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 👋