Every year, I take a step back to reflect on my journey as a content creator. Since 2018, I’ve been helping developers learn Flutter, and since 2020, Code With Andrea has been my full-time focus.
This 2024 retrospective dives into:
- My highlights and achievements this year
- How AI, SEO, and social media are reshaping my strategy—and what I’m doing about it
- The launch of my new course platform and latest course
- My thoughts about where Flutter is headed and my plans for 2025
You’ll also find charts, metrics, and insights into my business—shared transparently and honestly. These retrospectives are not just about numbers; they’re about the lessons I learned.
I’ve been writing these retrospectives for seven years now! If you’re curious, check out the previous editions: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018.
2024: Executive Summary
In 2024, I accomplished a lot:
- Launched Code With Andrea Pro, my new course platform
- Launched Flutter in Production, my latest course
- Published 12 articles and 81 new tips
- Launched my Flutter Tips app on both app stores and web
But what results did I get from all my efforts?
- Traffic from Google 🔻
- Traffic from social media 🔻
- Newsletter signups 🔻
- Average monthly revenue 🔻
- Revenue from launches and promos ✅
- Course engagement and ratings ✅
While I'm very happy with the things that really matter (more on this below), some areas didn't go too well.
Website traffic and newsletter signups, which were already declining in 2023, fell further in 2024. On social media, my efforts haven't paid off consistently on X and LinkedIn.
Let’s dive into the details. 👇
Website Traffic and SEO 🔻
Here’s how my 2024 website traffic compared to 2023:
The numbers tell a clear story:
- Unique visitors: down 28% 🔻
- Total pageviews: down 27% 🔻
Google remains my largest traffic source, driving 49% of total pageviews in 2024:
Unfortunately, traffic from Google has been declining even faster:
- Unique visitors: down 39% 🔻
- Total pageviews: down 31% 🔻
Ironically, my Bing traffic grew 33% year-over-year, but it only makes up 2% of my total traffic, so it doesn't really move the needle.
So, what's the takeaway?
SEO is Getting Harder (at least in my niche)
SEO has been a core part of my strategy for years. Many of my articles ranked at the very top of Google search, but I hit a peak in March 2023:
Since then, Google traffic has plunged by a staggering 65%, as of December 2024.
What’s causing this? Here’s my take:
- Search algorithm changes: Google increasingly favors platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and large publications over small blogs.
- AI disruption: Developers are turning to AI tools instead of Google for coding problems.
- Outdated content: Keeping an growing collection of free programming tutorials updated is a constant uphill battle.
Website Traffic: Takeaways
Search traffic is great, but search traffic that converts is what really matters.
With declining traffic, converting visitors into email subscribers or paying customers has never been more critical. While intrusive email popups are known to increase conversions, I absolutely despise them and I vow to never add them to my site. I hope my readers appreciate that. 🤝
Given the diminishing ROI, in 2024 I paused my SEO efforts and decided to focus on three key areas:
- Sharing bite-sized tips on social media
- Developing in-depth paid content exclusively for my course platform
- Posting free articles that naturally lead visitors to my courses (here are some examples)
I’ll break these down in the next sections, starting with social media. 👇
Social Media 🔻
In 2023, I started cross-posting my Flutter tips on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn.
In 2024, I doubled down by posting better tips, more often. Here's one of my most popular ones:
My goal was to get more followers, who would ultimately sign up for my newsletter and courses. So, how did it go? 👇
LinkedIn ✅
LinkedIn was a clear winner with nearly 5M impressions from over 500K members:
What's more, each of my top posts reached over 75K impressions and 1K engagements:
As a result, my LinkedIn followers nearly doubled from 13K to 24K. 🙌
X (Twitter) 🔻
On X, the very same posts didn’t perform nearly as well:
- 2023: 3.6M impressions, 34% follower growth ✅
- 2024: 2.7M impressions, 17.5% follower growth 🔻
Why the drop? The X algorithm increasingly rewards clickbait, controversial and divisive posts that drive more engagement. As an educator, that's not the kind the content I want to share.
