I did a 2020 Q1 retrospective pretty late, so this is more focused on the 10-30 April period.

Ritza progress

Ritza is still evolving at what feels like a slow pace. I launched ritza.co today (actually it has been live for a while, but it had a brain dump on the homepage which I rewrote today to have more structure and provide more relevant information). I shared it on ZATech, HackerNews, and the EUTech telegram group and got some good feedback (thank you if you were one of the people that provided this!), which I am integrating into the next iteration.

I am still in some contact with two “startup facilitators” – organizations in the Netherlands which can endorse startups which I need for my visa. Unfortunately both are very slow to respond to my emails, so I keep assuming that they are no longer interested, only to get a reply once I have given up.

Other miscelaneous bits of progress include:

• Trying to sign up for MailChimp again but realising I had already used the single “audience” for a test page I launched (startyourown.co) and then abandoned, so signing up for ConvertKit instead. Both are companies firmly in the marketing world that I consider at least slightly email (tracking, targeted advertising etc), but I do not want to sink the time needed into building my own mailing list system at this stag.
• Having the deck I mentioned in the previous post designed on fiverr - I wasn’t super excited about the result but it’s not terrible either and was good enough for what I needed it for. You can see it here
• Telling various people about Ritza and getting feedback. I did a mini-pitch and discussion for Ritza to two informal meetup groups, both through ZATech, and got some positive feedback on the concept (yay!) and some advice.
• I started a “Zettelkasten” system based on the advice of CP Botha. I’m still trying to figure out exactly to best use it and I am currently maintaining both a physical version with pen and paper and a digital version (I think the double entry actually helps instil the notes mentally too, but I only have 12 or so thus far so we’ll see).

Revenue

In the previous post, I mentioned I was on track to make $6000 in revenue for April. I ended up invoicing $5600 in revenue in the end after having to end a relationship with one client.

I had already agreed to something significantly below my usual rate for a trial article to “build the relationship” and had a good call with the CEO of the company to discuss the goals for the piece. Things seemed fairly promising until I submitted a 100 word or so outline as requested (basically just headings and a short description of what would be in each) and got dozens of nitpicky comments in response – their editor spent over 2 hours (based on the Google docs comments timestamps) making comments about style, capitalization, American spelling conventions, etc etc. Maybe she was just very thorough but I took it badly and it felt like the comments were coming from an egotistical place rather than a supportive one, so I decided that it wasn’t worth the time or emotional energy.

What got published

• I spent many hours on editing a Python data science tutorial which had some pretty obscure and frustrating bugs and took way longer to fix than I had estimated.
• I also wrote Machine learning for managers, which again hit rank #1 on Google after 48 hours for the search term Machine Learning for Managers and is now hovering between #1 and #3 for me.
• I compiled my first showcase. This involved downloading the original sources, cleaning up some of the markdown, finding a pandoc workflow that works for me (at the moment it’s markdown -> .adoc (asciidoctor) using pandoc and then .adoc -> html using asciidoctor and the Ruby CSS stylesheet with highlight.js and the Monokai theme (which seems to be the only one that highlights a decent number of Python keywords). Once I have a publication pipeline better put together I’ll publish a separate article on that. I also am editing the collection into a book format (currently downloadable as an ebook from the showcase page, but I’m adding an introduction, removing external links, and linking the chapters together more cohesively still).

Where next?

I’m still trying to get the legal and tax side of everything set up. Progress is frustratingly slow. I also have a todo list which currently contains things such as:

• Collecting the rest of my content from around the web to combine it into more “showcases”
• Extending the homepage and additional pages to answer more questions people have (what kind of content do you produce?, why is it so expensive?, is this marketing?, why should I buy this? are some at the moment)
• Adding an “/open” dashboard (I was going to link to the popular Baremetrics page here but then I discovered that they link to “Hubstaff” which provides malware to allow employers to spy on their employees so I won’t)

I don’t expect things to change too much in the next 4 weeks while I am still spending a majority of my time at my full time job, but I hope to set more ambitious monthly goals from 1 June!