353Solutions - 2016 in Review

Happy new year!

Let's see how 353solutions did in 2016. We'll start with the numbers and then some insights and future goals.

Numbers

• Total of 193 work days (days where customer were billed)
• Up 23 days from 2015
• Out of 261 work days in 2016
• Out of these 61 days are in workshops and the rest consulting
• 18 workshops
• Up from 14 in 2015
• Go workshops
• First docker workshop (teaching with ops specialist)
• First open enrollment class
• In Israel, UK, and Poland
• Only 4 out of the country (vs 8 last year, which is good - I prefer to fly less)
• Workshops range from 1 to 4 days
• Revenue up 10% from 2016
• Several new clients including GE, AOL, Outbrain, EMC and more

Insights

• Social network keeps providing almost all the work
• Doing good work will get you more work
• Workshops pay way more than consulting
• However can't work from home in workshops
• Consulting keeps you updated with latest tech
• Python and data science are big and in high demand
• However Go is getting traction
• Having someone else take care of the "overhead" (billing, contracts ...) is great help.

Last Year's Goals
We've set some goals in 2015, let's see how we did:

• Keep positioning in Python and Scientific Python area
• Done
• Drive more Go projects and workshops
• Done
• Works less days, have same revenue at end of year
• Failed here. Worked more and revenue went up
• Start some "public classes" where we rent a class and people show up
• Did only one this year
• Publish my book
• Failed here, though I'm close. Probably Q1 this year.

Goals for 2017

• Work less while keeping same revenue
• Work more from home
• Publish my book
• Publish a video course
• More open enrollment classes