Gone Fishing 2024 Wrapped

In case you were wondering why the newsletters fell off this year, here’s a quick rundown of our year by the numbers:

🖥️ Projects

• Projects Finished: 12

• 🚀 Projects Launched: 9

• 🚦 Projects Ready to Launch: 2

• 💀 Projects Killed Pre-launch: 1

  • Special Bonus Material – See that site here.

🌐 Projects By Type

• eCommerce – 3

• Portfolio – 5 (including the new gonefishing.studio)

• Marketing – 4

🛠️ Projects By Stack

• 🚀 Next / Sanity – 8

• 🛍️ Shopify Theme – 3

• 🤡 Wordpress - 1

📥 Leads

• By count about on par with last year

• Overall much higher quality projects, budgets, and connections

• We won ~15% (2x more than last year)

• We turned away or referred away ~50% of our leads (3x more than last year)

• ~20% were lost/ghosted (2.5x less than last year)

• ~15% are still in play for next year 🎉
  

• Lead quality has continued to increase as our positioning and messaging gets clearer, and our portfolio expands to include top-notch examples of across a wide range of site types.

• A vast majority of the projects we sign come via referrals, so the focus is to increase those rather than cold inbound via social media or otherwise.

• We have a solid pipeline for next year in place.

🤝 People

• Collaborated with some of the best design studios in the world including Gretel, Practice, Decade, GrandArmy, and Shore.

• Had a few of the best devs in town helping us out on a few of our projects – shoutout to Kevin Green, Logan Sparlin, and Lucas Vocos

💰 Money

• Revenue slightly above our previous best year ever (2022)

• 24% of our revenue came from smaller projects (Average Budget ~$25k)

• 62% of our revenue came from larger projects (Average Budget ~$66k)

• 14% of our revenue came from Maintenance / Retainer Work

This felt like a really healthy blend:

• Our larger projects allowed us to go deep with our clients on a longer time-scale – these are our bread and butter as we bring a technical and design sense to create a maintainable platform for our client.

• Our smaller projects allowed us to spin up world-class web experiences quickly on a smaller scale, refining our kickoff and launch processes along the way.

• Providing our larger clients with ongoing maintenance helped them build upon a successful launch with a sense of continuity and security.

🎖️ Recognition

• 3x Siteinspire Selection

• 5x MaxiBestOf Selection

• 3x Landbook Selection

• 1x Awwwards Honorable Mention

🧮 Other Notable Metrics

• Attended 6 NY Knicks games at Madison Square Garden (Knicks went 6-0 in these games)

• Spent 2 months in Europe (Berlin, Marseilles, and Sweden)

• Spent 1 month in Asia (Japan and Thailand)

• Fixed a lingering foot injury 🦶 and took care of some much needed dental work 😬

• 1 new brand identity and website for Gone Fishing

Time for some rest and relaxation before we get back to it next year. Wishing you all happy holidays 🎄