The good: - I got plenty of customers (side gig volume) from all over the world. - Many of them were very happy with the results. - Collecting requirements for reports and dashboards is notoriously difficult and volatile, but I was able to keep this under control. I credit my age (48) and experience for that.
The bad: - I hitched my wagon to a tool that is not ready for prime time: Google Data Studio. I spent too much time wrestling with the tool. - The success of many projects depended not on my skills with Data Studio, but with the quality of the data sources and APIs that were feeding into Data Studio. Almost half the time, the quality was well below expectations, and I spent too much time wrestling with the integration.
In the end, I wasn't even close to making a reasonable hourly rate, and getting to the point where I could get past an hourly rate and make money at scale seemed impossible.
I happily shut it down after six months.