HAMY LABS - 2024 Review

Overview:

High: Shares have been doing remarkably well, growing by ~2x in video
Low: Builds have been interesting but not gaining much traction
Seed: Enjoying my recent builds, more to come.

Overview:

High: YouTube channel doing v well!
Low: My Social game is bad. Also long form writing not doing too well.
Seed: Gonna keep writing anyway cause I like it.

My Shares are the high of my Creation bucket so we'll start here.

HAMY LABS YouTube

Stats

Videos: 120 (~3x per week)
Views: 317k (4x vs 2023's 67k)
Subs: 4.1k (~2x vs 2023's 1.8k)

My HAMY LABS YouTube channel grew in viewership by ~4x vs 2023. This is partially because I leaned into a few "exploding" topics that got outsized viewership and partially because I simply posted a lot more this year than I have in the past.

I credit the increased posting to a new perspective on writing I got from Ship 30 - a 30 day writing course. It emphasizes quantity as a means of moving towards quality and I found it refreshing to share more smaller things. So that's what I've been doing then doing a quick voice over to turn it into video.

This is also the first year my YouTube has been monetized and while it can't (and probably won't ever) pay my bills it certainly helps pay for my coffee and hosting costs which has been nice and makes me feel more comfortable spending some money on probably-throw-away experiments and dumb websites.

More on the money side in Business.

Overall I'm very happy with where my Shares are at and I'm enjoying where my YouTube channel is going. I don't think I'll ever be a full-time creator or garner a huge following but I find the Shares to be meditative for me and I've connected w a lot of new ppl / ideas online through it that I wouldn't have otherwise. This feels like a hobby I can sustain and want to pursue for the next 10 years so smth worth investing in.

Top 10 Videos in 2024:

Video Games

I've purposely omitted two videos that otherwise would've appeared in the top 10. These are small guides on video games that I enjoy making but don't really fit with the rest of my content.

I've noticed a trend where some of my video game guides do FAR better than my tech posts that require much more thought to put together. My hypothesis is that video games are a larger market and my guides tend to solve more mainstream problems vs my tech posts.

I don't think it makes sense to post the video game stuff alongside my tech tutorials but I'm also not oblivious to the fact that the data seems to be pointing to an opportunity here (esp since I play so many video games in my freetime anyway).

So I'm making a small bet here and creating videos on a new YT channel HAMY GAMES to see if there's interest in guides I already create for myself as I play through games.

HAMY LABS Blog

Stats

Views: 54k (~same as 2023's 52k)

My blog posts remain the core of my shares. I love writing and think it's probably a hobby I'll continue throughout my life, regardless of whether or not people read it.

This is a good thing because my writing doesn't really reach that many people. I think this is for a few reasons:

I write on my own site which has low distribution
The topics are niche
I write long-form which many ppl don't like
My reshares aren't viral on any platform, etc etc.

But it doesn't matter to me that much - I see most of my writing more as a public journal:

Helps me process my thoughts
Saves these thoughts in a way I can access it later
Forces me to refine these thoughts in such a way that it might make sense to others (which really helps me make sense of it myself)

So if I'm honest I would keep writing even if no one read it - and I do that a lot anyway in my personal notes and journals.

But it is nice to have this writing read and engaged with. I've gotten a ton of good feedback on my systems and solutions from the internet on topics ranging from F# to web dev to video game tactics. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't like that.

Which is a big reason why I've been publishing more frequently this year and turning many of those posts into videos - it gets more engagement that way. But you'll notice that most of my videos are really just me reading my posts - and that's because I really like writing and even enjoy the reading of it now but I'm not really a big fan of video making / editing so kinda steer clear of that. This definitely limits the audience that would enjoy these videos but it aligns better with what I want to do with my time so I think is better overall.

If I had to guess why my Shares aren't getting read more it's probably a few things:

Topics are too niche
Reshares don't play well with algorithm (shorts are not good for tiktok/ig, tweets are not very viral)
My info / presentation is a bit dry - I'm def not gonna win any influencer personality awards

The only one I'm really willing to change is the topics but even then I don't want to make things I'm not interested in so largely my upside is capped. That's okay - I was going to write the thing anyway.

(Let me know if you have other ideas for how to increase readership - will consider implementing.)

Top 10 Posts:

HAMINIONS Membership

Stats:

Members: 11 (+5 vs 2023's 6)

More HAMINIONs! My HAMINIONs membership is how ppl can support me with their money. In return I get to keep building projects that lose money, they get access to my HAMY LABS example repo which has grown to dozens of projects, and they get some discounts on my products - mostly CloudSeed rn.

On my side it's a nice way to see that ppl want more content like this and is v encouraging to build more random projects so can share the code out later.

I don't have many plans to change the membership going forward - just will build more projects, share the code out, and hopefully have some more products that are worth giving discounts for.

HAMY LABS POD

Listen to HAMY LABS POD wherever you get podcasts - also on this website.

