🎄2024 in review - Stats, Figures, & Outlook for 2025

Full breakdown of one year of writing 28 newsletters and 247 LinkedIn Posts. Read this if writing online is on your list for 2025.

Dominik Nitsch

23 Dec 2024 — 8 min read

Hey there & (almost) Merry Christmas!

Today, I’ll break down my growth as a creator over the past year. But first … let’s begin with a story.

In high school, I considered becoming a journalist and going to Journalism school. What a cool life, I thought – you get to write for a living. So I floated the idea to someone I knew who happened to be a journalist. Was this a good idea?

“Absolutely f**king not.”

“Learn something reasonable that actually makes you money, and you can still become a writer afterwards.”

Fine. I went ahead, studied the science of making money (aka. business) instead, and forgot about the whole journalist thing.

Until a few weeks ago.

I sat down to write in the morning – like every day – and realized: I am a writer now. This is what writers do.

This newsletter – whose 2nd anniversary is today – has gone from being a simple accountability mechanism to get back into writing to being a weekly mainstay in my routine … and your inbox.

So thank you, dear reader, for coming along for the ride.

While nobody pays me to write yet, publishing online on a daily basis has had a significant impact on my ventures, and created a ton of connections that I would’ve never made otherwise.

I’m very thankful for the privilege to write daily, and it still blows my mind that over 500 people read this stuff.

With that out of the way, let’s break down the year 2024 from a creator perspective: the numbers, what worked, what didn’t, and the outlook for next year.

Let’s dive in. ⬇️

[1] 2024 in review: facts & figures

Note: I switched sending tools in April (more on this below), hence the subscriber count starts at ~320 in April.

Dec 23rd, 2023: 284
Dec 22nd, 2024: 511
YOY Growth: 79% (down from 417% last year)

Growth flatlined for a lot of the year, as I was figuring out what the next angle for the audience will be. It took off again once I tried forcing growth less, and focused more on building other ventures (a digital product and a bootstrapped business).

Is this an example of the law of reversed effort?

A nice hack was to give applicants at my recruiting company, Generalyst, the option to subscribe. They’re my ideal reader profile anyway, so that seemed like a no-brainer. You can also see in the stats when I stopped accepting applications.

The rest of the subscribers came from organic traffic, LinkedIn, referrals from other creators (with Vassilena being an absolute all-star referrer – you should check out her work), and online course signups.

What’s cool to see is that my average open rate has consistently hovered above 60%. That’s a good indicator.

I feel that flexing with the number of your subscribers is a vanity metric: great that you’re able to attract them, but are they reading your writing?

In this case, it certainly looks like it:

kit.com subscriber scoring: on the right hand side, you can see readers that engage with content often, on the left the ones that don't engage at all.

That’s also why I actively encourage readers to unsubscribe if they’re not getting any value.

Overall: solid growth, but needs more fuel. Maybe social media can help. ⬇️

[1b] LinkedIn

Impressions:

Dec 23rd, 2023: 296.127
Dec 22nd, 2024: 524.661
YOY Growth: 77,17%

Not sure what was going on in the summer, but engagement leveled again afterwards. Again, crazy to think that my content has been viewed more than half a million times. Difficult to wrap your head around that.

Followers:

Dec 23rd, 2023: 1.925
Dec 22nd, 2024: 2.857
YOY Growth: 48,42%

Follower growth picked up quite a bit once I quit my sabbatical and started working on business again. Seems to be helpful & interesting to people when you build something new.

In a time where a ton of LinkedIn content is AI-generated or otherwise incredibly f**king boring, it’s easier to stand out than one might think.

I’m still super positive about LinkedIn; even though the platform feels crowded already, there’s still a ton of room to grow, especially if you write about something else than growth hacks.

