January Retrospective

January is one of those months where you are in great spirits and are ready to change the world. Resolutions and all of that, setting goals, hitting the gym, all of that. That's most folks anyway, they shine brighter than the sun, then end up fizzling before the month is over.

Nothing wrong with that, just gotta keep getting back on that horse. For me, I tried to slow my roll a bit. Last year was extremely productive, both in terms of what we accomplished with the platform, but also in terms of revenue, ending the year around ~76% over the year prior.

Money's great, but for me, the satisfaction comes from shipping a great product. Talking to users has helped me learn a ton about the space, where and how to grow, as well as what adjacent opportunities are out there.

Because I didn't want to rush into too much this year, January was spent sharpening the ax, so to speak. Tons of research and planning to help ensure that over the next 11 months, I'm spending my time correctly.

Time is always limited, so spending it building the right things is always of the utmost importance.

With that, I'm a huge fan of the book Essentialism, and tend to read it at the top of the year. This year, I opted to simply put one of the core principles to practice. Said principle is "play", the idea that you need to goof off a bit as a way to stay sane and ultimately, become more productive.

Play for me looks awfully similar to work, coding. I spent some time building a small Node.js library that I won't even mention by name because it really doesn't matter. What matters is that by taking that time to play, I freed up my mind a ton which helped aid in my planning for the year.

In addition to the background cycles doing their thing, I spent a great deal of time brain dumping / mind mapping a ton of ideas that I have been kicking around, and found some commonalities in a lot of the things I want to build.

Don't necessarily want to delve too much further than that, but do want to mention that some of things that I've been doing last year (sites I'm running, projects I'm involved with, et cetera) don't necessarily fall in line with those commonalities.

Because these things aren't necessarily "on brand" I'm starting to cut them out of my life. Some have been easier, like scaling down my freelance writing and some will be hard and may take the better part of the year until I'm there emotionally, like pulling the plug on the niche social network I've been running for the better part of a decade.

These little deaths will ultimately contribute to new life in the form of other projects as well as additional time to help me keep my shit together and not bug out over working all of the time.

From the actual business front, this month continued to see growth in MRR and some amazing new customers that are building some amazing things using our service.

What's been a pretty big milestone this month is that for the first time, a split test we were running hit complete confidence. That tells me we're either starting to define the right tests or we're finally hitting an inflection point in our traffic where tests don't take forever to finish.

More than likely it's a combination of both, which if so, is definitely a huge win.

For anybody that's followed these little retrospective posts of mine, you know that I continually apply to Y Combinator every single batch. This upcoming batch is no exception.

The big difference this go around is that the day the applications opened, I filled out the application and filmed my video. I can't wait to be known as the YC alum that was first to apply for their batch ;)

Joking aside, I'm confident and hopeful but always humble and grounded enough to know that it still may be too early.