X.10: By The Numbers
Don’t worry. This is not another substack plug for a discounted holiday subscription. I don’t begrudge the other authors who are making them, but Downrange Data is, and for the foreseeable future will remain, free.
I did promise this post would come out before Christmas, and like all great leaders throughout history, I lied. But the end of the year is a great chance to take stock of the previous one, so with New Years fireworks just a few hours away, let’s take a quick look back.
The Numbers In Brief
Ignoring chapter headings and things like the glossary, I made 39 total posts. They ranged from 3,088 words (2.12: No, You Can’t Have a Phone Call) down to just 795 (2.13: Not So New Math). In total Downrange Data came it at 61,403 words — excluding the glossary — which puts it between Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (61,922) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (59,900) in length, and solidly in the standard length of non-fiction.
Downrange Data is just one subscriber away from 500 and will likely hit that mark before the ball drops tonight.
The Top Five Posts
This wasn’t as straight forward as I originally thought it would be, in part because it depends on what you count. I publish on Substack, which gives me total views, open rate, and an ‘engagement rate’, which is measured by the number of subscribers (in relative terms) who have opened your emails, liked, commented, or engaged with most or all of your posts.
0.3 Death to PowerPoint landing at the top for views makes sense, since it was the closest I came to a viral hit. 0.1: WTF is Data Literacy? also seems a logical one, since it’s where a lot of people probably went after following their first link to the site. It’s great to see Natalie’s post, X.7: Stop Using Pie Charts get the recognition it deserves. When I first caught her pitch in an online brown bag, I immediately reached out and asked to give a pro-dev encore to the SOCOM MS Teams crowd on ‘Think, Drink, Write, Fight’, and then followed up here. 1.2: A Stryker Dies in Diyala was actually one of the first posts I wrote while I was at the pre-command course back in March, and I think it captures the needed culture change well.
But, as much as I have loved putting the time, effort, and snark into X.2: Glossary, I feel that that’s an edge case. There can’t be that many lexicographers amongst you.
I promote the substack on five other sites: NSTR on Discord, The aforementioned SOCOM MS Teams site TDWF, LinkedIn, Instagram (and with it Facebook) and Twitter/X. While I’ve had a few noteworthy reposts (shout out to All Berets Matter), LinkedIn is the site which drives the overwhelming majority of traffic to the substack.
It seems to make sense a site ostensibly about finding jobs found my two posts from my time at Human Resources Command interesting (2.10: The Files Are In The Computer and 2.11: Data in Context). 2.04: ‘I’m From the Future’ was another one of the original anchor posts I wrote, in part because Scott — I feel like he’s ok with me using his real name now — summed up the problem so well with just that one line.
Measuring comments on LinkedIn is something that also caught my attention. Ryan Crayne poked me about writing a post for West Point’s Center for Junior Officers on the data transformation I was advocating. I owe him a huge thanks for doing so. First, because it prompted a conversation between my first army battalion commander and I, which was as awesome as it was humbling. But also, that article, which was a bit of an overall retrospective of Downrange Data focused on highlights the changes we drove as junior leaders, had the most impressions of any post I’ve ever had on LinkedIn.
However, a lot of the comments it garnered clearly showed the posters hadn’t read the actual article. I’m not trying to drive subscribers, but I do believe in the ideas I’m advocating, and I want them to get a chance to spread. I’ve been mulling comments as a sign that someone is willing to take the time to engage, but something about my post didn’t get them to read it. So, I’m retooling my LinkedIn shares, trying out different things to see what helps the ideas spread best. Hit me back if you have any thoughts.
The Bottom Five Posts
Here you find my darlings. Except this is self-published so I don’t have to kill them. Nobody wants to listen to an XO talk about finance of logistics, so it’s probably no surprise 2.05: Show Me the Money didn’t fare well. That said, when your fellow XO steals all your money with your comptroller’s blessing, you’ll have no one but yourself to blame.
My time with Ryan (2.03: Make A SGM’s Day Better) was without peer, and those initial forays into helping him track the soldiers in our company grew into every other digital system we built while I was at group, to include the homegrown dashboard.
Working with Ben (2.06: ‘The Ben and Erik Roadshow’) was such a great experience he got a whole second post (4.2: Bad Ux = Bad Data or ‘How We Killed iCommand’). I’m a little surprised to see 3.5: Sua Sponte didn’t do better, but I got word it did cause a bit of a ruckus back at my last command, so at least KM read it.
I owe a debt to Zach for getting me started writing, and Downrange Data wouldn’t exist without The Harding Project. One highlight I think is worth catching. Give this podcast a listen. Amos Fox challenges Zach on the idea that military journals needed a refresh, but Zach brings the data receipts (X.4: The Data of the Harding Project).
Fellow Data Acolytes
I also got to talk about the substack on a pair of podcasts. I owe a debt to Rick and War On the Rocks, where this whole effort got started. Drew, Brett, and Jon were an incredible group of commanders who I got to share ideas with at the Military Leader Podcast, and we’re still discussing ways to cooperate and coordinate our efforts to drive the change the army needs. A fellow SSC student, Matt Miller, also reached out and invited me to dial in to their class as they discussed the original War On The Rocks article.
Several of you also reached out with your own experiences and notes. I can’t thank every one of you enough for sharing your time, and for sharing these posts with others.
Another Milestone and Another Overdue Promise
I asked my editor this morning what a good way was to commemorate the pending 500 subscriber milestone in a short note, and she quickly chastised me for not getting those stickers figured out. So, I spent some time this morning getting that a bit more organized. Like all great projects, it has grown. I’m looking to offer two different designs in both sticker and magnet form. First, the classic one:
There is also going to be a special one for the ongoing Gains (G) series I’m currently working:
We’ve got six more posts in that series that’ll continue to drop on Saturdays into the new year.
And because the best things come in threes, at the suggestion from a friend on NSTR, I’ve reached out to a company that does PVC morale patches. We discussed the design and some tweaks that need to be made, but I wanted the QR code to work, so they’re getting back to me with an estimate of this patch:
I’ve gotta work out a few final details on how to do ordering, but thanks to Substack and Stripe, I’ve already got payments figured out. Not looking to make any money on this project, but covering shipping costs seems like a winning strategy. More to follow.
Happy New Years, and best of luck to us all in 2025.