Best & worst of 2023

The best and worst of my 2023, in terms of project, marketing, purchase, tweet and lesson:

Best and worst project

🥇 Jason’s Plugins For Carrd. The year before it was the underdog. By the end of last year it doubled in revenue. This year, it tripled in revenue, consistently around $1k/month. Premium plugin sales increased by 1.5x. I shipped 12 plugins in 12 months. This project is still the reigning champ. I’m grateful for this. But I’m beginning to see the cracks and shortfalls of it. It has limited growth potential. I will need a new best project by end of 2024.

💩 Chart Pics. It was a fun project that I wanted to use as a means to get back to shipping, but probably not the bets idea to do that with because I got stuck. It wasn’t an easy problem to solve based on my coding skills. I could use a library like Remotion, but it’s based on React which I know nothing about. In the end, I built it halfway and abandoned it.

Best and worst marketing hack

🥇 Maximum diversification of distribution. I went crazy with being on every platform I saw there’s a Carrd folks. Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok. Even more obscure ones like Deviantart, Dribbble, Pinterest, Imgur. To date, now when I launch new plugins, I post the launch in over 30 channels. It’s wild, takes over half a day. Not all channel gives the same ROI of course, but there’s been a few surprises. Youtube had come up as a top referral channel even though I’m quite new on it. So much for advice from marketing gurus about sticking to one that can you can build a presence on. I’m just doing my own thing.

💩 Over-experimenting on Twitter. When engagement dropped in August, I started experimenting on Twitter again. BAD idea. I veered off from my usual style and type of tweets, and started putting out a lot more shitposts and memes. Well, initially it was fun, and it worked. Brought lots of impressions. But over time, I think it changed the kind of people who were looking my my tweets. Not the kind who I want to engage with in the long term anyway. And probably a few meme tweets got reported or flagged, causing me to get shadowbanned, and then search suggestion ban. It was all pointless drama and stress for a month or so. Instant regrets.

Best and worst purchase

🥇 Carrd Pro Plus 250 subscription. At $299 per year it’s my biggest SaaS subscription, but also the most worthwhile because it makes me back multiple times over the profit! Spend money to make money, yes. I was stuck at 100 sites for an agonizing few months, and now I get to make up to 250 sites! Hopefully this will last till at least end 2024! My next best purchase will probably be a Macbook Air/Pro M1! Desperately need a tech refresh!

💩 Cheap domains on sale. This needs no introductions. Domains like infodirectory.app, infodirectory.dev will probably not get used. I only got them because there’s a 50% Black Friday sale on Namecheap. Never again! (Or is it)

Best and worst tweet

🥇 My most viral tweet at 1M impressions unintentionally started some sort of class war, because it was related to that Hacker News post about entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games, and middle class kids afford one throw while rich kids can afford many throws. But viral != best. I think my best tweet was actually about my kind of ambition. About how I don’t need to change the world, but my world.

💩 My worst tweets were the ones which caused my shadowban and search suggestion ban. The awful thing about it is… I don’t even know which one(s) caused it! I went on a paranoia-filled deletion craze and probably deleted all the potentially questionable ones. But even my questionable ones were hardly controversial or anything. It’s wild to this could happen to anyone for doing nothing at all…

Best and worst lesson

🥇 Accepting my season. That’s the single most powerful lesson I learned this year. I learned that there’s no point forcing it. I tried to push to go faster, get more progress. But my season now just means it’s not possible. Accepting it was a relief. Less stress. Might have even helped progress a bit faster because now I just do what I can consistently instead of hastily. Yes there’s often benefits to acting fast, shipping fast, but with that I also start to get expectations of fast results. That’s usually the thing that ends up hindering me more than helping. Still working on how to ship fast but being patient with the results. Ayush, my friend on Twitter, said it best with “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”:

“I realized it’s all about going smooth… reducing friction in life… That gives us momentum… So its okay to go slow as long as we’re going smooth… Slow is smooth, smooth is fast…”

💩 There’s no such thing as worst lessons. The worst lessons are the best lessons!

So what’s your best and worse for 2023?