This Week In React #87: Special Edition - Story & 2021 retrospective

My background

Let's tell you my story and why I created this newsletter 😉 skip this section if you are in a hurry 😏.

Before 2014, I was a Scala/Java developer, and I hated JavaScript 😂 and I was suspicious toward those using Node.js.

In my startup, I was a backend Scala developer. In 2013, our frontend developers struggled to maintain our Backbone frontend. I got involved and tried to help. At the end of 2013, we concluded it was better to rewrite everything. We hesitated between AngularJS and React. As Scala developers with a functional programming background, we choose React.

Fast forward, I'm now using React every day since January 2014 😱. This was not simple at the beginning: there were no state manager, no context (at least not officially 😏). In 2014, I created a state manager Atom-React: it was like Redux, but a worst version 😂 Still, I was proud to have time-travel debugging before Redux (video).

Early 2017, I became a freelancer. I started to help a friend (CTO of a startup) that needed a mobile app: a good opportunity to learn React-Native. I also joined a French freelance collective Alqemist and we shipped a few nice React & React-Native projects together.

Soon, I started to look for high value consulting gigs, and I figured out it was not so easy to sell. Despite my experience and my open-source contributions, nobody knew me in France. I'm rather discreet, I don't often attend conferences or meetups: I had to find something that suits me to work on my personal branding.

In 2019, I started to produce content: I commented the React news each morning on LinkedIn, in French, to build a local audience. LinkedIn is often late on news compared to Twitter and there's always something interesting to comment. This worked pretty well and I started to receive consulting opportunities.

I launched the French newsletter in February 2020 (1st edition 🇫🇷). Thanks to LinkedIn, I started with 500 subscribers.

I had a plan, but something unexpected happened 🤪. This tweet led me to work for Facebook on Docusaurus, as a contractor. It's not often that you have the opportunity to be paid to work on a popular open-source project (and Facebook looks good on my CV right? 😏). This collaboration was supposed to last a few months, but ultimately will last much longer.

I stopped my consulting activity, but decided to keep the newsletter and try to make it a self-sufficient project. Having a local audience could remain useful someday.

At the end of 2020, I started converting my newsletter to Twitter threads (1st edition), to develop an international audience. I received a lot of positive testimonials and decided to keep doing these threads.

This newsletter in 2021

Vision

My value proposition remains unchanged: saving time for professional React developers who are already familiar with React and need to stay up to date.

I try to differentiate myself from my big American competitors with more relevant comments, a better understanding of the React ecosystem, highlighting trends and weak signals.

I probably don't make it easy for myself: I prefer to have a smaller but very qualified audience.

Stats

Beginning of 2021:

• ReactHebdo: 1357 subscribers

• ThisWeekInReact: 0 subscribers

• Twitter: 4246 followers

End of 2021:

• ReactHebdo: 2352 subscribers (+995)

• ThisWeekInReact: 1945 subscribers (+1945)

• Twitter: 12571 followers (+8325)

My analysis:

• The newsletter in French is growing slowly (+20/week)

• The newsletter in English started well (1st edition end of Octobre 2021 with 1000 subscribers), and is growing much faster (+100/week)

• My Twitter account exploded (+160/week)

I also started a LinkedIn newsletter (🇫🇷) : 5500 subscribers in 2 weeks 🤪 incredible my entire network has been invited, but I think there is a lot of noise: duplicate subscribers, my family, recruiters ... LinkedIn does not give any information on this audience: we are stuck on their platform.

Format

The format has changed a bit:

• 1st edition of 2021 (🇫🇷): less links, smaller comments, a few images...

• last edition of 2021: more links, longer comments, Extras section, meme...

I don't know if it's really better than before? 🤷‍♂️ Don't hesitate to tell me what you think.

I would love to put more images, but Gmail often truncates longer emails, so I can't put a lot of images and text at the same time.

I also want to include some evergreen articles instead of just commenting the news, but not sure how yet.

Organization

At the beginning, I did my curation work on the fly and on weekends, and I wrote the newsletter + the twitter thread on Mondays.

