This year for me was all about learning about myself as cliche as that sounds. I took a big break from pumping out content, and projects to really reflect what I want to do with my life.
I think I figured it out for the most part, but I’m sure my goals will keep evolving as I get older.
Here’s what I did in 2023 and I bet you can see where I’m heading and what I learned about myself from this timeline.
Zero To Mastery
I started the year trying something brand new which is to build my very first course. Since I’ve never done this before I thought it would be a good approach to partner with Zero To Mastery so I could learn a ton along the way. And learn I did.
My course called Flutter Bootcamp: Zero To Mastery, came out early in the year, and I’m pretty damn proud of it.
Hungrimind
This is by far the biggest and most ambitious project I’ve ever taken on. I don’t fully like how YouTube is structured for learning. You can’t organize content exactly how you want it, and it’s very hard to update. These are the two things I wanted to solve with building my own platform.
What started just as another blog site, grew quickly into a fully built simple course, to what is now an interactive scrolling experience, that in my super biased opinion is one of the best ways to learn.
The thing I’m most proud of with Hungrimind is that I became borderline experienced in web development. There is still lots to learn, but ask me to build any feature into a site and I’m no longer intimidated.
YouTube
I released 6 YouTube videos on my channel. Two of them were about Hungrimind, two of them were about cool projects I built, and two of them were about topics I wanted to talk about.
Given the minimal uploading the channel only grew by 3000 subscribers this year.
There was also a Hungrimind YouTube channel that was started to showcase videos which grew over 500 subscribers without telling many people about it. There I also published 6 videos about more technical topics.
Twitter/X
I cut down posting on there by a lot, resulting in no real growth this year. I honestly just got sick of the platform. Not even because of the whole Elon thing, I just got sucked down the algorithm rabbit hole too often and tried to distance myself a bit from it.
Other
- Planned a wedding (Getting married Feb 2024)
- Learned Polish almost fluently
- Updated all the exterior of our house
- Remodeled the kitchen
- Remodeled a handful of other smaller projects around the hose
- Built a workshop
- Bought a Toyota Sienna and converted it into a camper van
- Used the Sienna for road trips across most of the US from NY to San Francisco
- Read like 40 books
- Journaled consistently
- Started mountain biking
- Benched 225, deadlifted 315
- Basically cut out alcohol
The thing is, although a lot of progress was made I did not hit most of my business goals that I set at the beginning of the year.
I wanted to reach 1000 DAU and 5k MRR for Hungrimind and I wanted an average of 100k YT views every 28 days.
I got no where close to those. I didn’t realize how hard it was to build a business specifically when it comes to marketing.
But I’m not leaving 2023 disappointed. Like I said, this year was a year of learning. And I did a lot of reflection of who I want to be and what I want to do.
2024
Since last year was a year of finding myself, what did I find?
I have two things I want to do in this world. To teach and to create.
- I want to use Hungrimind to help people learn so they can build creative projects and maybe even someday change the world.
- I also want to get back to the initial vibe when I started making videos and just make things that I’m excited about.
To get both of these I am separating the way I put things out in the world. Wherever you see Hungrimind (site, youtube, twitter) that will be the home of teaching. Tutorials, whether it’s a small post of article or a whole course will live on Hungrimind.
Anything that has Tadas Petra I will use for fun.
I am also going to try something different where I will set quarterly goals instead of yearly, so I can adjust and reflect on a smaller time scale.
2024 Q1 Goals
Hungrimind
- 100 DAU organically (without me posting about it)
- Find a co-founder (hit me up if you’re experienced with web dev)
- Release Video Call and Experts Course
- Rebuild Tutorial section into a searchable article UI
YouTube
- No actual goals, but make a cool video or two that I have fun with.
Other
- Oh yeah, get married in February 🖤
I’ll be back at the end of March to see how we did.