---
aliases: ["Q4 2024"]
Is A: Quarter
Created at: "2024-10-01"
Belongs to: "[[2024]]"
Has: ["[[24q4-annual-review-process]]", "[[24q4-sponsor-dashboard]]", "[[24q4-laputa-start]]", "[[24q4-black-friday-campaign]]", "[[24q4-cycling-year-review]]"]
Status: Done
---
# Q4 2024

## Focus

Q4 was about closing the year strong and planting seeds for 2025. The Black Friday campaign was the commercial centerpiece. But the most exciting thing was starting work on [[24q4-laputa-start]] — the personal knowledge management tool I'd been sketching in notebooks for years. The quarter also meant wrapping up the annual review process and reflecting on a transformative cycling season.

## Highlights

- [[24q4-black-friday-campaign]] drove 2,800 new subscribers in 10 days and converted 180 free readers to premium — best single campaign ever
- Built [[24q4-sponsor-dashboard]] giving sponsors real-time access to their campaign metrics — reduced back-and-forth emails by ~70%
- Started [[24q4-laputa-start]]: initial Tauri + React prototype, basic markdown reading, YAML frontmatter parsing — the MVP of the MVP
- Designed and documented [[24q4-annual-review-process]] — a structured template for reviewing goals, projects, and metrics across the year
- Completed [[24q4-cycling-year-review]]: 6,200 km ridden, two gran fondos, FTP up 12% year-over-year
- Newsletter crossed 50k subscribers in November — [[2024-reach-50k-subscribers]] achieved
- [[measure-sponsorship-mrr]] closed the year at EUR 11.4k, more than doubling from January — [[2024-double-revenue]] hit
- [[2024-read-24-books]] finished with 26 books total — exceeded target

## Reflections

Hitting 50k subscribers felt like a milestone that validated the whole year's strategy. When I started 2024 at 35k, doubling the growth rate felt ambitious. But the combination of pillar content, podcast reach, the Codemotion talk, and the Black Friday push all compounded. Each channel fed the others in ways I couldn't have predicted at the start of the year.

Starting Laputa was the sleeper highlight of Q4. I'd been frustrated with Obsidian's limitations for months — specifically around structured data, relationships between notes, and the inability to build custom views. So I started building my own tool. The early prototype was rough, but the moment I saw my own vault rendered in a four-panel layout I'd designed, something clicked. This could be more than a side project.

The sponsor dashboard was [[person-matteo-cellini]]'s idea, and it was brilliant. Sponsors love transparency, and giving them self-serve access to metrics reduced our support burden dramatically. [[person-paco-furiani]] set up the automated reporting pipeline. Looking back at [[2024]] as a whole, every major goal was hit or exceeded. That doesn't happen often, and I don't take it for granted. Now the question is: how do we scale this in [[2025]] without burning out?
