Solopreneur 2022 reflection

This blog is about the journey of 2022 as a Solopreneur - from building my 2nd + 3rd app, to growing an audience, to productizing my skills and making massive mistakes. Read this blog to learn from my mistakes and take note of my successes to advance your own journey.

🗓 2022 was the second year of solopreneurship. I battled through a depressive period after a two-year relationship ended. Built my second and third app. Discovered my favorite distribution channel thus far: YouTube. Slacked hard on all other forms of distribution, and I destroyed tons of runway by not taking profits from stock/crypto assets.

🗓 In 2023, I’m automating my distribution processes, doubling down on writing, distributing and sharing, continuing to utilize hot new productivity tech, codifying capitol management processes, digging deep into analytics and I’m getting real with my limits as a solopreneur.

Pareto actions are actions that have an outsized, asymmetric impact relative to the input. This acts to give you, the reader (or listener),

Positive:

🟢 Monitoring and integrating AI tech like Copilot, GPT3, and ChatGPT into my engineering workflow.

🟢 Pivoting into full-time work and managing my schedule so I have time to work towards the solopreneur life, and spend time with loved ones.

🟢 Taking deep pockets of time to build MVPs for new applications.

🟢 My meta processes that force me to slow down and question all of my actions to optimize.

Negative:

🔴 Horrid management of my emotional state during my break-up of a two-year relationship.

🔴 Awful bankroll management that nuked tons of runway because I didn’t take big profits from massive crypto & stock positions.

🔴 Halting distribution, content, and blog writing when I started full-time work.

✅ Discovering and building my favorite distribution channel: Youtube.

✅ 100 Youtube subs

✅ Experimenting with video content styles

✅ Utilizing AI (Copilot, GPT3, ChatGPT) to scale my engineering impact

✅ Writing the hit blog post ‘when you when what will you do’?

✅ Building and releasing Timeva

✅ Building and releasing my 3rd product Subvolver.

✅ Moving Light Bulb into maintenance mode

✅ Completing a social media posting challenge where I released 52 instagram reels, one per week.

✅ Returning to full-time work while maintaining time to build (TTB) the Solopreneur life.

✅ Entering the data analytics world and building a plan to processify consuming key user feedback.

Reflection:

🧠 I didn’t expect to enjoy creating youtube content as much as I did in 2022.

🧠 I find a ton of joy from viewers enjoying my youtube content. I think this is an important find because as a solopreneur, you have to have deep wells of energy to do basically ‘everything’. When you enjoy what you’re doing, you get free energy.

🧠 Returning to full time work was a big win and a big loss, all in in the same stroke. You can’t play if you don’t have any chips and you can’t win if you don’t bet. Full time work was necessary and it’s turning out to be an incredible career opportunity as my team is incredible, the work is great and I know I can provide a lot of value there.

🧠 AI trends are popping off hard thanks to the devs at OpenAI (and everyone who creates content on open web that the OpenAI teams feeds to their models 😲). More on this in the 2023 predictions section.

🧠 I completed the instagram reels challenge of posting 1 video per week talking about solopreneurship, productivity, mindset, ideas and miscellaneous. I believe consistency is one of the most valuable skills and I utilized it here. To commit to generating and sharing ideas

Mismanagement of personal relationship + solopreneur life balance.

❌ Letting Timeva v2 dev drag into Q3 & Q4.

❌ Letting Light Bulb dev drag into Q1.

❌ Failing to find/make time to build out and use social media automation tools.

❌ Sub $100 Revenue from any product.

❌ Major slacking on marketing & distribution aside from Youtube.

❌ Stopped writing blog content in q3+q4.

❌ Stopped connecting with other builders on social (twitter, indiehackers).

❌ Bad bankroll management at beginning of year (holding crypto too long) that destroyed lots of runway.

❌ Exchanging ideas and connecting with other builders.

❌ Scattering my time too much.

Reflection:

🧠 The biggest fail here was poor emotional management during the fall out of my 2 year relationship with my partner. When relationships get in your way. Stop coding. Stop building. Stop marketing. Stop everything and take care of relationships first, full stop.

