The Come Up Quarterly Review (EoY 2024)
How things went in Q4 2024.
Hey — Alex here, from The Come Up.
After 2 years of producing content, we’re hoping you would fill out a 30-second reader survey — we don’t normally ask for anything from you, but consider it an early Christmas present!
It will go a LONG way in helping us produce better interviews and content!
Last quarter, I decided I’m going to begin sharing the journey of scaling out the publication.
It’s inspiring for all these business owners to share their stories, so I figured, it was only right that we share some behind the scenes too.
If you’re new here, you should start by reading our letter from the editor, or my last quarterly update on how & why I started the publication. With that said…
The 2024 End of Year Update
Refining Process…
I previously wrote about how process was the biggest focus in 2024, but it turns out, there was still a lot of work to do in creating and documenting a REALLY thorough process so nothing slipped through the cracks.
Angus has been invaluable as an editor, but there are so many more tasks involved in the process, including building a strong pipeline for entrepreneurs to interview, executing on our growth strategy, and creating the social media assets for each issue.
Taking full blame, we still hit production delays in Q4, as Angus would rush to get something done, only to have to wait a few days for me to get back to him, as I was busy juggling multiple client projects.
In order to tackle this, I mapped out every single task that needs to be completed to produce a single issue (hint: there’s almost 30 of them) and creating a “how-to” walkthrough video for any task that we aren’t able to automate.
We’re just about ready to bring on a project manager to make sure there are never any production delays and things don’t slip through the cracks.
Growth…
I’m wrapping the year early for the holidays, so these numbers don’t account for the back half of December, but to date, growth has remained strong — averaging 13.19% month-over-month.
Even with fewer interviews published than planned, each issue brought in more new subscribers on average.
We didn’t hit a full calendar of interviews, but the numbers show growth continued regardless — a solid finish to the year.
Brand Overhaul…
You may have noticed an updated look, as we put in an effort to improve the visual assets behind our brand.
To date, everything had been done myself, and while I actually got great feedback from every designer I spoke to saying it was “the best brand design by an amateur they’d ever seen”, it was time to bring in the pros.
I’m really excited by the new logo and font as it’s a better visual representation of who we are - we also got rid of the ugly yellow-ish off-white for a more refined colour palette.
We also sprung for our own URL - thecomeup.co!
I’ve been wanting to ditch the substack URL for months now, but once I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the domain (~$300), I got hit with another unexpected $75 one-time fee from Substack to allow for a custom domain.
Not a deal breaker, but one of those things I would’ve preferred to know in advance as at times it feels like death by 1000 paper cuts!
Maybe you think these details don’t matter...
It can certainly be tough to rationalize the investment, when you’re still struggling to get content out and there’s no revenue being generated.
Every now and then have moments where I lose confidence and want to scrap the whole project, but I’m still just trying to subscribe to the 1% better philosophy and breaking things down piece by piece and zooming out to take a long term approach..
And really, I think all these details compound over time, and hopefully makes it look a bit more legitimate, so that when we reach out to business owners cold, they see we’re not some fly-by-night operation.
We still have work to do — like updating homepage images and improving content tags for company type to make navigation cleaner. But we’re on the right track!
Social Media…
TBH - this is another area I’m disappointed in, mostly that we didn’t get the machine up and running. That said, everything always takes longer than you think.
Maybe it was overly ambitious to try to:
find a designer
revamp the brand
create templates for evergreen content
get revisions
launch a full content calendar of evergreen content all in one quarter.
Just getting the templates was a big win — they’re simple, but do the combined job of featuring the business owner, highlighting some of their insights and promoting the publication as well.
Here’s an example of what the V1 carousels will look like for Instagram & LinkedIn:
Now that these exist, it’ll be a lot easier to have someone create one template per issue, without having to go down a creative rabbit hole every time.
What do you think of the new carousels? LMK!
And with that said—if you have any feedback on how we can improve our content please let me know.
You can always respond to this newsletter or reach out to me directly!
That’s the update—hope you have a great holiday season.
Thank you for being part of this journey — your support and feedback mean everything as we keep building. Here’s to a big 2025!