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Holy crap, I did it! An Update

At the start of the month I aimed to release a book called Career Switch To Coding, I started writing it around the 25th June and I am delighted to say that I released it on the 30th July on Product Hunt and was the 7th most popular product for the day 😀 which I'm stoked about (it was also my 34th birthday so not a bad gift to myself)

My aims for this month were to:

  • Release a product without writing a line of code
  • Loosely build in public
  • Hit my deadline
  • Get over myself and actually do marketing

I hit all of those and I want to share some numbers for how the month went and some surprise extras that I threw in the mix as well.

  • Worked 115 hours 29 minutes according to Toggl
  • I wrote 0 lines of code for this project! (This is a huge win if you remember back to my earlier post as I tended to confuse coding with progress)
  • Started tweeting and grew from 0 to 154 followers (Twitter is hard) @allthecode_
  • Grew my coding Instagram @allthecode from 2,317 followers to 3,259 (942 increase), releasing 12 reels garnering around 162K views and my two most liked picture posts
  • Wrote a 20,000 word book, 6 email templates and 2 worksheets
  • Relaunched careerswitchtocoding.com on Squarespace from Carrd
  • Grew the mailing list from 0 to 72 subscribers and created an automated welcome email series
  • Started a podcast by the same name and released 3 interview episodes that have been listened to around 600 times (apparently the Squarespace analytics are iffy for RSS though so who knows)
  • Had 1,309 website page views
  • Paid an illustrator to make an amazing cover (I seriously love it), and a proof reader to make me look smarter than I am
  • Published 6 blog posts (and syndicated on dev.to)

And the thing every one cares about is:

  • Released the book for $19.99 on the 30th and sold 3 copies

I was aiming for 5 so a little disappointed but still delighted that 3 people choose to buy it and I know it will help them so that’s all the matters to me right now.

I start a new full time job tomorrow so the focus is on marketing and mainly content generation for now, I want to get the right traffic to the site so the focus is relevant blog posts and a weekly podcast episode. I also need to sort out purchasing power parity as many of my followers are in lower income countries.

Overall I give myself a 7 out of 10 for the month. I wish I had gotten the book done a bit quicker and not let some scope creep get the better of me but I am incredibly proud of myself for getting over fear of being on camera and making a marketing video and also doing the podcast.

If anyone is, or knows, a self taught developer who would want to tell their story on the podcast I would be delighted to interview them. I can offer a couple of links and a plugs for their social medias and projects in return. I am also keen to speak to anyone hiring developers as well, as that is an interesting perspective.

Thank you for all the encouragement in my early posts this month, it really meant the world to me 😀

  1. 2

    Great update!, thanks for sharing.

    1. 1

      Thank you, this month will be less as I’m in a new full time job but will still make some progress 😀

  2. 2

    Congrats! That's awesome work

    1. 1

      Thank you - I got more done that I expected

  3. 2

    Fingers crossed for you Simon!

    1. 1

      Thank you, I’m crossing toes as well for me!

  4. 2

    Congratulations on the launch Simon!

    1. 1

      Thank you, now the real work starts I think 😂

  5. 2

    Thx for sharing the deets!

    1. 1

      Thank you, still feels a little uncomfortable but I think that’s a good thing

    1. 1

      Thank you, hopefully this is the first shoots of something great

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