wtf happened in 2023 – Year in Review

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TLDR: Turned 25, traveled 4 new countries, 7 new cities, 2 plate bench PR, 1 plate overhead press PR, made over $100,000 on my side projects, doubled liquid net worth(!!), grew from 0 to 20,000+ followers on Twitter, invested 200+ days into improving copywriting, 100+ days into into improving design, 1 successful exit

Personal Highlights

Travels: 

I traveled *a lot* this year and will try to continue that trend in 2024

– 🇰🇷 Seoul, S.Korea (1/10)
– 🇻🇳 HCMC, Vietnam (8/10)
– 🇹🇭 Bangkok, Thailand (10/10)
– 🇰🇭 Siem Riep, Cambodia (7/10)
– 🇸🇬 Singapore (6/10)
– 🇲🇽 Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (9/10)
– 🇺🇸 San Diego, USA (10/10)

Seoul, South Korea:

I started off the year in South Korea for New Years and it f*cking sucked lol.

I was wearing heat-tech, 2 layers of jackets and I still was freezing my balls off. (Mental note to myself to not visit Korea in the winter ever again.)

Other than that, I love Korean food. We on that protein grind so it was BBQ chicken every meal.

(( oh also.. I also got to see my college roommate again after 3 yrs so that was fun! ))

HCMC, Vietnam:

I visited Saigon for the first time and it was dope. I’ve traveled to Hanoi b4 and I think I prefer Hanoi more. Hanoi is not as a hectic as HCMC.

Bangkok, Thailand:

So my only point of reference for Bangkok was the movie Hangover 3, so I was pleasantly surprised when I visited it. I stayed in a really nice penthouse.

The food was pretty good

Highlight of the Bangkok: the Husky park 🐶

It was also kinda cool all the statues were kinda just in the middle of the city?

The only downside was the traffic. It would take us 30 minutes to get from our apt to any touristy spot.

Siem Reap, Cambodia:

Angkor Wat has been on my list for a while now.

Actually the last time I was traveling around Asia, I lost my passport in Hanoi and couldn’t make the trip to Cambodia so was glad I could finally get to visit it this time.

We stayed in a super decked out lux apt and spent 3 days walking around Angkor Wat.

Loved it!

Singapore:

I had a quick in Singapore for a layover. Surprised how clean and peaceful it was!

Mexico City, Mexico:

Did a mini team retreat with my startup team I co-founded in Mexico City 🙂

We spent most of the 2 weeks in the penthouse working bahaha

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico:

Later in March, I took a quick trip to Puerto Vallarta. I got myself another sick Airbnb with a KILLER view 👀

San Diego, USA:

In July, I visited a few friends in San Diego.  I tried surfing for the first time (I sucked! i’m gonna try to get better this year) PS: The tacos in San Diego are fire..

I could see myself living here or at least spending the winters here. The ideal setup would definitely be 8 months in nyc for fall/summer/spring and winter in San Diego.

Shoutout my bois Thomas and Michael for showing me around town and hanging out.

Music:

I finally got to see Drake irl this year and that was pretty dope. We manage to finesse our way to some good spots in the concert..

Skill: 

One of the common question I get is why bother investing this much time into improving copywriting and design.

My answer: Gut instinct that both these skills pay off hugely in the future.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. – Steve Jobs

Copywriting: 

Aside from a few days, I was consistent in at least spending 10-20 minutes every morning doing copywork.

This is something that I will be continuing in 2024. I still believe copywriting is the highest ROI skill to learn.

I wrote this thread which popped the F*CK off. As a threadboi, it was the best thread i’ve ever written. 

The hook? The story telling? *chef’s kiss* 🤌

That single thread did almost 2M views, 10k bookmarks, and brought in 2000 new followers. All thanks to copywriting. Pretty OP, eh?

I’ve also gotten message like this

So its encouraging to keep going.

Design:

The other skill I invested in is design.

I spent 90 days designing random shit on Twitter.

Design is an area that I will put increase efforts in improving in 2024.

Twitter: 

I started my Twitter from scratch this year (0 followers) and managed to grow it to 20,000+ followers.

I agree that follower metric is pretty useless but my thinking is that the number of opportunities (business opportunities/# of people to meet) increases with a bigger follower count.

No hard number how big I want to grow my Twitter in 2024

(50k would be cool though =P)

I’ll continue to provide as much value as I can and meet more cool Twitter peeps, good things are bound to happen 🤞.

I’ve been able to keep my Tweet streak going and will hopefully hit the year long streak (soonish.)

As a whole, I think Twitter is a net positive.

I spend 3-5 hours a week writing tweets, 2-3 hours browsing Twitter, maybe a small percentage of the time thinking about what I should tweet so let’s just say ~10 hours a week on Twitter.

