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.

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.

20 years later, Rails is alive and well. While it has never been the the most popular kid on the block by any means, it remains widely used by bootstrapped founders, large tech companies and everyone in between.

Learning programming after 40 with the goal of building a SaaS, going all-in on Rails was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Let me explain:

Rails is a monolith

When embarking on SaaS, I did start with the most popular framework: Next.js. All I wanted was a few database tables, user authentication, and some basic functionality. It did not go well.

It’s highly possible that mine was a skill issue. However, I found out was that JS ecosystem is heavily fragmented: for even the most basic piece of functionality, you either have to comb through a plethora of node packages or pay a VC-funded tech company a lot of money to solve problems that other frameworks solved more than a decade ago.

Rails on the other hand was extracted from Basecamp, one of the OG SaaS companies with thousands of paying customers. It does not aim to solve imaginary problems that do not exist, nor does it create new problems in order to reinvent the wheel. It comes out of the box with pretty much everything you need to build a SaaS application that you can run on a single VPS.

Rails is mature

Over the past two decades, many developers smarter and more experienced than I have generally agreed on the right way to do important things like authentication, and the not-so-important ones like naming conventions. I like not having to think about any of that, so I can focus on building a business and marketing.

Convention over configuration means I can open any open-source repo and know exactly where to look. And if I get stuck, I can hire a Rails developer and they can get to work right away.

To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, “the longer a technology has been around, the more likely it is to continue being around.” Rails exemplifies this principle.

Rails is productive

One of the most underrated features of Rails is that it attracts the kind of people that are more interested in just building things than debating tech.

Most of the bootstrapped, successful, solo-founder SaaS businesses I admire use Rails, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s something about picking a stack that just works.

Of course it’s entirely possible to bootstrap a successful SaaS company with any stack, but to me it just seems that monoliths such as Rails or those inspired by it are more common than not.

Rails is good enough

Yes, the learning curve can be steep, and the “magic” can sometimes be frustrating. But for 80% of the cases in building modern web applications, Rails is good enough. It is battle-tested, it is messy, it is beautiful, and most importantly, it gets the job done.

There are so many details to get right when building a business, and there’s beauty in not having to worry about the tech.

Happy 20th anniversary, Rails!

It turns out, across all domains, the creative process requires a different pattern: inspiration, experimentation and execution.

Inspiration

The first part is seeking inspiration out in the world. Curating a repository of great work that captures your attention: A book cover, a thoughtfully designed product, a challenging drum fill, or copy for a landing page. Capture it.

In Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks suggests an exercise called “Homework for Life” that asks you to write down a 5 minute, story worthy moment of each day of your life. In his Radical Design Course, Jack McDade advocates becoming a digital hoarder of inspiration.

The goal of these exercises is to get better at noticing things. It’s hard to know where to start when staring at a blank canvas. It’s a lot easier when you have a pool of great work to draw inspiration from.

Experimentation

The second part is experimentation. This is all about building muscle memory and training your subconsciousness. It’s about learning to pay attention to little things.

And the way to do that is by copying. Pick something from your inspiration library and try to recreate it from scratch. What shade of yellow is this? Why is there a comma here? What’s that font in the heading there?

Sam Parr talks about this for writing in Copy That - literally taking a piece of great copy and writing it down. Adam Wathan does something similar, recreating the Allbirds site in Tailwind CSS.

Anyone who’s ever played at a band knows this too well: You start by covering songs, long before you can start writing decent ones yourself. In the process, you learn how the great masters do it.

Execution

The last part is the execution. It’s when you stop messing around and start getting things done. Locking yourself up in a cabin and writing for days. Turning off social media and getting down to work. Stop seeking inspiration and start building momentum.

Cal Newport calls this Deep Work: the ability to focus without interruptions at length. Great writers are masters at this: Victor Hugo famously asked his servant to lock him in a room without his clothes and not return the key until he was done with the day’s writing. Henry David Thoreau spent two years in a cabin while writing Walden.

Now I don’t have a cabin in Singapore, nor do I want to be locked in a room. Instead, I’m trying to get better at creativity by building a library of inspiration, setting aside time for deliberate practice, and pushing myself to do more uninterrupted work. Like how I wrote this post in a hotel room at 7am, after keeping notes and experimenting with writing styles for weeks.

Home

The idea buying real estate never appealed to me. I’ve always thought of it as a big commitment with high risk. I also enjoyed the freedom to move and change of scenery that comes with renting. That all changed last year when we moved back from Switzerland to Singapore.

• Singapore was the second most expensive place in the world for renting an apartment in 2023. The first was New York.
• My wife being a local made us eligible to buy public housing turned an otherwise very expensive purchase into a manageable one.
• After getting married, I learned to appreciate big commitments and the stability that comes with them.

Choosing tile gaps, one of the 10,000 small renovation decisions to be made

We found our dream place on the first week in January. It took a few months of paperwork to get the keys and another few months for renovations. We finally moved in September. It was a tedious and tiring experience, but it was worth it in the end.

Work

It was a year with mixed results. The year started out great, but I lost momentum due to moving homes twice, constant demands of an ongoing renovation and the occasional travel. Life changes are disruptive, and moving is high on that list.

That said, there have been a few firsts in my Ruby journey:

• Released my first Rails app, Meet Lars
• Release my first Ruby Gem, Bridgetown Obsidian
• Gave my first technical talk, Introduction to Hotwire

One of the things I tried this year was collaborating with a programmer friend I’ve known for years to build an email marketing tool. We both learned a lot, but ultimately failed to ship on time. This was a combination of over-thinking and not talking to customers early enough. This experience was a wake-up call for me to go back to my marketing roots and start talking to customers before building features – an advice I’d happily give others but clearly failed to practice myself.

