The Full Recap of 2024

Metrics, best posts & my plan for 2025

I’ve just had the longest no-laptop holiday in two years. I’m back, feeling refreshed and ready to get going in 2025 🏎️ 🏎️ 🏎️

BUT, not before looking at what worked and what didn’t in 2024. Instead of simply looking at vanity metrics, I want to document the learnings and keep me accountable, so I can come back at the end of 2025 to see where I’ve got to.

So, here’s my 2024 Growth Dives business recap 🤿

By the Numbers

I hit 1 million impressions on LinkedIn and 233K views on Medium. What’s interesting though, is that I get more reach but less followers on LinkedIn, but less reach and more followers on Medium:

• New Medium followers: 8,061 (136% growth)
• New LinkedIn followers: 5,764 (55% growth)

What I care more about is email, where I saw:

• New email subscribers: 1,114
• Total Unsubscribes: 42
• ​Deep Dives published: 18 (started Aug 22, 2024), and 36 on Medium

My 3.8% unsubscribe rate feels high based on benchmarks. But, I prefer to keep a smaller, more engaged list so that I stay out of junk and spam. I've also heard that unsub rates are higher in the early days, so perhaps not a biggy.

And perhaps the most important metric....

• Hikes done: 18 ⛰️⛰️

In all seriousness 2024 was great for physical and mental health, which helps keep me motivated and consistent when it comes to content. I'd like to keep this balance in 2025.

My Best Posts

On LinkedIn we have:

1. ​It took six years for me to fall in love with Figma. And one month to destroy it.​
2. ​Let’s play a game. Spot the difference between Duolingo’s 2022 and 2024 welcome email.​
3. ​2023 was my most productive year yet, and also my healthiest year ever.​
4. ​Over half of Duolingo’s active users have a streak of 7 days or more. But not me.​
5. ​Where has the music gone on Spotify?​
6. ​I downloaded Duolingo again after 2 years to learn how to order a coffee on holiday (I’m off to Italy in 3 weeks 🇮🇹).​
7. ​I cancelled my Loom membership last week. And I was shocked. Pleasantly shocked.​
8. ​People: ‘wow you’re so organised’.​
9. ​I’m cancelling one of my new favourite subscriptions​
10. ​The hidden secret to productivity:​

My biggest learning here is that when I'm the dramatic/opinionated in the hook I often see the best results. The strongest hooks make you click into the body of the post (a good signal to the algo).

On Medium the top posts are different. Funnily, my best 2 posts ever were 2023 not 2024…

Have I peaked?

Maybe 😂

Just kidding, it’s not the reach that matters to me. It’s the depth of my learning. I’ve covered more growth topics and more startups in 2024, which is a win.

What was New in 2024:

1. Launched this newsletter — woohoo!!

This was an iteration of my first landing page:

Then I iterated to something more fun:

I’m pleased with the newsletter (but still getting used to the tool). There's more customisation I want on the landing page and I’ve barely tested messaging, format etc. First is consistency, then I’ll start to test things like length, frequency, landing page, welcome email etc.

2. Hired and learned how to ask for help

​I’ve leant on others a lot this year. And it’s paid off. Specifically delegating the things I’m either not good at, don't have time for or don’t enjoy:

• Accounting
• Admin (both personal and business)
• Financial planning
• Proof reading
• Brand design
• Coaching
• Nutrition
• Exercise (i.e. coaches, teachers)

(If anyone wants recommendations for any of these just ping me).

All of which have paid themselves off based on time saved, money saved and knowledge.

But I won't delegate is what I love: the writing and designing. I'm even thinking of doodling more on the analyses, as I find the trackpad and keyboard just so limiting for the ideas I have.

3. Properly focused on LinkedIn

At the start of 2024, I wasn’t consistent AT ALL. Come August, I started trying to post daily (on weekdays) on LinkedIn, and almost achieved it.

Typically, I do: a long-form piece per week (1500–2000 words). Then I break this up into smaller pieces for LinkedIn.