Stats:

Listens: 108

I have a podcast! I created it because I reflected on my personal contumption and realized I mostly consume via blog posts, social posts, and podcasts with an occasional YT video every day or so. This meant that even I wouldn't necessarily consume my own videos regularly. So I decided to create a podcast to see if there were other listeners like me out there who enjoy the listening-only content.

I'll be honest it's not really doing that well. I didn't really have a listenership goal in mind but 100 listens over a few months seems pretty low - especially compared to the performance of the same content in written and video form.

I think there are a few reasons the podcast is not doing that well:

Low awareness - I don't mention it very much cause writing / videos are still more primary
Meh production value - these podcasts are really just my videos reuploaded and I think are probably not great production-wise
Niche topics - again leading to less listeners and less ppl who might discover it

The pod is still new so will probably run it for another year considering it doesn't take that much more effort than the videos. Only thing I'm really planning to do differently in the future is write about some more mainstream topics and see how that goes.

HAMY LABS Socials

I've been posting a lot on my Socials this year - enough that people I know IRL have commented on it. The socials are growing but not by that much. Which is fine but another sign that full-time creator is likely not in my future.

One big thing I tried this year was to lean into short-form video - YouTube Shorts, TikTok, IG - as I was seeing some big successes from other people in the indie hacker / coding communities. But after ~6 months of doing this I decided it wasn't really worth it. I found that even though the short videos were low effort (I used an AI to make them) they still were annoying to make and people just weren't liking them so was just an annoyance for little impact.

I think the problem with the shorts is that they are pretty low effort - just cut up bits of my long form pieces. This means they just aren't great videos and coupled with the niche topics there's just very low surface area of engagement here.

So for the most part I'm moving off of the short-form video content / channels and just going to focus on text-based shares which seem to do okay on text-based platforms like Twitter, BlueSky, and LinkedIn.

Stats:

Subs: 99 (~2x vs 2023's 40)

The Hamniverse reached 99 subs. This is less a newsletter and more a notification that my monthly release notes is up. So cool to see people want a notification but not very interesting otherwise.

Builds

Overview:

High: I built some fun stuff
Low: None of my stuff has any traction
Seed: Maybe will build more fun stuff and get some traction.

Notable Projects:

One Million Checkboxes - 1,000,000 checkboxes, shared by the internet.
CloudCompare - Cloud pricing is confusing, often overpriced, and hard to compare. Fix that.
Fullstack Projects - Sometimes I want to build smth but I don't know what to build. So I thought aggregating build ideas would help. It didn't. But I did learn how to generate 100k webpages with AI so there's that.
Options Scanner - Every ~3 months I think I can beat the market by finding great options plays. I built a scanner so I can automate this process and ultimately remind myself I can't faster and with less effort.
TravelMap - My first forays into HTMX. Glad I built it. Probably needs some improvements to be useful.
CloudSeed - Continues to chug along. Released several small improvements but nothing big. Still how I start most of my web projects.

See all my projects.

Business

Overview:

High: Business not stressing me out so much cause have a job
Low: Not making that much money from builds
Seed: Maybe will build stuff that makes money

I ranted at length last year about how trying to build projects that worked as businesses was sucking the joy out of building things. That's still true and yet I'm still trying to build little projects that make some money.

That said I think I've found a slightly better balance with these things as I'm certainly enjoying my build process more than I did back then:

I got a job - which helped remove some of the expectations on each project
Leaned into projects that are actually interesting to me
Found that Shares are outperforming most of my projects so as long as I write ab it probably good to build

But I do think in an ideal world my projects would both bring me joy and be self-sustaining. I'm ofc willing to pay out for hobbies I like but if they can pay for themselves... maybe make them. (this is probably a logical fallacy and the source of a lot of internal strife but again... here we are)

HAMY LABS - Revenue breakdown 2024

Splitting my revenue by source:

Shares: 91.5%
Builds: 8.5%

By source:

HAMY LABS YouTube - 67%
HAMINIONS - 18%
CloudSeed - 8%
Affiliates - 4%
Blog - 2%

So clearly my Shares are the dominant source of revenue here - just like they were last year. CloudSeed remains my only Build that really makes money - likely cause it's the only one solving a real and present problem. Something to learn here methinks.

Next year I'd like to try to get at least one more project on the board but we'll see what happens.

Thanks for supporting me through another year of building projects in tiny little niches!

If you've got any suggestions for how to do better next year pls drop me a line - I'd love to hear from you.

And ofc if you want to get updates from me - connect w one of my socials.

If you liked this post you might also like one of these posts that I think deserver more readership:

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HAMY LABS - 2024 Review

Shares

HAMY LABS YouTube

HAMY LABS Blog

HAMINIONS Membership

HAMY LABS POD

HAMY LABS Socials

The HAMNIVERSE Newsletter

Builds

Business

Next

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