One of the highlights of this year was speaking at Ahref’s SEO Summit in Singapore. It was such a well organised event with 200+ attendees from all across asia.

Me and my extra minimalist slides which people apparently liked.

Travel

This was a great year for travel.

• Attended a friend’s wedding in South Korea and visited Vietnam.
• Had an amazing road trip in Turkey involving paragliding, hot air baloon and ATV rides, sailing, and eating at great places from the dingiest hole-in-the-wall kebab shops to the two michelin star restaurants.

Sunset in Cappadocia. What a beautiful place.

• Attended the first Rails World in Amsterdam and met the Rails core team, Ryan Singer, Adam Wathan, Ufuk Kayserilioglu among many other fun Ruby people.
• Met up and hanged out with fellow MegaMakers in Barcelona over a few days.

Personal

Despite big moves, I managed to exercise somewhat regularly, and got better at lifting heavy things. I’ve been following the Stronglifts 5x5 program and it’s good.

I also managed to do a few DIY projects at home, such as building the entire home automation system, sanding and staining furniture and installing things.

But most importantly, I got my pizza oven and got back to mastering the pizza at home, a journey that will continue well into 2024.

Next Year

My main goals for the year are to get better at execution, think more clearly and meet interesting people.

• Launch a SaaS product and make the first dollar online
• Spend 20 mins daily without screens to think
• Try Shape Up to ship more consistently
• Gym 3 times a week to stay focused
• Explore getting a co-founder
• Write at least once a week
• Get back to playing drums
• Speak at a conference
• Master pizza at home
• Take a trip to Europe
• Start a podcast

Reminder to self: good things take time. Best time to start is now.

A bit of background

Natural wines are made by “indie” winemakers in small batches, typically without any intervention in the vineyard or winery. This growing niche has come a long way since my first experience in 2016, but even today, there’s still surprisingly little information on the web. I thought it would be cool to help people learn more about the makers behind the wines they enjoy, and discover new places to enjoy them. This project also has the potential turn into a little business as a directory or community, while learning Rails and practicing the “shipping muscle”.

Discipline over motivation

At the start of the project, I made a “commitment” (get it?) to make a git commit every day. The first few days were hard, but it progressively got easier, even enjoyable. The simple act of opening the editor with the intention to write code—especially on days when motivation eluded me—had the biggest impact towards making consistent progress.

The looming deadlines

One month was too short to build most of the things I wanted, but long enough time to build something decent and get feedback. If I didn’t set a timeframe, I would likely have taken longer to ship it or not ship at all.

Priorities, priorities

One of the biggest challenges for a solo entrepreneur is staying focused. Figuring out what is worth building and avoiding rabbit holes is hard. To stay on track, I used a simple Notion board.

Going through the exercise of figuring out which ideas are worth building every week, and focusing on a handful of things every day helped me a lot to stay focused.

Having said that, I’m working on improving on this. For example, I spent two days working on the “design” in Figma. Judging by the final product, I think it’s fair to say that this was unnecessary.

Finally, I kept a development journal where every Sunday, I highlighted what what I set out to do, whether I accomplished it and how I felt about it. This was a great opportunity for a reality check, as well as to reflect on lessons I learned and celebrate my progress.

Learning as you go

There’s a time and place for structured learning with books and courses, but information sticks much better when combined with practice on a real-world project. Over the past year, I consumed my fair share of literature on Ruby and Rails. On this project I finally started to grasp and gain experience with concepts such as about model scopes, concerns, stimulus controllers and mosty importantly, tests. “Just in time learning” in the context of a specific task worked much better than “just learning”.

Content is hard

As much as I am interested in the domain, curating, writing, editing and optimising content takes a lot of effort. Also, building content-heavy businesses take a long time to produce results. Without a plan for consistently creating high quality content, this is probably not be the best business model for an solo entrepreneur to pursue. Although the jury is still out on this, and I would like to be proven wrong.

Start marketing early

Ironically, as a marketer, I could have done a better job of marketing. Talking about the product while building it helps get some early feedback and gauge interest. It can also help to build an audience. I spent most of my time building and not enough time on talking about it.

What’s next?

I’m quite happy with how this project turned out. I will continue to build functionality and add content from time to time, but I consider this project done for now. For the next set of projects, I will explore less content driven, more saas business ideas. Most importantly, I want to keep the momentum going, by sticking to daily and consistent progress.

Working with a partner

My original design was hardly inspiring, so I asked Oygar for help. Being a solo founder can be hard. Being able to bounce off ideas, keeping each other accountable and making steady progress kept us both inspired and helped us build momentum.

Fixing scope instead of time

Setting out to launch the project in a week forced us to make hard decisions early-on. Instead of fixing scope, we fixed the deadline and cut down the scope. That forced us to focus and ask ourselves at every step: does this feature help us ship faster? Will this feature deliver value from day one? Can we get away without building it now?

Picking the right tools

Originally I was convinced that this site needed to have user accounts, OAuth, a voting tool and a CMS. I even built some of it using Rails, which introduced some complexity. It turned out that we could build a much simpler, static version in Bridgetown and Airtable to validate the idea. If it works, there will always be time to improve it later. If it doesn’t, then the tech stack won’t matter.

The next step is getting real-world feedback, and experimenting with alternating between coding and marketing each week to keep the momentum going.