Celebrating An Anniversary: Three Years of Writing About Analytics - Issue 154
Celebrating An Anniversary: Three Years of Writing About Analytics - Issue 154
Reflections on what 3 years of writing a newsletter about analytics has taught me.
This week, this newsletter celebrates 3 years! 🎉🎉🎉
Three years! With a published newsletter every week.
Three years were put into 154 publications with deep dives, interviews, recaps, roundups, checklists, code snippets, an unacceptable amount of sugar, and a new level of heightened anxiety. Three years of weekly publishing through the sun, rain, pandemic, deadlines, and the war.
To my family, friends, and mentors - thank you for three years of supporting my work and ensuring that I can keep doing it!
To my subscribers - thank you for making this newsletter happen!
While I’m pouring champagne to celebrate, here’s what you missed this month if you’re not a paid subscriber:
Top 10 Advanced SQL Functions For Data Analysis - my favorite 10 SQL functions of advanced querying focused on statistics and analysis with use cases and examples.
An Introduction To Feature Engineering - “gentle” intro into feature engineering with steps, methods, and common techniques.
How To Hire Exceptional Analysts and Data Scientists - an interviewing guide for hiring managers with my “go-to” interview questions for data science and analytics.
Three years ago (I’ll keep saying “three years” to be more dramatic), I published my first newsletter. What was meant to be a fun 30-minute weekly exercise turned into a new endeavor with a new identity, reach, and voice.
Today I decided to change things a bit and share with you my journey, candid reflections, and painful learnings about writing a weekly newsletter. If you are thinking about starting blogging or getting into content creation, you will learn that this journey is both the most exciting and the most difficult one.
✨ Why I write this newsletter
1. Document my journey and store my work
Over the years, I’ve created a lot of checklists, playbooks, templates, code snippets, etc. This journal is a place for me, first of all, to store, keep, and reread my own work. Here’s where I keep all of my favorite articles, best frameworks, examples, gotchas and caveats, reminders, calculators, definitions, etc. I put it all here for my subscribers to reuse and hopefully upskill and grow.
2. Bridge the gap between academics and the industry. I want to show what data analysis is or does “in action”.
Today we use less than 10% of what we learned back at school. I remember spending many months trying to understand Beta distributions. Comprehending how to calculate the continuous probability of probability gave me PTSD. And yet, I never had a chance to actually apply it!
I have a strong objective to make every publication “applied” and bring academia into the industry by writing about projects and challenges we work with every day. I want to create a resource I wished so badly had existed for myself years ago.
3. Bring classic data analysis back.
As technologies have matured, they stop being a cutting-edge advantage and instead, become an expectation. It forces data scientists and analysts to focus on “how” rather than “what” or “why” in their work. I want to encourage and inspire my fellow data practitioners to go back to the basics and enjoy genuine analysis.
⏳ How this newsletter started and grew
I had 2 different newsletters.
Initially, I started with a light recap of events, publications, news, and updates within the analytics community to document my own journey in a diary format. Thus, the newsletter's name is “Journal”. I put together a news aggregator that located content with the “data analysis” keyword via JSON API, loaded it in SQLite db, and parsed it with Python to compile in a roundup. Then I would write my snarky commentary for things that got my attention and send a newsletter out. It was meant to be light, fun, and somewhat private. I did this for a few months and tried to keep it within my tiny network of fellow analysts who accepted my arrogant writing style with passive-aggressive jokes. It was my favorite time of blogging.
When the newsletter reached the first thousand subscribers, it hit me that it was no longer “private” anymore. My articles started to be referenced, mentioned, or even plagiarized. And those were early publications that I was not proud of. I had to make a decision to either end it or transition into a new proper format with better content. I surveyed my readers to get a better idea of who they are, where they work/study, what challenges they have, and what they like to read about, and based on the feedback made a decision to pivot from a short and light “roundup” to deep dives, case studies, and how-tos format. Since then, I no longer sleep.
The transition was not easy. I had to spend more hours per publication, back it up with research, validate data, crosscheck with experts, polish, watch my language, and more. This is when blogging became more difficult and not as enjoyable for a little side project.
After many weeks of ethical, legal, and existential overthinking, I took the difficult decision to introduce paid subscriptions. I made an uncomfortable announcement and “re-launched” the same (but very different) newsletter.
The content change accelerated the newsletter's growth. After the switch, the average open rate went up from 24% to 52% across all subscribers, and the daily growth rate increased at least 5x. Even for a very small, actually tiny, and rather specialized newsletter written by no one special, I started getting invites to events, tickets to conferences, “check my demo” asks, requests for sponsorships, and an imaginary crown. Notably, I used no social media back then. This was all only through word of mouth.
