2025 Recap
Once again, my turn-of-the-year post for 2025 comes in two parts:
- My 2025 recap (this post)
- My 2026 outlook (next post)
I compartmentalize my life into three areas—Life, Hobby, & Work—so that’s how I’m organizing this post. Skip to whichever parts you’re curious about.
- Life — Highlights and lowlights from life, family, travel & health in 2025.
- Hobby — My creative outlet outside of work is songwriting, an increasingly important (and under-reported) part of my life so it's getting its own section now.
- Work — My business recap. It was a doozy.
Life
Life for me and the fam in 2025 was pretty normal and routine--and by that I mean wonderful. Road trips, skiing, Mets, Knicks, coaching basketball, beach, hiking, piano & guitar, and plenty of travel...
Emma (11) and Juliet (9) continue to amaze us. Watching them grow into such smart, creative people is the best part of this whole ride. Emma’s been vibe coding games with Claude.ai—she even built her own “app store” to showcase them. Juliet’s become quite the pastry chef (not ideal for my health goals, but whatev).
Both girls were accepted into the LEAP program in school (for advanced learners) and they both consume more books in a year than I do in my life 🤷♂️
Travel highlights
Family trips:
- Northeast ski trips (VT, NH, MA)
- Tulum, Mexico (April)
- Outer Banks, North Carolina (June)
- New Hampshire lake house (August)
Aimee and me:
- Costa Rica (December)
Just me:
- Snowboarding at Stowe, Vermont with business friends (January)
- Snowboarding at Whistler, Canada with friends I've known since childhood (March)
A health scare
In June, a benign lump in my left hip suddenly became extremely painful. Doc advised surgery to remove it.
For a few weeks, the word “cancer” entered my imagination. That was scary. Luckily, pathology confirmed it was just an enlarged lymph node—a remnant from my previous year's bout with shingles.
It knocked me off my workout routine for over a month. I’m back at it now, but my body isn’t as forgiving as it used to be. Or I'm just not going hard enough on diet and exercise. Probably the latter.
Hobby
A 4-day workweek was a key goal I set for myself at the start of 2025. What I really wanted was space for songwriting—an important creative outlet that sat idle through most of my 30s while I focused on business.
In 2023–2025, songwriting came back to me. Not surprisingly, this coincided with some of my most turbulent business years. Apparently that was fuel for what I feel are some of my best songs.
Unfortunately, I don’t have good recordings to share yet. I blame a mix of perfectionism and genuine lack of time. Taking Fridays off was supposed to fix that. But then surgery happened, then Builder Methods took off, and the 4-day week thing fell away.
A key goal for 2026: finally record and release those songs. I have no expectations beyond that. I just want these artifacts to exist in finished form before too much time passes.
Work
I’m guessing most of you skipped here, so let’s go. I’ll cover my 2025 chronologically.
Q1: The low point
At the turn of the year, I was in an uncomfortable place with my energy split across too many things:
- Consulting projects had multiplied. Income was good but I was burned out managing them, even after delegating much of the work to my team.
- Instrumental Components was taking longer to ship than I’d hoped.
- The business I actually wanted to start (what eventually became Builder Methods) was stuck in planning—I couldn’t act on it while tied up with everything else.
- YouTube was a weekly grind with minimal traction. But stayed committed to it because I believed that learning this craft and developing the channel would eventually pay off.
Then in March, something unexpected happened.
A company I greatly admire announced a rare job opening for a senior software designer role. I wasn’t thinking about the job market at all, but after a few days I thought: why not apply? If it goes nowhere, fine. If it does, that’s an opportunity worth considering—especially since I hadn’t yet started or figured out my next sustainable business (my current ones weren't exciting).
I threw in my application and to my surprise, I was 1 of 10 invited to interview (apparently there were over 1400 applicants). That interview went well.
But a few days later I respectfully withdrew my application.
When I’d applied, I was unsure about my future as an entrepreneur. But once landing this dream job became an real possibility, I didn’t feel excitement. I felt fear. Maybe a little sadness.
That was exactly what I needed. A reminder that after 18 years of entrepreneurship, I’m not ready to quit. I’m more unemployable than I realized.
That realization fired me up. It gave me a rush of confidence to build my next business, my way. As the year went on, I re-learned to my gut and leaned into my strengths in ways I’d been afraid to for years.
Q2: My first launch in a while
In April, I finally shipped Instrumental Components—my UI and app boilerplate for Ruby on Rails.
