2018 in review and a look forward to 2019

Best wishes to you all for 2019!

My sons
My sons are 1 and 3 years old and growing up quickly!

This is one of my favorite posts of the year to write, because it’s my chance to reflect and look back at the whole year, and celebrate the wins and learn from my mistakes. It’s a chance to assess growth (both for the business and personally) and think about where I want to go in 2019.

2018 was extremely rewarding, but also extremely challenging at times.

Life and business are both moving forwards again and I go into 2019 full of optimism.

Starting with the highlights:

2018 highlights

Online courses

Website

Conferences

  • I attended the Craft and Commerce Conference in Boise, Idaho in June 2018. I met some interesting folks and picked up some super relevant knowledge from Mariah Coz‘s workshop on course launches
  • I attended the Google Next 18 Conference in San Francisco in July 2018. I finally got to meet a whole bunch of folks I’ve been chatting with online for years, in person, which was great. The Google Sheets product team announced lots of cool new features coming to Google Sheets (some of which are now live, like the 5 million cell limit)

Investing in Design in 2018

I found a talented designer on peopleperhour.com to create some new course logos for my online courses:

New course thumbnails

Compare that to the old course logos:

Old course thumbnails

Worth every penny! I was really pleased with how they turned out and they’re so much stronger visually than the old screenshot logos I was using initially.

This is definitely something I want to continue to invest in this coming year.

Stamping my personality on the office

I invested a little bit of time and money to make the office more personal, so it was somewhere I’d want to spend time and feel inspired when I was there.

I hung a few pictures on the walls and built a LEGO Saturn V rocket model to go on top of the bookcase (can you spot it?):

Office

Saving the best for last, non-work highlights included:

Challenges in 2018

So 2018 was not without its challenges.

I had pneumonia earlier in the year that took forever to kick, and made for some nervous months and LOTS of doctor visits. I was basically sick, to varying degrees, most of the days between March and June. I got sick again in September but since then I’ve felt (mostly) back to normal (whatever that is).

Being a two working-parent household doesn’t get any easier (well, it has a little bit since both boys are sleeping through the night). My wife and I are both ambitious and love our work, but balancing being a good dad, a good husband and working hard on my business is still super hard. You end up always feeling like you’re not doing a good enough job at any of them, and it’s mentally exhausting.

I missed some of my targets this year. I didn’t hit my overall course revenue goal (I got close), but being sick for so long meant I launched one less course than I’d planned. That’s life though! Can’t make any excuses, just got to keep working hard and do better in 2019.

Looking forwards to 2019

My goals for 2019:

  • Create a follow-up Apps Script course to the free Apps Script Blastoff! course I launched in December. I plan to launch this new course in March 2019
  • Create two other courses. The shortlist at the moment includes: 1) “Beyond Sheets” on what to do when your data outgrows Google Sheets, 2) Regular Expressions in Google Sheets, 3) a Data Studio course, and 4) Google Sheets for Educators
  • Attend the Google Next 19 conference (give me a shout if you’ll be there!)
  • Continue to grow the community on this site and the online school
  • Hold more webinars in 2019, on Google Sheets and Apps Script topics
  • Personally, I want to deepen my digital analytics and marketing knowledge, particularly GTM, GA and paid Ads, and also continue experimenting with data science and Google Cloud topics. Specifically, I’ll try to find time to work through this book: Data Science on the Google Cloud Platform

Thank you

Of course, none of this would be possible without you readers.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my experiences and knowledge, and carve out this teaching niche. My mission to create a world class resource for learning Data Analysis on the Google platform is just getting started.

Finally, good luck to all of you with your own endeavors and all the best for 2019!

Cheers,
Ben

Previous years

2017 in review and a look forward to 2018

2016 in review and a look forward to 2017

2015 in review and a look forward to 2016

16 thoughts on “2018 in review and a look forward to 2019”

  1. It is a entertaining post, I will stamp my personality on the office too. It is a good advice. especially because there we spent a lot of our day. HNY

  2. I can’t wait for the “Google Sheets for Educators”! As a middle school science teacher, I have taught my students how to use Google Sheets for data analysis (one of my favorite units I did) and look forward to using Sheets for even more.
    Thanks for a great 2018 and I’m looking forward to even more in 2019 – Like the Google Apps Script course!!

  3. Happy New Year. I enjoy your weekly posts. If possible, I’d love to see something on integrating Sheets with an external database. I work in SQL from time to time and would love to import and export data from Sheets to SQL. All the best.

    1. Thanks, John!

      Sheets < > SQL is a topic I plan to cover later this year so keep an eye out.

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