It's DDI's One Year Anniversary
My very first DDI article about how SoFi is seeking to build the AWS of Fintech was published one year ago today.
To celebrate the anniversary, I wanted to show some statistics about the newsletter and how it and my Twitter/X account have grown over time.
DDI Data
After the first day I had 73 subscribers. Since then the newsletter has grown to just over 2800. You’ll notice that the bumps in member count often correspond to SoFi earnings or big SoFi news. Probably not a coincidence 😉.
Twitter followers have followed a similar trend. When I published my first article a year ago, I had 1,500 followers and now I’m above 18,000. I like to think of Twitter as my SoFi Checking & Savings…it’s the top-of-the-funnel product that puts people into the DDI ecosystem where I can cross sell them into the hard-core analysis 😂.
Page views over time is unsurprisingly highly correlated with how many articles I write.
Most people view my articles through emails. The next biggest source of traffic is “direct”, which is people who type the url into a browser directly. After that comes Twitter, Google search, and Reddit. Other sources are smaller.
It also turns out that 1 in 5 of my subscribers come from California. Utah, where I’m from, makes up about 0.5% of my subscribers
The Future of DDI
I have been toying with the idea of moving from substack to beehiiv but haven’t made a final decision yet. If I do so, nothing would change from a subscriber perspective, it would only be a backend change.
Virtually all of my content thus far has been about SoFi. I think that’s where I add the most value and have the biggest comparable advantage. I’d love to do more analysis on other names but finding the time to do so is honestly the biggest challenge. This is a fun hobby and side gig for now and hopefully the content is useful to people who subscribe to the newsletter. As it grows I do plan on branching out and covering more equities.
As I’ve said a few times, the next step I think for me would be to start a YouTube channel and that I’ll do that once I get to 100 paid subscribers. I hope organic growth gets me there still this year. I’m not far away but I’m in no rush. I’ll still have a 9-5 job and a wife and kids to keep happy, so I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew. As this makes up a bigger part of my income it makes it easier to justify putting in more time. I’m truly grateful to everyone who has voluntarily chosen to support me. I hope to always share my analysis for free moving forward. I’ve tried to think of some ways to still do that while also adding value to paid subscribers above the analysis I publish here. I have a few ideas, but we’ll see what I can do.
I have been very surprised by the amount of people who care about my opinions and analysis. I try to be transparent, objective, and intellectually honest even though I am aware that I can be swayed confirmation bias just as much as anyone else. I also try to show that my opinions are backed as often as possible by some quantitative data (hence the moniker).
Thank you again for your support and for reading and caring.