From Job Desk to Beachside: My Agile Entrepreneurial Journey in 2023
Agile Coaching, Content Creation, and the Pursuit of Life Vision
Tracking My Growth
Over the past 2 years, I’d written my retrospectives regarding the journey to become an agile coach, as below.
I reviewed the goals set at the end of 2022 and look back on the journey in 2023. Some were fulfilled, and some were not. I think it necessary to record what happened to me this year and the changes in my mind.
Let Vision Lead Me
I have a dream, that one day I would live neighboring a beach in Dutch, with a soulmate who supports my life vision and two cute children. At that time I am able to go anywhere whenever I want. I am a self-employed agile coach. I’d dreamed of on the way visiting customers who need my assistance.
Well, that’s my vision, and whatever I do is to realize the profile I imagined.
During the period between 2020 and 2022, I was in the turning point of transitioning from a software engineer to a project manager. However, I got suffered from several events that made me confused with the life, COVID-19, failed career transition, and working with immature teams. I once felt obsolete with what I was doing right at the moment.
Fortunately, I met a life coach in 2022, and he assisted me clarify the life vision as well as the inner values I must bear in mind: Love, Compassion, Respect, and most importantly — Quietude Brings Farther. I started identifying that I always view myself from a ”3rd-party” perspective, which is an advantage but also a shortcoming because I can’t move with my ego. And that just blocked my actions toward the life vision. I was really grateful for the coach’s leading, so that I could make a big decision to change my career to become an agile coach.
I am still on the way to realizing the life vision.
What I’ve Done
In February, I left the previous company and become a self-employed agile coach, because I realized that the company was unsuitable for my career growth as a project manager. It was full of demand and control, that caused members to get passive to their tasks. So I decided to leave the items to the manager who insisted in the controlling form, and indulge myself in content creation in the following months.
If some readers have been following my medium for a long time, you must know I started writing articles in 2021, got into podcast in 2022, and finally stepped into youtube channel in 2023. I might be the one who owns 3 social media at the same time, so I became busy in generating valuable contents this year. So, what have I done?
- Medium — Your Agile Coach
I published 24 articles on Medium this year, almost 2 posts every month. I’ve concluded the readers’ statistics as below.
The left axis stands for the amount of readers who went through my medium platform while the right axis stands for the ratio of readers who really “read” my articles. In the graph, I know there were up to 8 months in 2023 that read ratios were more than 50%. However, there was a significant drop in ratios after September, which were 36.62%, 39.8%, and 38.64% respectively.
I think the result was caused by the SEO on Medium because now it decided to kick out individuals who just wanna abuse the SEO resources of the platform, and provide SEO settings in each posts. Its original intention is to maintain valuable contents, instead of trash articles, kept generated on the platform but as well causes many eminent writers to leave. Of course, I believe Medium would have another approach to avoiding prominent writer from fleeing.
Nonetheless, if I explain the statistics from cumulative data as above, the significant drop after September was nothing. I accumulated the amount of readers for each month, and calculated the total ratio of readers for each month. I find that the average read ratio locates around 50%, which means nearly half of readers are willing to spend their time reading through my posts. That is an inspiring signal for a writer, especially for me who focuses on unpopular topics — Agile Methodologies.
Compared with the data in 2022, the amount of views increases up to 27% while the amount of reads grows more than 40%. I believe it an investable habit to keep writing for expanding my influence to the world. By the way, my medium has exceeded more than 100 subscribers, but I still cannot apply for the partner program because I live in Taiwan. I hope one day the policy could be refined.
- Podcast — Agile Rocket
I’ve released 28 episodes this year, and the podcast once had encountered a huge transformation in March, because I found the channel’s language was inconsistent with my youtube and my writing space. On the other side, just as my previous observation on Medium, the amount of Mandarin listeners is not as many as I expected, so I determined to transition into an English channel.
