2025.01.05

LXXXI

I am both blessed to have been able to go on so many adventures this year and grateful that I chose intense focus when I did.

The year started with me backpacking around and vagabonding. In August, I went home and started a sort of “monk mode”, a season of intense focus on BirdDog. Both chapters had their place.

This post is a light hearted year in review, with a brief discussion of couch surfing, some memorable highlights, a reflection on some achievements, and where I fell short of explicit goals.

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Couch Surfing

I was reviewing my 2024 in terms of statistics, and the craziest thing that stuck out to me was how many people were kind enough to let me crash with them. Thank you to my hosts in, roughly the order in which I visited with them in:

My Parents, Uncle Dave, Jack P, Michael, Toni, Aunt Donna, Rachel, Jack L, Lucas, Mitch, Barton, Mateo, “Mike”, Jacob, Rohan, and Ila.

I’m very lucky to have so many friends and relatives who I’m welcomed to stay with—it makes travel both more accessible and enjoyable.

A maybe more surprising stat in line with this is that I slept on 37 unique things this year: 7 couches, 1 air mattress, 1 cot, 1 hammock, 1 plane (I had a red eye), and 27 beds (counts hotels and airbnbs and such. I think Lucas’s place counts for over 20% of the beds). I don’t know who I’m in a contest with, but that’s pretty high variety, if anyone is keeping score. 

Of the couches, I think Rohan had the best. No offense to the other couches, but Rohan’s couch is a pretty good couch.

I definitely learned how to fall asleep in many places. My best somewhat obvious trick is that if you are in a brighter place with moderate noise and don’t have earplugs or an eye mask, you can build a fort around your head out of pillows to reduce light and sound. 

Caption: Couch Surfing?

Crazy Memories

Below are some of my most fond memories from 2024–if you’re not in a memory on the list it doesn’t mean I don’t love you… and just because you are on the list it doesn’t mean I do love you…

• Blasting Key Glock with Michael S on the way out of SF 

• Learning to surf in Costa Rica with Izack and Toni

• Watching Luke fire dance on a beach

• Failing at an async Iron Man with Bobby (we only didn’t make it because of 6 flat tires, not a lack of vigor)

• St Patrick’s Day debauchery in Savannah with Jack, Connor, and Greg

• Long, lovely walks in Savannah’s many parks

• Working out of an eccentric startup’s office in NYC during the eclipse

• Jumping off of a bridge in Boston with AnhPhu, Zack, “Mike”, Pranjali, Barton… twice…

• Learning of the gospels of Lisp and Category Theory from Barton while he was concurrently talking to 2 LLMs (one slowed down, one sped up)

• Endless lurks with Mridul

• Eating Madras Dosa maybe 20 times

• Grappling with AnhPhu in public parks in Cambridge half a dozen times and forcing everyone in C House to go to jiu jitsu classes with me

• Seeing starfish with my family in Oregon

• “Mike” nursing a bird back to health

• Having to get on the roof and break in through the window of our airbnb in Paris to unlock the door after Sammy left the key inside

• Gelt debauchery in Florida & Chicago

• Jack & I listening to a sales assassin who manages a 9 figure relationship impart the holy gospel of relationship selling to us

• Seeing a fleeing & handcuffed guy get tackled by a cop in Fulton Market with Jonah

• “Running” with with Rachel and Ila on Lakefront Trail (it alternated between jogging and walking)

• Harassing Bobbi (cat) while I waited for my coffee to brew in between coding bouts and sales calls

Caption: Me trying to throw myself into an omoplata on AnhPhu

Business Achievements 

2024 was also not all fun and games. While the middle of the year was quite tumultuous for me from a business perspective, I was able to stabilize and focus more than ever after the chaos. Such things can give you renewed energy, in some ways. Some achievements:

• Closing my first b2b saas contracts early this year

• Building a differentiated piece of software with Jack that people are paying to use and is creating tangible value for them

• Fine tuning an LLM that works in a production environment

• Going from ~800 connections to >5,500 followers on LinkedIn

• Building a pretty awesome personal website in Lisp (not so important for business, but still taught me a lot of engineering that I’ve applied to BirdDog)

These achievements are outcome based–meaning, they focus on the effect of the actions rather than the actions themselves.

Interestingly enough, my day to day goals, especially the engineering and social media ones, were more input based. They included things like: “Code uninterrupted for n hours today”; “post once a day / once every other day”; “comment on ten posts today.” It feels that it is easier to hold yourself accountable to the input based goals, rather than the outcome ones. So while the above achievements are very cool, I am also proud of the countless hours that went into making them happen.

Ultimately, you have this hypothesis that if you do enough of those inputs, the results you want will come. Still, you can’t ignore it if the results are not coming, because your hypothesis on the inputs themselves or what’s “enough” input might be wrong. 

Caption: Nature grades on fitness in your niche, not hours worked.

Missed Goal

So, in addition to the input goals, I had larger, more tangible goals, such as the $100K ARR target for BirdDog. Something like this goal functions as a sort of check on whether or not my hypothesis about cause and effect is correct.

We regretfully missed the target. Still, I do have more faith than ever that we will hit that number sooner or later. 

So, why did we miss it? That is hard to say. I don’t really know for sure. We worked as hard as we were planning, if not harder, so I’m more inclined to say that it was one of the following:

• We underestimated how long it would take us to build a tool that was 1) providing value and 2) easy to use

• When we had such a tool, we didn’t switch into “sales mode” soon enough

  • I say switch into sales mode, because we were always talking to users. However, we (I) were (was) not always treating the product like something that was ready to buy when we were talking to them.

One of the reasons building a thing to sell is so complex and challenging is because these two above issues are, to some extent, at odds with one another. Maybe it was more of the former for the first few months and more of the latter for the next few months, I don’t really know.

I’m not very pressed about it, either way. These things take time. Even though it’s not what I was expecting or what we had “planned” on, having our first paying customer 4 months after launching and then closing 5 more in the following month and a half is pretty cool.

I’m most inclined to say that the goal was ignorantly set than anything. 

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2025?

What shall the shape of my 2025 look like? I really don’t know.

If I had to guess, I’d speculate that the first half or so will be similar to the second half of my 2024—relatively stationary and focused.

After that, I kind of want to go back to Boston, or maybe SF. Only time will tell.

Live Deeply,