2024 in Review
My biggest goal this year was making my first dollar on the internet. I achieved this in July, when a stranger in UK paid $29 to use meetlars.com. And I only found out about it coincidentally - turns out my Stripe notifications were turned off! It was a beautiful moment, but getting there was not easy.
Embracing entrepreneurship
Early in the year, I was stuck in between two worlds: my past identity as a marketer, and my aspiration to build a SaaS business. Working on the occasional marketing gig felt like living in the past, while building a SaaS felt like an overwhelming adventure. I somehow believed I had to do the former in the short term, so that I can do the latter in the long term, while giving neither of them the attention and commitment they deserve.
This all changed one day in March. I sat down and made a realistic plan on what it would take to make consulting successful, only to realize that it’s a lot of work. The exact type of work I had done many times before, and had no desire to do anymore. Which led me to ask myself: why not put in all that effort into building a SaaS instead?
In April, I set things in motion. I joined a group of indie makers on Telegram, committed to making daily git commits. I started co-working 1-2 days a week with a very small group of bootstrapped, profitable and full-time SaaS business founders in Singapore. I bet $500 with a friend to launch my project in a month, and it worked!
In hindsight, the transformation was sparked by a revelation about what I wanted, but the result was the outcome of these small actions every day.
Getting real
It’s so easy to give advice to others and so hard to follow it yourself, which is why consulting is so much easier than entrepreneurship. There are three lessons I learned the hard way this year:
First, momentum is everything. I lost it a few times this year, all perfectly aligned with overseas trips. Travel feeds the soul, but at the cost of major productivity dips.
Case in point
Second, focus on painkillers, not vitamins. Lars attracted a few hundred users and a few customers, but it would be a stretch to call it a business. Nobody wakes up in middle of the night, fearing that their marketing strategy is not good enough. It needs to solve a bigger problem or find the people who already have this problem, ideally doing both, but currently doing neither.
Third, let go of perfectionism. I spent too much time on non-essentials such as obsessing over UI design, finding “the right way” to write code and going down self-hosting rabbit holes. They don’t matter, at least not now. While there’s a balance between craftsmanship and shipping quickly, my obsession with the former held me back from achieving the latter.
Quality comes through quantity. You can’t think your way through greatness, you have to live through it.
Life beyond work
One of the highlights of the year was helping organize and host the Red Dot Ruby Conference in July in Singapore. It was a lot of fun meeting and hanging out with Rubyists I previously knew online such as Marco Roth, Tim Riley and Charles Oliver Nutter among others.
I didn’t speak at the conference but gave a talk, From Ruby to Revenue at RubySG September meetup at Stripe, to encourage Ruby devs to gain clarity on and invest time in marketing.
Meanwhile, my rails anniversary post got to the front page of Hacker News, which earned me the labels “naive” and a “dinosaur”. Achievement unlocked 🎉
In the end, I joined the Ruby Singapore core team as a volunteer and started organizing the meetups. My personal goal is to encourage more people to start bootstrapped, profitable businesses using Ruby.
In other news, I surprised myself with the number of trips I did this year.
- Traveled around Kyushu, exploring some of the best onsens Japan has to offer.
- Spent some time in Austin and Miami. People in the US surely love big cars and big cups. They are also generally much nicer in person than internet would have you believe.
Mastering the art of being a tourist
- Visited my family in Istanbul, with a sailing trip on the Turkish riviera and a road trip to Greece.
- Went on a co-working trip to Bali and met some indie hackers. It was exactly how I imagined it would be.
- Did a short trip to Seoul and admired some gorgeous modern architecture.
Dongdaemun Design Plaza, built by Zaha Hadid Architects
One of my goals for this year was getting back to playing drums. Benedikt and I got together twice a week every week for almost the entire year and practiced our chops.
Meets world’s nichest community: Rails devs playing drums
Finally, my never-ending quests for mastering pizza continued at a pace of one pizza party per month. Turns out practice does make perfect.
24h fermented sourdough crust with eggplants, mushrooms, red onions and mozzarella
Books
I also read a lot this year. Here are some of my favorites, in rough order of enjoyment:
- The Comfort Crisis, Micheal Easter. Modern life is too comfortable, and we would all be happier if we learned to embrace a bit of discomfort.
- The Forgotten Highlander, Alistair Urquhart. The incredible story of a young Scottish man surviving WW2 as a Japanese POW.
- Atomic Habits, James Clear. Winners and losers have the same goals. Change your beliefs and fix your inputs, the outputs will follow.
- The Pathless Path, Paul Millerd. If you are not your work, who are you? Given who you are, what kind of life is enough?
- Deep Work, Cal Newport. When everyone’s distracted all the time, your ability to focus is a competitive advantage.
- The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Culture of safetyism and commercialisation of education ruined societies and made them fragile.
- Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks. Every great story is about a five minute transformation.
- The Millionaire Fastlane, MJ DeMarco. The only way to truly build wealth is to own a business.
Next Year
My main goals for next year are achieving ramen profitability while staying healthy, spending more time with interesting people and surrounding myself with good design.
- Get to $2k MRR SaaS revenue by the end of June
- Exercise 5 days a week
- Attend Rails World
- Practice drums
- Write more
Reminder to self: majority of building a business after 40 is managing your own energy. And energy seems to be a lot easier to manage when you follow your curiosity, share your work and build momentum. Better done than prfect.