What a year! When I’m thinking of what happened this year the only thing that comes to mind is how much I’ve learned, in large part thanks to this newsletter. Many thanks to all the readers - you are the main source of motivation that keeps this newsletter going! Let’s get to business!
Email Subscribers
The e-mail subscribers growth rate was very close to the last quarter - we ended the last quarter with 16.9% subscriber growth. We started the year with 431 subscribers, meaning that we’ve achieved a yearly growth in subscriptions of 214.85%. Not bad!
Website Traffic
Compared to the previous quarter the number of users increased by 15.2% and the number of sessions increased by 23.3%. These days I’m saying quite a low amount of traffic from Google Discovery, if anyone has any ideas how to get featured there more often then feel free to let me know!
Time Spent on the Newsletter
This quarter was quite busy, mostly because of my work on an extra project (coming soon, I promise) and getting first SWAG produced - the “you will never gait alone” stickers.
Highlights of the Quarter
This quarter I was out talking to people about Weekly Robotics on 3 occasions - once presenting Weekly Robotics at Robotics and ROS Meetup in Zurich and twice meeting with people from Academia and Industry.
As I mentioned in the previous section I took some time to get the stickers printed and send it out to some of you. I’d really like to send it out to all of you but I don’t have a budget for that at the moment.
Speaking of budget - the biggest news is WR started making money! We had two companies purchase sponsored entries in the newsletter! In December I got the payout from Humble Bundle for the donations you’ve made while purchasing the books from the referral links. The total money earned from these sources got very close to covering the cost of making and sending out the stickers to the few of you.
The Future
I really really want to take this newsletter to the next level and will try very hard to do it this year. The main limiting factor is my free time. I need to make a living and since this project didn’t even get close to paying for itself I can only work on it in my free time. I’m hoping to change it this year by creating sponsorship options and looking hard for partners that will help me take this thing to the next level.
Many thanks for taking the time to read this report. I hope that you find the newsletter as exciting as I do and if you have any feedback, please feel free to reach out.
Mat