The above statistic data is kind of different from the medium platform. On the medium platform, it includes the views and reads for each month so I am able to draw the trending line to observe the growth of readers. But on SoundOn platform, it provides 3 primary downloading metrics: total download, 1st-week-download, and 1st-week-download.
From my viewpoint, I prefer to observe the 1st-week-download and the 1st-month download rather than the other factors. For one thing, it reflects if some contents really catch audiences’ eyes for the moment they are released. For another, the total downloads adds up as time goes by, and cannot tell me if audiences love it.
From the graph above, I used a pink frame to mark a significant drop between episode#15 and episode#17. At that time I was transitioning to an English channel, so it is necessary result that some audiences lost during the transition. But I have to confess that the amount of audiences did not significantly increase as I transitioned into an English channel. Instead, it remains smooth as more episode was released.
Indeed, it’s becoming different as I made the decision to transition into an English channel, especially for the location of the audiences! In 2022, the primary sectors of audiences were from Asia, but in 2023 the sectors of audiences involves more countries, such as America, Spain, Norway, Brazil, Australia, etc. I am glad to see more and more potential audiences are listening to my episode even though the ratio is still not so high.
- Youtube — Your Agile Coach
In 2023, I started running my youtube channel as I left the prior position. In fact, I already had the idea when I wrote my 2021 retrospective but had no time to realize it, and it was my first try to show up in front of the video. This year I totally published 26 videos talking about agile methodologies, and the results are indicated as below.
In my opinion, I am unsatisfied with the result because both the retention rate and the click rate are low, which means I don’t touch audiences’ mind when they were searching associative contents on Youtube. Of course this contains many details such as video hooks, thumbnail presentation, content arrangement, SEO, etc.
I have to confess that I don’t have sufficient dimensions of thought in content creation. Many SEO experts sent me private emails telling me that I don’t do well on SEO although I had created great contents. On top of that , some content creators have mentioned that I didn’t properly process the quality of both video and audio, that made the retention rate low. As a result, the amount of subscribers cannot grow effectively; it only grew to 47 subscribers this year.
Some readers might be curious why there was an “empty episode“ in the graph. Well, there was the corresponding video but the data was empty due to insufficient data for youtube to aggregate. So its performance cannot be identified; this made me a little sad about my content creation capabilities.
- Business Mindset Growth
In order to run my agile coaching business around the world, I know it is necessary to enhance my business mindset, inclusive of product analysis, business model, customer analysis, and the doable solution to bring in the cashflow, I bought an online course from the channel: Littleboat, which provides concrete steps for content creators to run their business.
Well, the course might be the most expensive one I’ve ever bought in my life, but it pays. I gradually clarify my direction to craft an online agile project management course for those who’d like to transition to a project manager, especially for software engineers. Because I was the one who had struggled for the transition over the past 3 years.
Different from other theoretical courses, I wanna provide practical skills anyone could take right after they take the course. So I am still providing online free consulting services to know what the hell people is facing in project management. If you have ever thought of transitioning to a project management role, scroll down to the last section and reserve a web call with me. I am glad to see you online.
- Kanban System Design
In February, I attended a Kanban system design course since I wanted to broaden my horizon on other agile methodologies. And I did buy a soft whiteboard to manage my daily content creation task for up to half a year, which deepened my experience to WIP Limit, flow control, and workflow visualization.
Fortunately, I finally applied the Kanban practice to my current team to process the maintenance work. To record the ideas during the process, I also made the video, as below, talking about how to visualize the workflow in baby steps.
Introspection of The Journey
This year I’ve sacrificed a lot of time in content creation so I almost had no time in additional social life, not to mention datings. There are 3 primary work in my daily life: content creation, exercise, and sleep.
In my heart, this process feels much like practicing in the deep mountains. The only difference is that I am practicing in the urban setting, where the hustle and bustle of the streets as well as the interactions among friends seem nothing to do with me.
In the end of 2022, I wrote down 5 things I had got to do in 2023, as below.