It sold low 5-figures in the first month and continues selling a few each month. I’m proud of the product and used it on many of my own apps.
But I’ll admit—even before launch, I sensed there wasn’t enough sustained demand to build a business and brand around it.
Q3: Something hits
By June, I finally had bandwidth to act on the business I’d been planning for months: training and community for developers building with AI.
My conviction for this as my next big swing came from three things:
- AI in software is a wave that keeps growing larger, faster, louder.
- I’m personally obsessed with this topic and how it helps my craft as a builder.
- A creator business model—spending my time on video, tools, and teaching—plays to my strengths and I find this more attractive than placing another multi-year bet on a SaaS.
My first move: pivot my YouTube channel to content about building with AI.
Almost immediately, my videos went from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of views. My YouTube channel subscribers went from 2k to 23k in the last 5 months of 2025. My email list tripled. The top of the Builder Methods funnel was forming.
Agent OS was my first "product" from Builder Methods—free and open source, but quite successful. Videos about it performed well, thousands of people use it and recommend it, and now it drives buyers to my workshops and membership.
By end of Q3, I collected my first Builder Methods revenue: a live workshop at $25 a ticket. Sold over 100 in two weeks. It became a monthly thing (tickets are now $50)
I also launched Builder Methods Pro—my flagship membership subscription.
My biggest challenge emerged in Q3: producing high-quality videos at high frequency. I spent a ton of time and energy on figuring out the tooling, craft, people, and process for doing video well. This effort is ongoing.
Q4: OK, this is working.
September and October both exceeded my baseline goal—enough income that I could drop everything else.
November almost doubled that. December will exceed November.
The consistent month-to-month growth in audience, subscribers, and customers is starting to convince me I have a real business with staying power. It wasn’t a fluke. The funnel is working. Continued growth seems likely.
I still struggle with believing it. I spent years bouncing between short-lived launches, slogging on middling businesses, wandering the desert. This one feels different. The demand, my excitement, my vision—all different.
Builder Methods is only 6 months in, so I’m staying cautiously optimistic. But I think I've landed on a business I sink into and grow for years.
New builds
In December I started Design OS—my next free open source product from Builder Methods. It's already powered one (of several) new app builds for me this year.
In Q3/Q4--aside from building my membership site, and building Agent OS, and Design OS, I built a few new apps/tools (did I mention building with AI changes the game for shipping speed? ;)
- NewsletterLab — For curating content and drafting my weekly newsletter. Actually, some frustrations with AI on this project inspired me to table it in favor of building Agent OS. NewsletterLab will come back in '26.
- FilterHawk — Replaces Gmail filters to manage my noisy inbox. Built & shipped in a week.
- InboxSummaries — Summarizes and flags gems from high-volume survey responses. Built in a week, while on vacation.
Closed up consulting
In November, I finished my last consulting project and decided not to take more.
Despite having developed an efficient operation—delegating most work to my assistant dev, limiting to one client at a tim--the overhead doesn’t make sense anymore given my focus and growth on Builder Methods.
It feels good to drop consulting. I’d “exited” consulting years earlier, only to fall back into it when I realized my multi-year investments in SaaS wasn't working for me. Exiting again feels pretty damn good.
My SaaS
Oh yeah—Clarityflow. The SaaS I started in 2021 and still own today.
Not much to report. Business as usual throughout 2025—slow and steady, running lean.
My developer shipped several highly requested features and quality-of-life improvements this year. I provided direction but was mostly hands-off. I still get pulled into support but I've taken steps to remove myself from this.
As my future with this SaaS, I’m exploring options. For now, the most attractive is continuing to hold it as a lean, mostly passive asset.
Podcasting
At the end of 2024, Jordan Gal and I decoded to semi-retire our 11-year(!) podcast, Bootstrapped Web. But in 2025, we checked back in for our mid-year updates and we're planning a year-end check-in here in December.
In 2025 I started a new show with Justin Jackson called The Panel. It began as a multi-guest panel show but morphed into a bootstrappers journey show. We're still experimenting with formats and really enjoy the live chat audience on recording days.
In late 2025, I began recording episodes of what will be the Builder Methods Show, where I'm asking fellow builders to share their screens and show me their workflows for building software with AI. I'm having a blast being nosy and asking friends to show me their tools and tricks of their craft. Episodes dropping in early 2026.
That’s my 2025. It’s a wrap.
Now, onto the outlook for 2026…