Best and worst of 2024

The best and worst of my 2024:

Best and worst project

🥇 Jason’s Plugins For Carrd. The defending champion from past years wins again! The revenue is still increasing slowly and steadily over the years. It’s not ramen profitable (yet) but I can’t complain – it’s a nice business and a platform I love building for.

💩 ProfilePicture.app. It was a nice one to bite into, went super viral, but ultimately didn’t do well (or I didn’t know what to do with it). A good learning experience anyhow.

Best and worst marketing hack

🥇 Discounts. I’m going all in on discounts for Lists Kit and Carrd plugins. Decent Black Friday sales got me thinking about using discounts as a sales strategy. Everyone says it cheapens your product, but why tf not? Do what is needed for your target customers, and market factors, not dogmatic ideas about indie hacking/entrepreneurship.

💩 Viral memes. It’s hard to build a business on fleeting virality and meme-ish trends. So I learned from ProfilePicture.app. It’s nice as an occasional traffic spike, but when the whole reason for existence started from a single viral post… red flags.

Best and worst purchase

🥇 My new M2 Pro MacBook Pro. It’s amazing how a tiny rectangle of metal and silicon no bigger than the size of a sheet of paper can give so much. It’s my money printing machine, my wellspring for creativity, my sources of education and entertainment at the same time. It’s the gift that keeps giving, and no other investment had paid off so many times over. They say you should get a good quality bed because of how much time we spend sleeping in it. After a bed, I’d say a great computer because of how much time we spend on it when awake. Bonus best purchase: Buying credits from Anthropic for Claude AI. Using this LLM single-handedly allowed me to code in unfamiliar languages/frameworks, and start earning money as a frontend dev. Tl;dr - the best things to buy are those that help you make more money.

💩 X Premium+ subscription. Sometimes I don’t even know why I still pay for this. I wrote about how the value to price ratio is shite, and how the only thing keeping me subscribing is the long form tweet feature. Will review this in 2-3 months.

Best and worst lesson

🥇 Pivoting to being a dev. It’s a lesson long time coming. Actually I’ve been saying that design consulting will not last. I’ve been saying that for years. And I was preparing myself for it by building indie products at the side while I continued consulting. The pandemic hastened its demise, and the universe kicked me out of that comfort zone. I think there would have been a lot less pain and anxiety if I pivoted earlier, than trying to hold on to the last threads of that once-lucrative income stream. It’s been a relief since I decided to pivot, really.

💩 Doing training. I’ve said last year that “There’s no such thing as worst lessons. The worst lessons are the best lessons!”, but we can talk about the worst experience that led to a good lesson. I’d say it’s conducting training. I’ve never pushed myself harder doing something I don’t enjoy and not innately good at. And after doing it most of the year for peanuts, it’s fair to say, I quit!

So what’s your best and worse for 2024?