2024 in Review

Hey 👋,

I'm Tom. My background is hardware engineering (making gadgets). I lost faith that I could build a good life working in hardware, so I'm trying to work out how to build a profitable and sustainable business.

In this post you'll get an inside view on what worked for me in 2024, what didn't and what I'm planning for 2025.

First some quick context

Why am I doing this?

• I want to have freedom of time, freedom of money and freedom of location.
• I have a few values that are important to me (having diversity in my life, living a healthy and active life, being balanced and peaceful)
• I don't think I can achieve these working for someone else.

How am I approaching this?

I have been thinking about trying to build a business for a long time, and quit working as an employee in 2021. Quitting enabled me to start building the skills and the business sense I need, if I'm to actually build a business that meets those goals above.

Through absorbing a bunch of other people's experiences and making my own, I've honed in on some strategies/philosophies that resonate for me:

• Long term sustainability: I know I'll need several swings at the ball before I can hit a home run. So if I want to be successful I need to be able to keep swinging for a while, which means not burning out or running out of runway. Also this means I won't know which swing is going to hit, and taking more swings gives me more chances.
• Find a great market: I think building in a market that is growing rapidly has more impact on a bootstrapped business' chance of success than how much grit or skill someone has. An OK founder in a great market is more likely to have success than a great founder in an OK market.
  0 Build a business not a product: A bootstrapped business' success is just as dependent on distribution, unit economics and the capabilities of the team as on the product itself. There are a few outcomes from this for me:
  • Focusing on B2B SaaS products (rather than B2C, one-off products, content/info products, ecomm etc).
  • Focusing on the goal of building a great business rather than focusing on any one given product or business. I see people grinding away at a product and not assessing if it's the right product to work on, rather than taking more swings to see what hits. The flip side of this is obviously having enough grit to continue when things are tough, and it's a balancing act.

2024 in Review

2024 was a big year!

If I think about the person that manages to achieve the goals I have above of freedom of finances, time and location, there's a bunch of skills and ways of thinking that hypothetical person probably has.
I'm still a long way from the goals above, but I have made big strides in developing my technical skills and business thinking, getting me closer to being that hypothetical person.

Those big strides came through working on FluidSEO.

• I launched FluidSEO at the end of 2023 with Webflow's launch of an API and a marketplace.
• The thinking was that I could use Wordpress' plugin ecosystem as a proxy to find a good business opportunity, with the assumption that the Webflow marketplace would grow quickly. I landed on SEO as the product space to build in.
• In 2024 I developed the product from a buggy and sprawling MVP to a pretty stable and more focused product
  • I'm a far better developer than I was 12 months ago. I still have a lot I can learn, but I'll keep learning as needed.
• Revenue went from nothing to enough to pay my rent, health insurance and a bit more.
  • 207 different people signed up as paying customers

By the end of the year I realised there is some opportunity with FluidSEO, but it doesn't seem like the right opportunity for me.

• Growth is linear at best
  • The original plan of using a marketplace to get initial customers and revenue has worked out great.
  • I'm doing fine in terms of both traffic and conversion from the marketplace, so there's not a lot of opportunity to grow the business without finding another channel.
  • I'm struggling to make a mark with any other channels - I'm doing what I can and trying to get external support, but I haven't cracked it.
• The business opportunity is unstable
  • Who knows where SEO goes as Skynet replaces Google
  • Webflow are always a threat - I know they will build some of FluidSEO's features into the product, I just don't know when
  • I can't generate enough revenue in the short term to continue working towards the bigger vision (making competitor to Semrush/Ahrefs inside Webflow). I think I could incrementally grow the business, but without finding a channel that can increase the growth rate significantly, the opportunity cost is too high.

Things that sucked

As well as being really great for initial distribution, building on Webflow's API and marketplace has also sucked:

• APIs
  • v1 to v2 migration - the APIs released at the end of 2023 were EOLed by mid 2024 and deprecated by the end of 2024 🤦
  • bugs - there have been lots of bugs and regressions to deal with. I've reported tens of bugs, some of them got resolved quickly, others are still open. Webflow are pushing forward on a lot of different fronts in their product, so the marketplace/API is just one of many priorities. I've had several users churn because of bugs in Webflow's APIs.
  • functionality changes - updates to the API's functionality mean I can either offer new features or improved UX to users, but that's a constant time investment where I have to re-do prior work. This isn't a problem when you're building on a stable API.
• I'm a small fish for Webflow. The support and Dev Rel folks are all super nice and friendly, but enabling FluidSEO's use case isn't a priority.
• Competition is popping up and it's a race to the bottom. Agencies are developing more and more apps for the marketplace and not monetising them, but using them as brand assets instead. FluidSEO is still a far better product, but it's making the marketplace less attractive to build a business in.

What's 2025 look like?

I'm moving FluidSEO to more of an autopilot mode to give me space to work on opportunities that I see as a better use of my time.

It's clear my hopes for the Webflow marketplace didn't play out, and I'm not hitting the strategy above of "find a great market" so I'd like to take another swing . One "market" that is clearly going gangbusters is AI 🤖 . "Build an AI product" is not a strategy, it's super generic and broad, but generative AI is a platform shift and that means there's an excess of opportunity right now. If I don't explore the space then in 5 years time it will feel like a missed opportunity.

I don't have any specific idea that I've validated already, so the start of 2025 will be about exploring what opportunities exist. One approach I want to try is building a service business as a stepping stone to a larger SaaS business. The thinking is:

• Service business revenue can scale quickly, which would reduce some of the ongoing stress around money (helping me with long term sustainability).
• Working on projects in the space and with customers will give me exposure to the problem space and solutions.
• Lots of companies want to take advantage of this sea change, but don't know what they could be doing, or how to do it.
  I've started building out some form of portfolio or experience to justify myself as someone that can deliver on AI solutions.
• FluidSEO uses a number of generative AI models for various product features, so that's a start.
  • I built https://chatch.art/ as a fun demo project.
  • I have a couple of friends that are interested in how they can leverage AI in their business, so I am doing discovery calls with them.
  • I've already started working on a tool to help keep sales leads warm for Jay at Teal Canvas (a service for commissioning fine art from artists).

Ask

• Can you connect me with an SMB that knows they need to leverage AI in their business, but doesn't know where to start?

Thanks for reading. Building a business on your own terms is incredibly hard, and having a community of like-minded folks can make a huge difference, so I appreciate having the Indie Hackers community!