🧠 I let both Light Bulb and Timeva development drag on too long. I’ve developed a new ‘fill or kill’ process to prevent this in the future where I’ll basically time box all development to a single quarter and rely on hitting KPIs to continue development.

🧠 Absolute, total, abysmal, garbage bankroll management. I remember reviewing my balance sheet thinking ‘wow that's a ton of money’. I didn’t sell any because I didn’t create a plan to sell and got greedy. Classic garbage low tier retail investor mentality. I will not repeat mistake in 2023 and beyond.

🧠 Another big fail was dropping my distribution to basically 0 when I started full time work. I used it as an excuse to stop, I shouldn’t have. I will fix this. I was making some cool connections with other builders online that I lost.

🧠 Time management is a consistently challenging skill to build and utilize. Some days flow well while others feel like I need 3 more days of the week to accomplish everything I want to. The hard truth here is that good time management is all about what you don’t do. I’m learning to do the best I can with the time I have and to let myself relax when I’m out of steam for the day so I can come back strong the next day. Solopreneurship is a marathon then a race.

Twitter → 91

Youtube → 104

Instagram → 409

Indie Hackers → 26

Reflection:

🧠 Not a ton to say here, youtube started, everything else slowed over the year.

🧠 I’m recording my end of year metrics to see how things stand at the end of 2023.

🧠 #1 priority in 2023 will be Youtube.

🧠 #2 priority will be continue to use Twitter, IG and IH to build connections and discuss tech, solopreneurship and life.

[❌] In 2022 I will make Light Bulb #1 undisputed best app for creative musicians new ideas.

I’m proud of all my work here with my first app, Light Bulb. That being said, I made basically every mistake a first time builder will make. I had a hard time with retention and growth. In the end there isn’t a need for an app that helps musicians capture their new ideas - voice memos and voice notes is enough. The big lesson here is to validate your product fast and move on. A process I’m now calling ‘Fill or Kill’.

[✅] In 2022 I will create 2 new SaaS products from the ground up utilizing all the lessons I’ve learned from building Light Bulb.

I built Timeva and Subvolver. Super happy I pulled them off. Both MVPs were built in less than month.

[✅] In 2022 I will share my journey as a solopreneur by vlogging my journey as I scale SaaS from 0 to 1k MRR

Didn’t hit 1k mrr but I did share 1 reel every single week and several blogs.

[❌] In 2022 I will double down on opportunities to scale my impact and become a 100x solopreneur. I will automate processes, build software, and use tools that offer outsized return given the input.

I did scale my impact but I didn’t achieve the 100x solopreneur levels I imagined. Real life happenened, and I had to return to full time work. I did however stack up my toolshed for 2023 and beyond so this commitment wasn’t completely failed.

[❌] In 2022 I will build features that put my users thoughts, feelings and experience first.

I mean, kinda? 2023 will review growth/retention for Timeva and Subvolver.

[✅] In 2022 I will continue to measure and invest in my personal growth next to the growth of my software assets.

Yup, personal development happened all year long.

[✅] In 2022 I will continue to respect my health, time and money next to my goal to become a self sustained indie dev.

Definitely took time and backed away from hardcore solopreneurship. Once when my partner and I broke up and again when returning to full-time work.

[✅] In 2022 I will continue to believe in myself.

Hasn’t changed - will never change.

[❌] In 2022 I will create fundamental human value for my users.

Going to leave this unchecked but great progress was made.

[ ] Become a better solopreneur by improving my systems of product development, distribution, and feedback utilization.

[ ] FILL OR KILL Subvolver in Q1 (Find product market fit or kill it).

[ ] Build 1-2 new application that solves concrete problems a group of ppl have that they’d pay for.

[ ] Rebuild danisler.com to be simpler and easy to publish content to.

[ ] Make my first $100 in sales.

[ ] Double down on my distribution, writing, sharing and connecting.

[ ] Grow Youtube to 10k Subs.

[ ] Start a new ‘solopreneur’ micro podcast.