2025 will be trying to continue this, without risking content burnout. I’m planning to operationalise, repurpose and generally be more efficient in how I share my content across different channels to make it more sustainable. That means using genAI to help me make my articles into shorter form posts for other channels.

It also means making sure I have self compassion for when I just want a break and don't want to post. That's fine too.

Highlights:

1. Meeting cool people and clients

I’m incredibly grateful for everyone I’ve met. I’ve worked with some incredible clients this year like Miro, Blinkist, Exponential View, Thriva and more. This is largely down to my content and network.

Through my posts (both LinkedIn and Medium), I’ve chatted to Slack, Canva, Figma, Typeform, Monzo, Loom and others.

My learning here is: be curious, ask questions, put yourself out there, state your opinion and the rest will come.

2. Getting to 1K

A bit milestone! I’d randomly set 1k by the end of the year when I started on Aug 23, 2024.

I surprised myself by hitting this early, largely (I think) down to optimising my medium profile, a weekly cadence and LinkedIn posting.

Growth has massively slowed over the past two weeks due to Christmas and taking a break, naturally. And I don't mind, I spent a load of time with family, friends and outdoors.

3. Building accountability into my week

This is a big one. And probably THE biggest learning for 2024.

I have three ways to keep me accountable that has led to my Q3 and Q4 success:

1. A Friday posting deadline. Telling all of you (and the world) that I post on Fridays mean that I actually do it.
2. A power hour every morning with my friend Ben. 8–9am to focus ONLY on content.
3. Deep dives with Flown. Keeping my accountable with strangers in a room, all body doubling together.

Everyone works differently. But for me, I now know that I need deadlines, I need friends pushing me and I need a room full of strangers diligently working to focus.

Not-so-high-lights...

1. Missed my LinkedIn goal

I had a goal of 10k by the end of the year and I missed it by over 1K 🥴

However, I’ve decided to ditch follower goals. The algorithms (especially LinkedIn) are distracting and unhelpful.

What’s more helpful is sticking to where you get energy, posting without thinking about what others’ will say and ignoring the algos altogether.

2. Feeling scrappy and burnt out

I very much believe in get it out rather than make it perfect.

Meaning that there have been spelling errors, some bugs and other things (shout out to those who noticed, and if you didn’t notice then…well…carry on as you were).

For me not being perfect has helped me be consistent. It's kept me healthy and not feeling like I’m trying to keep my head above water.

So, 2025 will be more of the same, with a little more support on proof reading to reduce the errors I make.

Plans for this year

I’m SO excited for three things coming soon:

1. A rebrand!!

I’m not super into brand: it’s not my specialty and it feels like admin over anything else.

However, I feel that my brand identity isn’t super strong. And given I’m planning to work on this over the next few years, starting early makes sense.

I’ve also seen people repurposing my content (sometimes citing me, sometimes not..), and so making sure that I’m ‘seen’ across my visuals feels important.

SO, I’ve been working with a fab designers on my new brand. Can’t wait to implement it all.

May take me a few months to change it all, but I’m not in a huge rush.

2. Exploring other formats

I tried a few videos that did well on LinkedIn. I’d like to bring this into the newsletter. Some things I’m considering are:

• A 3-min audio summary from me (thanks for the idea Pavlov!)
• A loom video
• Notebook LM podcast versions of the newsletter

Will try these things out, would love to know what you think.

3. Continue with content

I don’t have a super long content plan. I generally have pieces I’ve always wanted to do and then other things crop up that I just can’t not write about. So I have a small backlog - and I find that if I don't write about what my gut tells me to, someone else beats me to it.

I started with a plan that looked like this:

But then drifted away to more ad-hoc spontaneity.

At the moment, I don’t feel like I need to become more structured with my planning. I like my organised chaos that is my Figjam board:

I'm excited for 2025 to say the least.

In summary, my biggest focuses this year are: delegation, efficiency/sustainability and having fun while I’m at it.

As always, any feedback, comments or more — just ping me.

First growth dive of the year coming next week!

See you there,

🕺 Rosie 🕺