- Kanban Practices
- Join PSM-II course; Get Certified
- Participate an Agile Community
- Generate Youtube Materials
- Develop My Agile Products
This year, I’ve completed options 1, 3, and 4. I did not join PSM-II course because there was not a concrete reason why I should attend it. Does it really solve my current problems I am facing? Apparently, it doesn’t. But I don’t deny its value because usually I would meet some valuable individuals in that course, and I would go to join the course in the near future.
Aside from that, I underestimated the difficulties I should go through in developing my own agile product. In my consulting service, I targeted at collecting at least 50 individuals to understand some common problems most people suffer from. But there were only about 11 people who did reserve the web call with me. I think it required to keep building connection with my audiences by generating valuable contents in 2024, especially improving the video quality.
Lastly, I’d joined some agile online/offline events, but I felt it unnecessary to do more because usually it works like sharing workshops that don’t really provide practices that solve business problems. So I would rather take more time on reading than joining the agile communities unless it requires extra fee. The courses that are offered without charging tuition fees are often found to be challenging to provide valuable materials.
Next Step in 2024
My life vision is still out there for me to achieve. This year is exactly the first time I tried to craft my own “leverage” to expand my own business. I did accomplish something different, but apparently there is a huge gap between the reality and the the vision. In order to shorten the distance, I have to take practical effort to realize it.
- Achieved more than 1000 subscribers on Youtube
This year I only get 47 subscribers, and I think the most critical reason was that I didn’t fully focus on video quality as well as the SEO performance, especially for the former. Although I’ve joined a Youtuber group to improve my video, I still discover some “mindset gap” as I am watching their works.
I cannot tell why they could do better than me in many aspects, which I think would consume more time to master. To bridge the gap, I would have to take some online course to know why there is an implicit gap between us …
- Reach at least 50 consulting samples
In my business course, I know the importance of understanding my customers because I have to dig out real problems if I wanna craft a practical course that really helps them grow if they wanna become a project manager.
In fact, the goal is highly related to the previous one. Although I clearly know what I should do, the lack of audiences is the primary pain point for me to move on. In the business course, it told me to consult at least 50 individuals to know my potential customers.
However, as I tried to achieve the homework, I started discovering there are still many to do to shorten the distance between audiences and me. So this would be my next target in 2024.
- Launch a short training course of agile project management
I’ve written a simple framework for the agile project management, but I didn’t launch the course all at once because not so many people consult me. But I think it an opportunity to get effective testimonials as well as build connections with my potential customers.
- Get salary raise for 10K NTD
In terms of personal growth, I need to get a salary raise in my current position as a project manager. Of course, the history has taught me to participate in some core projects that bosses really care about, so I would compete for the opportunity to acquire further bonus based on my performance.
Additionally, I need to cultivate my business sensitivity regarding products, no matter in product competence or in user experience. This would be the first step for me to get into a product management field. I have to conquer the defect of inflation around the globe, and the only approach is to leverage my value to a company as well as build my own products.
- Host at least 12 online streaming episode
In November, I’ve completed my first online streaming video with a partner in the UK. I think it fresh to exchange ideas with people around the globe regarding agile coaching, and brainstorm better solutions for the audiences. I think it more efficient to generate corresponding podcast episodes as well as Youtube videos.
In 2024, I hope to hold at least 12 online streaming videos to know how agile coaches from other countries resolve issues in project management.
Coach’s Murmur
I’ve faced a huge transition this year, no matter in my work or in my life. I know many people would be hard-working in plans, especially for the start of the new year, but put less effort in implementation as time goes on. I really appreciate it that I did not do that as I decided to realize my vision.
If you read here, applause for yourself. I bet you are also a patient person who is able to do the right things. Whatever, happy new year!
Let Me Help You
Now I provide free, 1–1 online consulting service. If you have any agile related problems or project management issues, please reserve a web call with me. I would answer your questions as possible as I could.
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