3 Biggest Lessons I Learned in 2020

I’ve worked on about 6 projects in 2020, lost my angel-backed startup to COVID, gone full-time on my hustles, and even sold my first side project (getrocketnote.com) a couple months back!

Here are my top 5 takeaways from this last year as we get moving in 2021:

1. Become a unicorn 🦄

I’m a developer-first guy by nature. I’m not as great with design. But in 2020, I had to really work hard to improve my designs. It has had the biggest impact over anything else I’ve learned, allowing me to really build cool products by myself.

For designers, I think No Code is the key. In 2021 it will only get easier for designers to be full-stack makers without code at all.

But the key is to invest the time it takes to figure out really NAILING the full-stack designer/dev thing. It’ll take time and effort, but you won’t regret it.

2. Take time to breathe

This one is pretty straightforward, but it’s really important!! I tend to put my head down and design/code all day... But you absolutely need to take time to think “big picture,” reset, and strategize.

3. Productize everything

Okay, people are split on this point. But I’m going all-in on it for 2021.

I am turning every internal tool I build for projects into their own products. This helps build new revenue streams and only takes a marginal amount of effort.

Take for example Plaudy. I built it because I needed an analytics platform that I could easily put in customer dashboards for my other SaaS, Jolt Block. Instead of just putting customer-facing analytics as a feature within Jolt Block, I pulled it out into its own product.

This will allow me to not only use it in the rest of my products I build AND have a product like Keen for free forever, but also have a brand new product to market and grow over time with whatever effort I want to use.

Cool, huh? You can go as far or as little as you want with this concept, but I’m all in for 2021 and can keep you in the loop!