On a side note, I joined Bluesky in November and started posting there, but it's too early make a useful comparison.
Social Media: Takeaways
It’s no secret that X and LinkedIn penalize posts with links to external sites. They want to keep users on their platforms to drive ad revenue. This makes it harder for independent creators like me to share articles, promote newsletters, or sell courses.
This is far worse on X than LinkedIn, and my data proves it:
- Total email signups in 2024:
- 263 from X (40K followers)
- 1,112 from LinkedIn (24K followers)
- Email signups per follower:
- 0.6% on X
- 4.5% on LinkedIn
Despite having nearly double the followers on X, the ROI is significantly worse, and I’m considering leaving X altogether in 2025.
Bottom line: Big social platforms are squeezing as much profit as they can, and that's not good news for small, independent creators.
Next, let’s take a look at my newsletter growth. 👇
Newsletter Signups 🔻
In 2024, I added 2K subscribers to my email list—half of the 4K I gained in 2023:
Here’s why:
- Fewer signups from social media: As mentioned earlier, platforms like X and LinkedIn deprioritize posts with links, making it harder to drive signups.
- Higher unsubscribes: During my latest course launch and Black Friday sale, I've sent a lot of emails, causing many unsubscribes. 👇
While these campaigns were great for sales (more on that below), I’ll be more mindful of unsubscribes in the future.
The Bright Side
Despite slower growth, my email list remains highly engaged:
- 40% average open rate
- 93% positive subscriber feedback:
In terms of signups by source, LinkedIn performed best, accounting for 32% of all new signups in 2024:
Newsletter: Takeaways
Email remains my strongest sales channel, so growing my list is a big priority for 2025. As a result, I've already revamped my newsletter landing page, and I plan to promote it more often on LinkedIn, which is the best-converting channel right now.
Next, let’s look at some of the wins from 2024. 🙂
Code With Andrea Pro ✅
Moving from Teachable to my new course platform was a big investment—but one that’s already paying off.
While I don't have enough data for a full comparison, I can report the following:
- Very positive student feedback on Discord
- Increased engagement: higher watch time and time spent on site
- Refund rate dropped from 4.9% to 1.6%
- Increased average ratings for all courses (4.8 stars from 1377 ratings)
The overall UX is much better, and the new platform allows me to create better courses that are tailored for software developers.
Engagement Metrics
Although my new platform doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as my main site, these metrics tell an interesting story:
- Views per visit: 5.21 (vs. 1.51 on the main site)
- Bounce rate: 22% (vs. 76%)
- Visit duration: 18m12s (vs. 1m38s)
Here’s a visual comparison:
As a side note, I noticed that a growing number of new enrollments comes from company domains. This means that more people are using their training budget to buy my courses and level up their teams at work, which is a very good sign!
Bottom line: Enrolled students are far more engaged than visitors on my main site, and they’re more satisfied, too. 👍
My latest course launch proves this. 👇
Flutter in Production ✅
When designing Flutter in Production, I wanted to create the most comprehensive curriculum for shipping Flutter apps in production, and I put my heart into it.
While I'm not sharing revenue numbers, I can say two things:
- Most successful launch to date (by number of sales)
- Highest ratings: 4.81 stars from 489 ratings
Launch Strategy
To ensure a strong launch, I focused heavily on free content and good marketing. Here’s what I did:
- Email campaign: Sent nine emails to my 22K subscribers with valuable tips, free content, and course details.
- Discounted pricing: Launched with a 50% discount to incentivize early sign-ups.
- Time-limited free preview: Offered an entire module for free to build trust and showcase the course quality.
- Content marketing: Published free articles and shared various tips about Flutter in Production (such as this and this and this).
My launch emails included free content and tips that would be valuable even for those who didn't buy the course. While many people unsubsrcibed from my list, the launch went very well.
Course Feedback
Flutter in Production is now my highest-rated course. This is very encouraging, and I hope it will continue to help many devs improve their apps in the future:
Black Friday ✅
In 2023, I bundled all my courses into a single offer for Black Friday, and sales went very well.
