first nursery he went to, trigger warning – worker 1 jailed for 14 years, worker 2 jailed for 3 years).
Moving to a bigger setting, like a 60-pupil school, was scary for him. However, he smashed it and has done well.
Travel
This year has been no different to others when it comes to travel. Here’s where I travelled to in 2024. I’m including holidays both in the UK and abroad.
- Centre Parcs (family)
- Disneyland Paris (family)
- Cheltenham (Woody meetup)
- Portugal (team meetup)
- Turkey (My parents 50th wedding anniversary)
- Thailand (family)
- Greece (family)
- Belgium (Beers, with friends)
- Wales Caravan (family)
- Cardiff (Woody meetup)
- Portugal (another team meetup)
- Turkey (family New Year’s last minute break)
It’s quite a lot again. As you’ll see below, my wife is now a travel agent. She has been able to find us some amazing deals. For example, we had two weeks in a lovely Thailand hotel for £1k, flights excluded.
Health
I’ve managed to keep going to the gym and feel much fitter. However, my diet hasn’t been great, and I’ve stuck around the 89-90kg mark again. I deadlifted again, but then realised by back just isn’t up to going heavy.
I injured it a while back. Now, whenever I try and lift heavy (for me, hi Remkus), my facet joints become swollen and painful. Just crouching or moving is hard.
Work (Automattic & Jetpack)
Wow, how to sum up an incredible year at Automattic and Jetpack. One of my areas of focus running up to my sabbatical was to improve the perception of Jetpack. I worked on a lot of different things:
- Created a testimonials page and started regular product marketing updates.
- Started and ran live webinars with 1,000’s of attendees live.
- I created video content on YouTube and improved the quality of my video production.
- Looked at (lots) of ways to increase the number of positive reviews of Jetpack.
- Plus much more, that’s still in progress and not ready to share yet!
Sabbatical
This year I reached the milestone of 5 years at Automattic. This meant I could take 3-months off to recharge and explore different things. This is a great benefit and it’s even more special for me because I joined after my company was acquired.
Why is this important? The terms of the acquisition meant the share component vested over 3 years. It’s a strong testament to Automattic and how great a place it is to work that I’ve stayed 5+ years. I plan to stay many more years with the best years ahead of me.
While on sabbatical, I did a lot of things:
- Helped my wife launch her travel agent business – Life of Travel
- Built a couple of web applications entirely using AI (cursor AI and Windsurf).
- Here’s one of them and the other.
- Travelled (see above).
- De-cluttered the house (but not enough).
- Started a Newsletter and grew it. Stuck with the content creation process.
- Created a free WordPress plugin (Binge Bank) and launched it on Product Hunt.
- Made a couple of pSEO areas of the site (like 50 Newsletters to subscribe to).
- Created a bunch of helpful content for this binge bank.
Newsletter Growth
I started a Newsletter for this site. I wrote 20 articles. It was mostly one a week, with a short break for Christmas. You can see the past articles here.
The growth of the Newsletter is below, explaining the chart below
- I wrote and promoted it on X (I didn’t get many subs).
- Then, I tested different paid ads mid August:
- Reddit <– won by a mile.
- Quora
- X/Twitter
- Then, towards the end of September, I discovered Refind (sign up here)
- This grew the list fast and is relatively cheap per subscriber CPA overall $0.78 (39.2% x $2.00)
- I stopped paid promotion when the chart flattened, but more recently, it’s started to grow organically.
What’s Next?
More of the same, I’ll continue to write content for my Newsletter, so do subscribe using the form below
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