From the order of ROI of opportunities on Twitter it would be:

  • (low) Selling products
  • (medium) Starting a business with someone off Twitter ((+millions))
  • (high) Long long term but angel investing in companies from Twitter connections ((+millions))
  • (high) Meeting dope builders irl ((+priceless))

This year, I’ve gotten to meet 10+ twitter frens irl. For 2024, I want to hit meet at least 25 Twitter frens!

shoutout dante, ryan, oliver, tim for a tasty kbbq dinner 🤝

The alternative to using Twitter to meet dope ppl is probably networking events/cold DMing ppl which I think is A LOT more work!

I’m lazy af. Creating Twitter content basically just means writing about what i’m currently working on so it’s ezpz

PS: I personally hate “coffee meetups” because i don’t drink coffee and hate zoom meetings so have found i just prefer meeting people over lunch/dinner so will do more of that in 2024.

Fitness 

The result of going to the gym 4-5 times a week, eating a shit ton of protein and getting 7-8 hrs of sleep.

I hit my goal of benching 2 plates (225lb) finally..

And hitting one plate overhead press.

I hate to be on that new year, new me bs but i think 2024 is going to be the year where i finally get my bodyfat under 15%.

I need to dedicate some time into hiring a personal trainer and personal chef and we should be gucci.

Finance

I managed to double my liquid net worth in one year (!!)

Most it was the result of a fat promotion (from the previous yr) at my FAANG job, huge stock market returns, and side projects popping off.

Pretty boring stuff tbh.

This is what I would tell the 15 year old me: Don’t be stupid. All in VTSAX and chill’. By far the highest probability (but boring) way to become millionaire in a decade. The hardest part is resisting the urge to pick individual stocks.

As a side note: My current apartment in downtown NYC costs $1700 (with utilities). I don’t think I’ll ever find a deal like this again in my life 😂

I’ve also deleted all of my personal finance apps, I don’t track month-to-month expenses anymore. I use Personal Capital to track my networth.

I also prefer having razor thin cash line. I’ve found mentally, it keeps me in check.

Reason? If I have $50,000 in my checking, its easy to let random $50/$100 charges slip by. If i keep a smaller balance, I notice these smaller charges.

The focus for 2024 will be to continue increasing cashflow, building long term assets, stacking more vanguard indexes and enjoying life.

Business Highlights

YC Rejection

I started the year coming off a YC rejection, and spent a few months with the same team deciding if I wanted to keep working together. One of the main criticisms from the YC interview was that the team wasn’t 100% passionate about the product and they didn’t see us working on the product.

I think their assessment was accurate. The YC rejection led me to reflect a lot about the type of products I wanted to build in my precious 20s.

Our YC product.. Generating Amazon review blog posts

Despite the fact that we were able to get the product up to $1000 MRR in <6 months, I wasn’t happy with the type of product I was spending my time on.

After the rejection, the team did a mini-retreat in Mexico City where we tried pivoting to a few other ideas but none of the ideas energized me enough to dedicate years of my life.

After a few hard conversations, I decided to leave the team.

First Acquisition 

I co-founded a B2B video prospecting SaaS (vidscale.io) in late 2022. I built the entire product in less than 2 weeks while I was traveling around Asia.

My co-founder and I, couldn’t scale the product to a level where it made sense for us to work on it.

I learned a lot of lessons after building Vidscale – the main lesson being that even if I could build a product fast, I need have distribution in mind before even writing one line of code.

In the end, the product was acquired for low five figures so that was exciting.

Starting on Twitter

After the YC rejection and the failure from vidscale, I decided to go all in on marketing. 

I previously lurked on Twitter and knew about the indie hacker scene on Twitter so I thought that would be a good start.

Granted, before this point, I’ve never really tried to grow on any social media so all of it was new.

I wanted to start simple: I dedicated myself to a goal of Tweeting at least once a day.

In one year, I managed to grow my Twitter from 0 to 20,000+ followers. Not too bad, eh?

Running it up with AI Demos:

In the middle of the year, I was getting hella traction from the AI demos I was sharing on Twitter.

Here were some of the more popular ones:

With all the extra attention, I decided to spin up a AI training program (i refuse to be known as a “course mans”😂)

I didn’t even expect the course to a wild success. I mostly started it to get better at marketing (which it did) but..

In the span of 6 months, there were 400+ students inside BuildFast and it did a whooping high 5 figures of revenue (95% profit).

But after some thinking…

I decided I didn’t really enjoy the info-product business so I put it on the back burner.

I’m not against courses (in fact, 2023 alone, I’ve personally bought over 20+ courses), I just didn’t find the work to scale the course fun which involved a lot of running ads and creating more content on Twitter.

Consulting:

A bunch of people reached out for consulting gigs, I did a few.

It was easy money (I charged $250 for 30 minutes).

But I stopped doing it because trading time for money sucks. I didn’t find it very enjoyable either. 😴

I made ~$15,000 in total from this.