In the end, I decided to devote myself seriously to this project, with a hard limit of 2 days per week.

I now concentrate all my curation on a single day to avoid being distracted on the other days. I subscribe to lots of other newsletters, and I use Twitter filters (I created a Twitter list with interesting accounts). It's a bit chaotic, but it works.

Usual planning:

• Monday 9h-13h: superficial curation, scanning many articles, saving things that seem interesting to Pocket

• Monday 14h-19h: adding the most interesting links to the newsletter draft, reading articles more carefully, writing notes and draft comments

• Tuesday 9h-13h: writing the final version in French

• Tuesday 14h-16h: creating the thread Twitter and images

• Tuesday 16h-17h: last review + English translation

• Tuesday 17h: send the 2 newsletters and the Twitter thread

• Tuesday 17-19h: promotional activity, marketing

It doesn't look like that, but this newsletter takes a lot of time 😅 and it therefore has a direct impact on my freelance turnover. That's why I'm trying to make this activity sustainable.

Note that it includes curation and reading time, on which I'm very easily distracted and I tend to follow non-React rabbit holes 😂

In my opinion, 2 days is way too much: I spend a lot of time on tiny details that you probably don't even care about. I also feel guilty if I miss any interesting link. I need to apply Pareto's law better and try to reduce this time to 1 day per week (like it was in the beginning).

Sponsoring & ROI

The French newsletter already accepts job and product sponsors.

I have a preference for job offers: a good offer is relevant content for my audience. The typical case: a startup that recruits a React-Native dev pays € 400 to have an ad for 4 editions. This may sound like a lot, but it's quite similar to the rates charged by my big US competitors.

This French newsletter brought me 4050€ HT in 2021.

Do the maths and you will probably understand that this activity is not profitable at all 😅 but I have more and more sponsorship requests, and I also intend to accept sponsors for the English version. In the short term my MRR should go above 1000 € / month.

My newsletter led to 2 successful recruitments of 2 React-Native developers via sponsorship (budget of 800 € HT). This reassures me about the viability of the project, and the ability to convince new sponsors!

This newsletter in 2022

I have received a lot of positive feedback on this newsletter, and I think the "product" is appealing to the target audience.

I intend to continue to invest myself in this newsletter 2 days a week. I am convinced that I can make this project sustainable.

My goal is to continue to grow the 2 newsletters, attract quality sponsors and reach 20k turnover before the end of 2022.

I will have to move up a gear, redouble my efforts on marketing and improve significantly on the acquisition of new subscribers.

I would also like to offer a recruitment service specializing in React (probably only in France). I'm assuming that a candidate will prefer to talk to me rather than some average headhunter who doesn't know anything about React, so why not give it a try? The only problem: it's an activity that takes a lot of time 😅.

Other projects

I will continue to work on Docusaurus in 2022, it will be a good subject for a next special edition 😉. My 2022 planning is therefore already quite busy.

I have a few other projects, which are not progressing much due to lack of time.

Why not create a course or training? Honestly, I don't really know about what? I know a lot of things, but not always in depth. Maybe about Expo, or cross-platform?

ThreadMotion.com is another side-project: it permits to convert Twitter threads to videos thanks to Remotion. I still didn't release a MVP, as I figured out I really want to use 3D to make the videos look much better. That's why I'm currently learning React-Three-Fiber. Even if this project fails, I still see so many opportunities for Remotion + 3D.

I just finished How to Take Smart Notes and I plan to invest in a "second brain" 😂 that should help me write better content in the future.

Music

Totally unrelated: let's finish in music!

I have been a fan of electronic music for 20 years (especially deep, progressive house, techno ...). For this premiere we will stay soft, we will wait a bit for the bunker music 😉.

A good opportunity to introduce you some French artists that are really nice to see live:

• Caravan Palace - Brother Swing - Live: a group that you must see in live once in your lifetime

• Molecule - Sila - Live: really like this song, in particular the live version

• DJ Jacques - Live: very particular DJ playing with real-life sounds

• Her - Live: great rock band, best seen in live

Happy new year and see you very soon 👋