My writing strategy and routine
It takes a lot of work to generate and deliver original content in a week. Every week. I learned to be fast, productive, and consistent.
This wouldn’t happen without Jared, my ex-manager and coach who stays behind the scenes and keeps me accountable and polite. Jared helps transform my chaotic thoughts into structured and readable text. Thank you, Jared, for watching my back for… 3 years! ⭐ [It’s been a pleasure! -Jared]
I create 3 drafts for every publication. The first draft often is the longest, most emotional, and most dramatic. By the time I get to the 3rd draft, I’ve cut 80% of the text and made it dry and cool.
I put a 3-hour cap on my time per week: 2 hours for writing, and 1 hour for polishing and publishing. No time for marketing is left.
I use ChatGPT. It's responsible for this newsletter's titles, and subtitles, and helps me to put my “Why on earth would someone buy this unnecessary stupid and useless CDP crap to over-complicate their data stack” into nice proper “From desire to delight: allure and appeal behind purchasing unnecessary and useless Customer Data Platform”.
It’s all about discipline. I write when traveling, celebrating, grieving, or cooking.
Writing is easy. What’s hard is backing it up with references, data stats, cross-validation, and checking who said what, and why. It’s hard to find (and connect) with subject matter experts, not to mention even asking them to check your writing. All of this in a very short turnaround. And it’s hard to keep it all interesting to read but unbiased, be candid, but constructive. Especially when you love and live in this topic.
🌱 My learnings (so far):
Less is more
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time"
I don’t know who said that, but it’s brilliant. It takes skill, time, and solid knowledge to condense the topic.
I have to pack causation analysis or a regression deep dive along with SQL code and examples and all the details into the “newsletter” short format and expect that readers will learn it in the whole minute they spend reading the weekly email. How would someone do this?
The power of being small
Every day there is a new skyrocketing milestone from other bloggers, and every day it feels like you are way behind. It’s easy to give up if you aim for that two-comma number of subscribers goal. Reality hits hard. If your current audience is below 20K readers and you grow 100 new subscribers per day, it will take you about 10-12 years to get to Not Boring by Packy McCormick,
, or today’s reach.I personally don’t publicize or fixate on the total number of subscribers, because (1) it’s a vanity metric, (2) for a year I manually removed hundreds of subscribers who did not open my newsletter for 3 months (because I am not here to spam them), and (3) I have my own “magic” number of 56K readers as the milestone after which it starts making sense to do sponsorship, affiliates, testing, and ads, and I am unlikely to reach it any time soon (are there that many analysts in the world?)
There are so many ways to measure impact and growth. There are so many benchmark traps.
Even though my newsletter is small, my voice is heard: my average open rate is above 52% (and above 75% for paid), the free-to-paid conversion is above 4%, the trial-to-paid is 82%, and my churn is less than 5%. If anything I learned from analyzing SaaS and subscription growth and revenue for other people for 12 years, is that these are very healthy stats, and I created something special here ✨.
The power of being independent
My newsletter is not associated with any company, product, or SaaS. I don’t need to create “a problem” and then write 1K words to offer my “solution” and hopefully close a sale (is that how it works?). There is no board watching my writing, no sales quota to meet, and no budget to spend. I truly, no matter how cheesy it sounds, go after genuine data and analytics with an aim to advance and improve it. Thus, I can afford to disagree, critique, vent, or be too direct, and it allows, in a way, a lot of leverage and power with my own relative freedom within this publication.
There are not too many bloggers in this space who are independent and unbiased. And I have big respect for them. Driven by our mission, we write content during the night, taking time away from our families. And we share a space and an audience with the ones who have the budget, the team, and the blog promotion roadmap to make sure their content (aka pitch) is heard. So yes, I want to raise the bar in order to challenge and call out many bloggers who simply pollute this already over-polluted data air.
I mean, I understand they have to sell June, but… really? There are so many exciting things to cover about product analytics. Is that the content they go with? :)
🚀 What is next
More guests posts
I will be sharing more guest posts and learnings from other analysts and experts whom I admire and learn from, who have been reviewing my content and continue helping me to keep the bar high.
No sponsorships or paid promotions
You might see occasional “Try It Out” chapters where I share an application or a tool, but they’re not sponsored in any way except that I independently fell in love with it, and I’d like to recommend it personally.
Discount for students and recent graduates
I am giving a 50% discount to all active students and recent graduates → click here.
You can also email me at olga@berezovsky.me with your university/school name, and I’ll set you up.
😍 What readers say
🔥 Top 10 popular publications
The best investment is an investment in your own skills, expertise, and growth. I hope this newsletter can help its readers find a path for growth in data and analytics, point to the right sources and documentation, and inspire to learn and love data analysis.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next Wednesday!