[ ] Stay on the bleeding edge of developer productivity trends.

[ ] Build a suite of content generation tools to help my distribute with ease.

[ ] Build an automated analytics process so I can easily monitor user feedback.

[ ] Share four Solopreneur quarterly review blogs that will revisit these goals and update.

[ ] Develop an extreme bias toward action.

My predictions for 2023. These are all my opinions based on my experience and (minimal) perspective of the world. Take each with several grains of salt and make your own predictions based on your experience and perspective.

Tech & Programming:

[] A massive gap develops between Senior (and above) engineers who use AI technology in their development workflows and Senior (and above) engineers who don’t. Don’t miss this trend. Junior engineers will misuse and overuse the technology, develop a dependency and miss out on vital engineering experience.

[] Web Engineers return to simplicity. HTMX becomes the fastest growing web tech and enters the top 10 most loved web technologies. Why? Engineers are burning out on the ‘new framework’ every other day and non-stop onslaught of new tech that does the exact same thing as the last with a minor twist. A similar wave happens with devops, engineers realize kubernetes and docker directly violate premature optimization for 75% of use cases.

[] Front-end engineers grow the confidence to openly say ‘React is Garbage’ due to Metas falling stock price and decreasing relevance as they continue to lose IG users to TikTok. React will lose popularity in 2023.

[] Rust continues to pop off and essentially becomes the new, modern day c++.

[] Svelete becomes the new react, except it’s actually good.

[] Serverless architecture will continue to replace more and more traditional back-ends as engineers realize it’s ‘close enough’ with drastically less overhead.

Big Tech:

[] Big tech turned the 2022 recession and revenue slow down into an opportunity to cut off their underperforming, coasting employees. Anyone with great talent and drive will still be hired despite all the ‘hiring freezes’ media blast into the news.

[] Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft remain completely dominant even in a changing market because they provide both the hardware and software (metaphorically and literally) that every other company depends on.

[] TikTok makes Gen Z the most information diverse, self-aware, open-minded generation that has ever existed with the caveat that they have 0 dopamine to act on it because they can’t stop scrolling.

[] TikTok does not get banned, it get’s stronger, and more addictive.

AI:

[] Similar to my Tech & Programming predictions, there will be a gap between creators, editors and builders that utilize AI in their workflows and those who don’t. By 2024, I creators that integrate AI will be at least 2x more effective than their AI’less counterparts.

[] Generative art is here to stay. A handful of artist decide not to be victims and take their art and value output to the next level by utilizing AI generated art.

[] The creator economy turns into the narrator economy as tools like ChatGPT and custom applications built on GPT3 (and soon GPT4) enable creators to say exactly what they want and tweak the result to their desire.

[] More lawsuits against AI technology as it endlessly scraps every other creators work on the open web for it’s own gain. OpenAI will likely be at the center of this. How they handle it will determine if they are sued into the dirt or not.

[] Google releases a ChatGPT competitor to prevent ChatGPT from replacing google search.

Geopolitical:

[] Ukraine-Russia conflict ends with odds set at 85% peaceful : 10% war : 5% nuke. The key is that Russia isn't backed into a corner to where a nuke looks like the 'best way to go out'.

[] US-China tensions loom but nothing develops.

[] Deglobalization takes center stage for better and for worse.

Stock Market:

[] Downward market until mid summer when things are so cheap hedgies can’t help themselves. Everyone with a long term mindset will be averaging in all year.

[] S&P ends between 4000-4800 after dipping as low as 3000 mid summer.

[] Retail investors get heavy into AI based Algo trading but it doesn’t really make a difference.

Crypto Market:

[] Correlation with stock market continues because the hedgies hold the real momentum.

[] Crypto has another long winter and trades sideways, downward and then upward.

[] Etherum contends for the top spot as it continues to roll out new feature and speed improvements.

That concludes my 2022 reflections and 2023 predictions. I hope it gets you thinking about your journey and I hope you enjoyed reading it. If you did, please share it with a friend 😃. If you didn’t, please share it with an enemy 😈.

Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me on any social platform listed below.

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