💡 Tis the Season to be Silly

With the Christmas party season in full flow and company productivity starting to nose-dive, the irish insights team will take a couple of weeks of hard-earned rest between now and the new year to review and prepare for an even bigger 2025.

We hope you enjoy our content, stories, interviews and videos as much as we have enjoyed creating them for you. It's been a pleasure to build this community, interact with you every week, and get to know so many interesting Irish startups and entrepreneurs doing amazing things in every corner of the globe.

In this week’s newsletter, we cover:

• Our 2024 irish insights content high-level overview

• A chance for you to provide us with some valuable feedback to help us grow and improve in 2025

• Your chance to be a part of irish insights global team in 2025?

• Personal highlights and low lights

And, of course, a mediocre irish insights Christmas-themed meme… 🧑‍🎄

Before You Dive Into More Festive Memes... 🎄

We have one small favour to ask! 🙏

We’d really appreciate it if you could spare three minutes to complete a short feedback survey. We want to hear what you think we’re doing well and gather any bright ideas on how we can improve our newsletter and community experience.

Want to Get Involved?
In the survey, there’s an option to let us know if you’d like to join our mission of promoting Irish innovation on a global scale. Whether you’re interested in contributing news, writing an article, or supporting us in other ways—we’d love to hear from you!

Thank you so much for being part of our journey. Now, back to those top-tier Christmas-themed memes! 🎅🎁

2024 Recap: A Year in Review 📊

As we approach the end of 2024, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come. This time last year, Irish Insights was just an idea we were passionate about bringing to life. Fast forward to today, and we’ve built a thriving community of subscribers, contributors, and supporters—all thanks to you!

We’re excited to share that we now have 716 subscribers, a net gain of nearly 500 people in less than 12 months! While the growth has been steady, we’ll admit it’s felt a bit slow at times, especially considering how rapidly our LinkedIn following has expanded during the same period.

But taking a step back, gaining 500 new subscribers organically in just a year is something we’re proud of. It’s a solid foundation that we’re excited to build on in 2025.

Since our main content hub has been LinkedIn, promoting our newsletter signup page has been tricky. Every time we post a newsletter link, LinkedIn’s algorithm severely limits our reach, as the platform naturally discourages anything that might drive traffic away.

If you’ve found creative ways to navigate this challenge, we’re all ears! Send us your ideas—answers on a postcard (or a quick message) 🤝.

As you can see, our content engagement stats, including newsletter opens, clicks, and impressions on our newsletter website, have been pretty incredible, especially when compared to industry averages based on research from our provider, Beehiiv. We’ve included those benchmarks below for context:

LinkedIn Leads the Way 🚀

While our newsletter growth could be described as slightly above average, LinkedIn has been a completely different story—with outstanding follower growth and exceptional content engagement:

One post in particular caused the most significant spikes in the stats. Our post about Irish man Damien Spillane accured 752 likes, 71 comments and 150+ followers. Thanks Damien!

Given Linkedin's success, we have big plans to double down on our content strategy for this platform in 2025. Watch this space

Wrapping Up 2024: Our Highs and Lows 🎉

As the year ends, we wanted to share some personal highlights and challenges from Irish Insights in 2024.

The Highs:
Connecting and being able to interview and get into the brains of many Irish founders doing so many cool things globally has been an absolute highlight. Hearing stories of startups rooted in a small island taking on the world—and succeeding—has been inspiring. These conversations felt like mini-masterclasses in innovation (and occasionally in managing time zones!).

The Lows:
Growing the community? Fantastic. Converting followers into subscribers? Well... let’s say the jury’s still out. It’s been like trying to convince people to stay for the after-party—a work in progress. But rest assured; we have some creative plans brewing for 2025 to turn "lurkers" into loyal readers.

The Balancing Act:
Balancing this newsletter with work and family life has been... let’s call it "eventful." With a one-year-old bursting with energy, the best writing windows often came during the early morning or late at night. Pro tip: The ultimate creativity boosters are peace, quiet, and a sleeping household.

Looking Ahead:
We’re excited to spend Christmas on the sunny Gold Coast, joined by our parents travelling all the way from Ireland—a special family reunion we’re genuinely grateful for.

We hope you, your family, and your friends have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. We can’t wait to return recharged in 2025 with even bigger plans to bring you the best of Irish tech news abroad—and hopefully, connect more of you through our growing platform.

Thank you for being part of our journey! 🎄✨

I will leave you with a meme of how we will likely spend our time at our respective Christmas parties.