Professional Catfisher:

I started another project with another friend I met off Twitter

The idea? Generating pics of you with AI Abs (tinderglowup.com)… to get more matches on Twitter.

We managed cross $1000 revenue as *professional catfishers* 😉

Not too shabby.

Also the pitch that I uploaded to Youtube is ranking #1 for “AI Abs”

Merch by Amazon 

Silently in the background, my Merch by Amazon (print on demand tshirts) business quietly brought in ~$60,000 of revenue (~30% profit) with zero effort on my side.

This was a business I started back in college and it just churns cash every month with no extra work on my end. We take those 😎

Failures 

But that’s not to say all the stuff I launched this year worked out..

I launched roastbueno.com (UX review with AI) and bumbleblowup.com (generate image of you with a dog) and neither of these made any real amount of money.

Future (acquisition & partnerships): 

After trying to start a bunch of products from scratch, I found how insanely hard it is to start from 0.

I’m making two big changes moving forward:

  • I’m trying my hands with flat out acquiring products with existing customers.
  • I’m partnering up with people with existing distribution

I was close to closing a few five figure acquisition deals but they fell through for one reason or another.

I am still bullish on acquisitions and is something I will be focusing on it 2024.

The other opportunity I’m bullish on is SEO partnerships. I was introduced to this my boi Jacky (the SEO 🐐)

Basically here’s how it works:

It’s a pure performance based model.

We write and rank the content. The additional revenue from ads/affiliate/sponsorships is split between the website owner.

It’s a no-brainer offer because as a site owner, there is zero time/effort investment and it unlocks a new source of revenue for the site.

ezpz

I’ve invested some time coding some python automation to handle editing so its ALMOST 100% streamlined now. I am bullish on this opportunity going into 2024.

If you have site with backlinks, hmu on Twitter, let’s make some money together 🤝 (90%+ hitting $1,000MRR in <3 months)

Lessons Learned

Being kind is important than being right – I had a few relationships break down this year due to poor communication. I think I could have handled some situations better in terms of more emotional empathy so that’s something I’m gonna to work on next year.

As a side-note I’ve kinda learned to stfu in some situation, I waste too much energy trying to argue with people (both online and irl.) Learning to just smile, nod and move on with my life.

Consistency is hard (but it’s worth it in a world where people give up)

Image

Just in time learning – I realized I’ve wasted a lot of time reading books and listening to podcasts and not really taking action on the stuff I’m consuming. I think there needs to be a right balance, idk the right percentage, maybe something like 20% exploring (reading stuff w/o taking direct action) and 80% content when you need the information.

Bias for action – One of the things I did well this year was starting stuff I had zero experience with, will try to do more of it in 2024 as well.

Wasting time on stuff that doesn’t matter – mostly a reminder to myself to not get bogged down on the tasks i should just be delegating to $10/hr VAs and to focus my time on tasks that will really move the needle.

Quote of the Year 

“A master has failed more times than a beginner has even tried”

A lot of my projects and ideas were failures this year. I hope to make even bigger failures in 2024.

Movie of the Year 

I typically don’t watch TV but one of my friends recommended Attack on Titans and it was 10/10.

I managed to binge it in less than a month..

(favorite character: Mikasa🧣)

Favorite Reads of 2023

I don’t track the total number of books I think its around 50-75. I will go days without reading anything and then just read 2-3 books in the span of a week.

But here were some of my favorites:

Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Elon Musk (by W.Isaacson)

The 10 Pillars of Wealth: Mindsets of the World’s Richest People (by Alex Becker)

Buy Back Your Time

Psycho-Cybernetics

Let My People Go Surfing

Goals for 2024

Here’s how I’m investing my time in 2024:

  • 20% of my time working on cashflow businesses that bring in cash to fund long term projects
  • 80% of my time working on one long term project that I can exit in 3-5 years (I’m still in the explore phase to find *the one* 🤞)

The goal is still to hit at least 5M by 30

I’m bullish on partnerships and acquisitions and I think these will be key to hitting 10M+ in the long long term. (I haven’t spent much thinking *exactly how* but I my prediction is Twitter will be an even bigger factor to getting some big partnerships.)

2024 Goals:

  • Fitness:
    • 14% body fat (-33%)
    • one rep 275(lb) bench (+22%)
    • one rep 195(lb) overhead press (+35%)
  • Finance
    • Increase liquid net worth by 60%
  • Fun
    • At least one fun adventure every 2-3 weeks
    • Train Muay Thai for 2-3 months
  • Raw skill:
    • Invest 300 hours improving copywriting
    • Invest 300 hours improving design

if you made it this far, you a real one, thank u!! To a even better 2024 🥂

P.S. Follow me on Twitter (if you haven’t already) and DM me on Twitter what your 2024 goals are, I’m curious to hear!

P.P.S – I still think about this a lot:

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