This article was published on December 23rd 2014 and received its last update on January 22nd 2019. It takes about 3 minutes to read.
2014 in the rearview mirror
Following the tradition of other fellow bootstrappers, I take a look back at the past year and my goals for 2015.
Table of contents
This article is mainly written for myself - It will be interesting to look back in a year and judge whether I have reached my goals and whether my business is evolving the way I intended.
Even though I cannot present you with fancy dollar signs (as I have no paid product yet), you may find it interesting if you are a bootstrapper yourself.
Milestones reached this year
- I finally attended 30x500 in April after having postponed it for far too long, which gave me the kick and inspiration I needed for starting my own business (cannot thank Amy and Alex enough for that).
- Around the same time I launched this website with the intention of never letting it go offline again (I have launched quite a few websites in the past which I did not manage to keep alive).
- I published 19 articles on this website.
- I grew my mailing list to 242 subscribers.
- I wrote 18 emails to the people on my mailing list (mostly DevOps guides).
- I published a free book as incentive for people who join my mailing list.
All in all I am quite proud of how everything turned out so far. I consider myself in a very early stage of bootstrapping but I already learned a lot about my audience and myself which I hope will enable me to build upon my strengths in the next year.
My goals for 2015
My number one goal for 2015 is growing my mailing list. This has been the most difficult part for me since the beginning and I definitely want to get better at it.
Furthermore, I want to release my first paid product in the first quarter of the next year. It will be an ebook about efficient Rails operations and I am really excited about it - I started working on it a few weeks ago and I believe it is going to be really great.
(If you want to help with my number 1 goal, please point your fellow Rails developers to the book's subsite).
As for the less important projects, I want to rewrite the bigger part of this website's backend, primarily in terms of integration with my email service provider.
Thank you all for your support!
No matter if you are a member of my mailing list or not - since you are visiting my website, you are most important for my business.
So this is the time of year to say a big "Thank you" to you and all the friendly and supportive folks in the bootstrapping community.
Happy holidays and all the best for 2015!
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