---
aliases: ["July 2024"]
Is A: Month
Created at: "2024-07-28"
Belongs to: "[[24q3]]"
Rating: "😄"
---
# July 2024

## Focus

- Race Maratona dles Dolomites — the big one for [[2024-complete-two-gran-fondos]]
- Begin [[24q3-premium-tier]] planning — pricing, content strategy, platform selection
- Launch [[24q3-summer-reading-sprint]] — target 8 books in July-August

## Highlights

- Completed Maratona dles Dolomites in 9h15m — Passo Giau at dawn was transcendent, Fedaia was brutal, but finished strong — [[2024-complete-two-gran-fondos]] achieved
- Started planning [[24q3-premium-tier]]: researched Substack paid, Ghost memberships, and Stripe checkout — leaning toward custom Stripe integration for flexibility
- Read "An Elegant Puzzle" and "Team Topologies" — both excellent, immediately useful for newsletter content
- Newsletter at 43.5k subscribers — summer slowdown typical but growth still positive
- Began outlining [[24q3-codemotion-talk]] abstract — submitted "Scaling Engineering Culture" as the proposed topic
- [[measure-podcast-downloads]] hit 6.5k/month — organic growth without new episodes (between seasons)

## Reflections

Maratona was the cycling highlight of the year, maybe of my life so far. 138 km through the Dolomites, 4,200m of climbing, starting in the dark at 6am in Corvara. The Sella and Gardena passes were hard, Campolongo was deceptively steep, but Giau — Giau was magical. The sunrise hitting the peaks as I climbed the final switchbacks, the silence broken only by breathing and chain noise. I didn't care about my time. I was just there.

The post-race week was recovery — both physical and mental. After months of structured training and race anxiety, there's a strange emptiness when the goal is achieved. I channeled that into reading and planning the premium tier. Pricing is the hardest part: too cheap and it devalues the content, too expensive and the audience is too small to sustain it. Need to think about this more in August.
