2025 in Review
This was strangely both an eventful and a calm year. Let’s get to it.
Cash vs. Curiosity
At the end of last year, I set an ambitious goal for this year: get to $2k MRR by June. I fell spectacularly short of my goal.
Throughout my whole career, I’ve been lucky to be able to pursue my curiosity whether in marketing, tech or payments, got really good at building the necessary skills, and got paid in the process. This time, for the first time, I chose “building a SaaS” as a meta-goal instead, and I found out the hard way that chasing MRR in itself is not compatible with the long term commitment and dedication required for building a sustainable business.
The internet would have you believe that shipping a new project every week is the only way to win. Shipping fast is a skill that’s absolutely worth mastering, but it’s not a substitute for genuine interest and curiosity.
Too bad that marketing work doesn’t show up in git commits
And it was not due to a lack of trying. At the beginning of the year, I shipped OG Panda, an open graph image API, mainly as a technical challenge. I learned about web processes, headless browsers, background jobs and a whole lot more, but in hindsight, I never truly believed it had commercial potential.
A few months later, I redesigned and relaunched Meet Lars. It turned out great, but what this project needed was better marketing or archiving, both options I lacked the conviction for.
Like Kruder & Dorfmeister, but for the web
One of the highlights of the year was launching craft.tattoo, a tattoo design generator. Oygar is one of the best designers I know, and he had been working with AI image generation tools for a while now. And I was learning SEO in addition to mastering Rails, so we figured this would be a good case study in shipping a product.
We went from idea to launch in only 5 weeks, including social logins, credits system, payments and SEO pages. We even got some initial traction with customers, but neither of us were committed to it in the long term to make it a commercial success.
It’s easier than ever to build products, but it’s harder than ever to stand out. And I’m now more convinced than ever that the best way to stand out is to focus on building products that you genuinely care about for the long term. Ironic, I know, but it took me multiple product launches to come back full circle to realize that genuine curiosity and commitment wins in the long term.
Rolling with the punches
Besides work, life decided that this year is the perfect year for curveballs.
For starters, I decided to spend my 45th birthday in the mountains of Gifu, but got stuck in a snowstorm in Kanazawa. Luckily, we managed to catch the last train to Tokyo instead, and ended up spending 8 slow and beautiful days in the suburbs of Tokyo.
A trip to the Netherlands countryside turned into spending 4 days sick in an expensive hotel room in Amsterdam, and a miserable connecting flight back to Singapore, but we survived.
And during my 3 day stop in Istanbul, I lost my grandma and ended up attending her funeral in her hometown. It turned out to be a poignant but good opportunity to catch up with distant family members I haven’t seen in years, and spend time with my sister.
Living in Singapore can get very predictable in the best possible way, which makes for great long term planning. But these experiences reminded me that life is chaos, and your ability to adapt on the fly beats perfect plans every time. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere for building a SaaS as well.
While going through my photos from the year, I realized some of the best times I spent were those with other people. The highlights of the year were showing my nieces (11) around in Singapore on their first ever overseas trip, hanging out with fellow Ruby developers in Bucharest, collaborating with Oygar over three days in a cool Airbnb in Rotterdam, and regular co-working with the only other 3 bootstrapped founders in Singapore.
Friendly.rb, without a doubt, was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended
Speaking of people, one of the highlights of the year was meeting Jonathan at Friendly.rb and eventually teaming up. We hit it off on day one, bonded over Romanian beers in the evening as gentlemen do, and co-attended a surprise SaaS panel the next day with a mild hangover. We realized we have a lot in common, not just with similar backgrounds but also worldview and goals.
After coming back to Singapore we started having weekly calls and working together on a new project. As much as I love writing Rails, it has been a refreshing change to have a partner who’s much better at Rails than me handle the tech, so I can focus on marketing again. I’m quite excited about our progress so far, we’re shipping our first product later this month and I can’t wait to share more soon.
Rocking the midlife crisis
It has been a tremendously successful year for hobbies.
Firstly, after two years of practicing on a pad, I’ve convinced myself that I was dedicated enough and I finally pulled the trigger and ordered this bad boy:
I obviously took off the blue tape on the foot pedals, lest you think I also keep my remotes in their plastic bags
It’s incredible how good electronic drums have become, and how closely they mimic the feel of acoustic drums. Our weekly sessions with Benedikt and Michael just got a boost of energy, and we started on a 30 day independence challenge which has been challenging to say the least, but very enjoyable.
Secondly, after a trip to Thailand and realizing how much freedom they offer, I signed up for motorcycle classes in Singapore. The classes have been somewhat challenging, but very well structured. I’m looking forward to getting my license this year, and maybe even my first bike.
Finally, I joined the cult of mechanical keyboards, to accompany my journey into development on Linux on a mini PC. The experience has been fun so far, and it’s been refreshing to get a glimpse into the world outside of Apple’s walled garden.
Reading like there’s no tomorrow
I have no idea how I managed to read so much this year. Here’s a summary in rough order of enjoyment.
- Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The purpose of life is to align all your goals to achieve a state where you’re so immersed in what you’re doing that nothing else matters.
- How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, Donald Robertson. If Marcus Aurelius did it while dealing with grief, fear and disease, you can do it too. Quite possibly the best summary of Stoic philosophy I’ve ever read.
- Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber. About half the jobs in the world should not exist in the first place. And to think that this book was written before AI.
- How to Think Like Socrates, Donald Robertson. Peloponnesian Wars teach us that no matter how bad you think things are, they can always get worse. Also, Socrates was the master of annoying people by challenging people’s assumptions, beliefs and motivations through difficult questions.
- Shoe Dog, Phil Knight. Building an enduring business for life is a series of make-or-break decisions, working with the right people, and mostly luck.
- Start Small, Stay Small, Rob Walling. The success of a venture depends on Market, Marketing, Design and Tech choices, in that order. Still relevant after more than a decade.
- China’s World View, David Daokui Li. Contrary to the narrative in the Western world, the rise of China is a net positive for the world.
- E-myth Revisited, Michael E. Gerber. Think of your business as a blueprint for launching other similar businesses, if you want to achieve freedom as an entrepreneur.
- $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi. Brainstorm all the ways you could solve a customer’s problem, not just the way you believe it should be solved.
Next Year
True to the spirit of this year, I don’t have any specific goals for next year, other than going with the flow. Hustling solo to build a SaaS is fun, but working on projects you truly care about, with the people that inspire you is much more rewarding. And I plan to do more of that next year.