[1c] Observations

Here’s what else I learned from writing 28 newsletters & 247 LinkedIn posts, launching an online course, and recording 11 TikTok’s:

I refuse to use the “LinkedIn” hacks but they work so damn well. Every time I post about a topic that gets people riled up about something (like 40-hour workweeks or coffee), the post goes viral. But well-researched, topically on points posts take off much more rarely.
When writing on social media, you're a slave to the algorithm. When writing on email lists, you own the algorithm. That's why this newsletter will continue to be the focal point of my writing.
Writing and posting online still opens a ton of doors. I’ve met wonderful people, made new friends, and received fantastic business opportunities all through that. While it’s a grind, it’s worth it.
Writing a lot has also sharpened my thinking: I’m able to synthesize thoughts much better if I’ve written about them before. As Paul Graham says, “writing is thinking”.
It's best to not do it alone – having a community of people with similar struggles around you is super important. I did the Un-Ignorable challenge last year, and they're doing it one more time in 2025. Sign up here, I can glowingly recommend it.

[2] Considerations for 2024 in review

Last year, I published some considerations for 2024. It’s easy to say, “I’m gonna do X”, much harder to actually do it. And even harder to admit when things didn’t work out.

Generally speaking, this is a great way to measure your personal effectiveness: the higher the ratio of “things you say you’re gonna do” to “things that you actually do” is, the higher your personal effectiveness is.

Here we go:

Name and Brand

I did, in fact, not rebrand my newsletter despite trying several times. Just last week, someone asked me what my newsletter is called. I didn’t have an answer, and that needs to change.

This remains a consideration for 2025. I feel like I have a much clearer idea what I write about now (see the Content Roadmap in a later section), so it’s a good time to tackle this again.

Newsletter Platform

I started out on Substack, and switched to Kit (formerly ConvertKit) this year. Zero regrets so far. I love the segmentation that the platform allows for (every email is slightly customized to your needs), the automations that you can build and the fact that it integrates with almost everything that I use.

My blog is now hosted on Ghost, and I love the smooth aesthetic. SEO is still non-existent unfortunately.

Second Social Media Channel

Besides a few experiments on TikTok in May, I didn’t add another social media channel. It was simply too much work so far. Also, editing videos is harder than it looks, and every good reel needs at least three takes.

This year, LinkedIn has launched native video inside the mobile app. I wanna test out video, so I teamed up with a videographer to record 16 reel-style videos that will be posted in LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Let’s see what works and what doesn’t.

I also have enough material now to take X and Instagram Threads more seriously. If I have all this writing, I might as well put it in front of more eyeballs.

Digital Products

Actually did this by launching an online course on Personal Productivity. And then launched a startup.

Now, I know what I want my readers to do: apply to my startup, work with my startup, or buy my online course. That’s super helpful.

I also began writing an ebook on international expansion that’s nowhere close to being published.

But the creation process of these digital products is fun, and they’re yours to keep: every now and then, I receive an email because somebody just bought the course. Feels illegal to make money while doing something else. Might be worth adding more and more digital products to the portfolio.

[3] Considerations for 2025

Aside of the considerations that remained, here are two new ones:

Publishing an eBook

I spent a lot of time during my sabbatical writing an e-book with a good friend of mine. We gotta publish it in 2025, or we will never finish it. Nobody benefits from work that’s 80% done and hidden on a Google Drive.

Collaborations, Guest Blogs, & Podcasts

Besides going hard on more social media, I’d also try to collaborate more with other creators. There are a bunch of cool writers in adjacent spaces (like Anna Mackenzie, Generalist World, and Andreas Jonsson) that would be super cool to collaborate with – maybe in the form of guest posts, maybe simply by recommending each other.

I’d also like to appear on more podcasts and wouldn’t exclude the possibility of recording a few episodes myself to see whether I like it. This year, I appeared on two: Developers Unplugged and The Inflection Podcast.

Question for you:

Who else should I collaborate with?
Whose podcast should I be on?

[4] 2025 Content Roadmap

Here’s the current premise of the newsletter:

Who it’s for: white-collar workers who don’t want to specialize, but instead build a career that fits their lifestyle.
What it’s about: frameworks, systems, & stories that help you do the things you really want to do
What I want the reader to do: stop putting themselves into one box and start embracing themselves as the wonderfully multi-faceted person that they are

This is what the roadmap for 2025 looks like: