End of Year

Welcome to my last newsletter of the year. This one will not contain any Zendesk news or updates, but will be a bit more of a meta, personal end-of-year update.

I'm writing this note from a couch with our Christmas tree in sight. End of year is about family, friends and tying up loose ends, but it's also about looking forward towards next year and how last year went.

The Internal Note project was started during the holiday break at the end of 2022 with three main motivations:

1. Keeping up to date with Zendesk releases is a big part of my 9 to 5 job, and this blog gives me a good way to test and validate the new features while also having a good logbook of my experiences with them.
2. Train different muscles was also a big part of the reason I wanted to blog. At work I scope Zendesk setups, offer consultancy for customers and develop integrations. But technical writing and maintaining a newsletter that forces me to write ~3k words a week is a whole new skill that I want to get better at.
3. I wanted to see if I could build a project that was self-sustaining and gets an audience.

My goal was to write an article a week and reach subscribers through organic growth. I'm not a fan of targeted ads via LinkedIn or Google, so I wanted to run this without that kind of advertising. Neither did I want to inject myself into active conversations on the Zendesk Community and link to this website in any relevant thread. The end result should be self-sustaining blog that exists because people like it and find it because it's useful.

The past year I published 57 newsletters while growing the audience for this blog from 1 to almost 500 subscribers, so for each of you who subscribed: a big thanks!