In 2024, I repackaged the same offer by including my latest course and adjusted the pricing. That was good enough to get another nice bump in sales:
Next, let's change gears and talk about a little side project I launched in 2024.
Flutter Tips App ✅
Sharing bite-sized Flutter tips has become a personal passion project. I enjoy crafting these tips with a mix of good design, creativity, and concise writing—and they’ve consistently performed well on social media.
But social media is very noisy, so I decided to create a mobile app where people can see all my tips in one place.
The result is my Flutter Tips app:
Key Metrics
Here’s how the app performed from April to December 2024:
- App Store: 4.8 stars, 3.5K total downloads
- Play Store: 4.9 stars, 2K installed audience
Admittedly, the app doesn't have good retention—and I know there’s room for improvement. That said, it’s a free app and very much a side project for now, so I’m happy with the progress.
If you want to learn more about my Flutter Tips app, watch my FlutterCon EU talk: Lessons Learned from Launching a Flutter app in Production.
2024 Summary
2024 has been a year of ups and downs:
- Traffic from Google 🔻
- Traffic from social media 🔻
- Newsletter signups 🔻
- Organic monthly revenue 🔻
- Revenue from launches and promos ✅
- Course engagement and ratings ✅
While I'm very happy with my new course platform and latest course launch, Google and social media platforms are driving fewer people to my site. This has a tangible impact on my bottom line, and it means I have to work harder to get the same results.
But there’s one more factor I haven’t touched on yet.
The Elephant in the Room: AI 🤖
Let's face it: software devs are increasingly turning to LLMs to speed up their workflows.
Why spend hours on Google, Stack Overflow—or, dare I say, reading documentation—when AI tools like Cursor can explain and even write code directly in your IDE?
As an experienced developer, I’ve embraced AI myself and find it very valuable. But AI is a double-edged sword:
- When it works: it can make you 10x faster
- When it doesn't: it's a waste of time, and if you don't know what you're doing, it can introduce subtle and serious bugs in your codebase
What Can I Offer That AI Can’t?
This is the question I’ve been asking myself as an educator. My answers:
- Reliable solutions that I’ve tested to work in real-world production scenarios.
- Up-to-date, specific, and applied knowledge that reflects the latest APIs and isn’t part of the LLM training set.
- Big-picture thinking: UX, architecture, and system design insights that AI still struggles to fully grasp—or that require extensive and precise prompting to get right.
For example, when creating Flutter in Production, I encountered many areas where LLMs fell short—things like CI workflows, app flavors, and analytics. These require a level of specificity and reliability that AI just doesn’t deliver yet.
Likewise, AI still doesn't answer correctly many of the questions I get on Discord, and I continue to point people to my articles for in-depth explanations of certain topics.
My Prediction
As long as AI continues to hallucinate and can't reliably verify its output on complex problems (this is still the case even with the latest frontier models and AI agents), in-depth technical content by reputable sources will still be needed.
This means you'll continue to see content from me in 2025! 🙂
Where Flutter is Headed
The recent Flutter in Production event highlighted just how far Flutter has come:
- 28% of new iOS apps on the App Store are built with Flutter
- Over 1M monthly active Flutter developers
I continue to believe that despite some of its flaws, Flutter has a bright future. I can't wait to get Dart features like enum shorthands, primary constructors, import shorthand syntax, and macros. And once we get direct native interoperability and Impeller on web, Flutter could really become a dominant cross-platform framework.
Looking Ahead to 2025
While my 2025 plans are still taking shape, I expect to focus on these areas:
- Complete my Flutter in Production course (expected in Q1)
- More Flutter Tips
- Revamp or replace my older courses and articles
My new course platform has a lot of untapped potential. My aim is to create better content that is well above what AI can do, and ensure developers can truly rely on it. This is easier said than done, but I'll do my best! 💪
Thank You 🙏
Helping thousands of developers grow their Flutter skills has been an incredibly rewarding journey. Whether you’ve just discovered my work or have been following me for years, thank you for your support—it means the world to me.
I wish you all the best in the year ahead! 🙂
