My First 100K

I have a difficult relationship with metrics for website or social media. I’m constantly exposed to the barrage of advice and posts about metrics and analytics and growth and all that through social media and I can’t lie, it has had a negative effect on me.

I don’t want to care about them because most of the things people do to chase the growth and high numbers are actually negative things to the readers (and only there to appease The Algorithm). I want to write in my style and every time truly prioritise the reader over any kind of recommendation algorithm. My blog is also what they call “variety blog” these days as I don’t have a niche focus on specific technology or part of life but as the regular readers have learned to know, I write about all sorts of things.

It’s been hard to convince myself that I can’t get all the wins if I don’t make those sacrificies so I should just be happy with each individual person who learns something new or gets inspired to do something new in their life through reading my blog.

And as I don’t sell anything, I have no ads and nothing like that, it’s not like the growth would bring an immediate financial reward or anything - which is also a perfectly fine goal for a blog to exist. My main motivations are to get the thoughts and experiences from my head to a form that others can read and learn from, to document technical topics so I can link to them if ever needed and to build a body of work that I can use when applying for jobs or gigs.

But I can’t lie, I was ecstatic when I noticed that for the first time ever, my blog had reached over 100K views in a 30-day window. For years, I used to say that my mom is the only one who reads my blog but I have to admit, that’s no longer the case.

To celebrate, I got my favorite pomada creme donut and a Moomin raspberry soda.

The growth has been very slow and steady over the years but then this summer it absolutely blew up and I started gaining exponential growth around mid to late July.

I don’t have detailed analytics because I don’t want to track my users but through Netlify’s server-side analytics, I can see the monthly numbers of views and visitors and the top performing pages.

It’s interesting to see how these numbers will evolve over the next 6 months: have I been able to capture the new audience as repeat readers and how much effect will it have when I switch back to weekly blogging in September.

(The title of this blog post is a homage to Tori Dunlap’s great financial book Her First 100K)