2024 Recap & Takeaways

I won’t forget 2024.

Strangely, it might have been one of my worst and my best year yet. It feels like both.

I had a rough first half of 2024. But I bounced back in the 2nd half and things seem to be (finally) starting to click—just in time for 2025.

Only time will tell, but this past year feels like a turning point in my career. A lot changed. Especially my perspective on it all.

These were the major events and what I took away from them as I look back on 2024:

Burnout.

The year began with what I think was my first real brush with burnout.

My body broke down in ways I hadn’t experienced before. First I was struck with shingles, which was painful and kinda scary. Then I had weeks of terrible lower back pain. Headaches. A weird eye twitching thing. WTF?

The curious thing was that I was actually in good shape in the months prior. Eating better. Working out.

This was triggered by stress. It was the pressure I put on myself. The constant sense of urgency to hit unrealistic targets that are out of my control.

Luckily, as the year played out, I healed up and bounce back. Now I’m feeling much better. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

My takeaway: I learned to listen to my body. The days of just plowing through stress like it’s nothing are behind me. Stress compounds and comes back with a vengeance if I don’t keep it in check.

Right-sized my SaaS

For 3 years I was “all in” my SaaS product business, Clarityflow. That calculus changed in 2024.

I knew I wanted to keep growing it and improving it as a product and a business. But raising more from investors was off the table. I much prefer to remain bootstrapped.

What this business needs is just time. Lots of it.

Rather than starve it of resources (team) and try to keep it alive all by myself, I went another way. I kept my developer onboard. I hired a customer success person.

I reduced my time from 100% down to 20%. I right-sized my personal time and energy investment.

It worked. We grew. The product improved. And we continued our—albeit slow—upward trajectory.

And with my 80% time that I freed up, I managed to reassemble my income and establish a new, highly profitable business, Instrumental Products.

My takeaway: This is my approach to bootstrapping and finding leverage. I’ve been successful this way before. My most unsuccessful years were when I abandoned this in favor of going “all in”. That may work for others. But now I’m back to what works for me.

Returned to Building.

I started building new software products again in 2024. I didn’t realize how much my building & shipping muscles atrophied in the past few years.

It’s strange because I was running a SaaS in those years. But I was mostly just overseeing my team’s work on that one product. I wasn’t building new stuff myself. Which meant I stopped learning and expanding my surface area as a builder.

That changed in 2024. Big time.

Ripple.fm,—a private podcasting platform that I built in a month— didn’t pan out as a business. But building it was just the jolt I needed to reawaken my shipping muscles.

In Q3, I broke ground on building Instrumental.dev. It’s a rails components engine that powers all of the rails apps my team and I build now. Yep—it’s a rails engine for building rails apps. I’m back baby!

AI has been a total game-changer in my workflow as a full stack product builder.

AI isn’t an alternative to writing code. It’s a catalyst for shipping. And if you have full stack product chops from the pre-AI days like I do, AI brings the unfair advantage to a whole new level. We’ve entered a new era of building and I’m here for it.

My takeaway: I’m a builder. If I’m not spending the majority of my time building new things, I’m not in my element.

Stopped marketing.

OK not entirely true. But I completely changed my approach to marketing. And it worked.

On my SaaS, I stopped all of our traditional marketing programs. SEO blog writing. Advertising. Cold email outreach. Cut all of it.

I invested in customer success, product, positioning and pricing. The result: doubled traffic, grew conversion, ARPU, and retention and word of mouth are improving. Metrics aren’t perfect across the board, but trending in the right direction.

Best of all, we’re not spewing marketing bullshit. Just a good, quality product with stellar support.

As for Instrumental Products, my marketing strategy there is to lean into my strengths: Creating and building in public.

I’m investing in video content around the products I’m building and my craft. This type of business—a products studio—works best with a strong brand and word-of-mouth. I’m driving that by sharing my work and my craft as much as I can, primarily through video.

My takeaway: Marketing doesn’t work when it’s forced. The few times I’ve felt successful as a marketer were when what I was doing—creating, shipping, and sharing—didn’t feel like marketing.

Settling into my new business.

What made the first half of 2024 so challenging was I didn’t what my next business would be.

I was searching for that answer. I explored a bunch of different ideas: SaaS, media, education, consulting, coaching… I even briefly flirted with potential business partners… None of that took hold.

My launch of onemonth.app was what clicked. It attracted a steady flow of clients who hired me to build MVP apps in a month (most extend to 2-3 months).

By late 2024, the projects piled on so I grew the team to 3 developers plus me. I’m now knee-deep in that transition from solo consultant to team that scales. I’ve been successful with the productized service model before. But building a software products studio is a new (fun!) challenge.

Finding it took a minute but I’m settling into my new business—Instrumental Products—for the long haul.

My takeaway: This concept of a product studio with a multi-product portfolio has been something I’ve wanted to do my entire career. But for too long, I was afraid to commit or I convinced myself it wouldn’t work. Now, given where I’m at and the skills I’ve acquired, I feel I’m perfectly positioned to finally go for it.

2024 proved that hunch correct.