2024 — My year in review
My original plan was to do my 2024 review as a video to try something new, but I'm lying in bed with a bad cold and will spare you from that.
Looking back, 2024 hasn't been the most eventful year—it was the first year as an adult where I didn't leave Denmark at all. That being said, it also felt like the year of finding my "footing" again after some turbulent years.
At work
2024 was my second year as the "ops guy" at Tailwind Labs. Having this gig was a godsend last year when I decided to move on from Reform, and this year it has continued to be a great "stabilizer" in my life. It's been awesome to have the stability, while having plenty of time for other things—mainly taking care of our two boys + a bunch of new side projects.
My gig at Tailwind is part time in terms of hours, but I'm always around. I care about the response time on our support tickets and I don't want anyone to have to wait the whole weekend if they have a problem with one of our products, so my work hours are very spread out. In addition to being the only support person, I'm also in charge of a bunch of other ops-related things such as making sure invoices are paid, and a bunch of legal things related to trademark and copyright. I also get involved in one-off projects, such as hiring, organizing meetups, hacking on our internal revenue dashboard, and random marketing related things, such as SEO, email/newsletter stuff, and analytics.
By far the biggest project this year was helping Adam hire two new people for the team. I'm pretty sure I worked close to full-time for at least a month to make it through all the applications. After several months of going through applications, running interviews, etc., we brought on two amazing people to the team: Philip and Dan. By the end of this project, we were millimeters away from building a Workable competitor! 😅
Another big project this year was to plan a meetup in Miami next year (January 2025) for our team retreat (that I sadly won't be attending). Last year, we did a meetup in Amsterdam, which was pretty awesome—especially because we had an awesome company taking care of hosting us! We didn't really get so lucky in Miami, so the goal was to find a model that we could run ourselves. I don't want to talk about it too much, since it's not really announced yet, but I feel like we might have found a model that is pretty reusable so we can run more of these events around the world 🤞
Next year is going to be the launch of Tailwind v4, which is a huge milestone for the company, and I'm excited to see what we do next!
Side projects
Last December, I announced that I was starting a writing habit. Side note: I'm a huge fan of starting new years resolutions in December—no need to wait for January!
The short version is that I wrote for a bit more than a hundred days in a row and in general way more than I normally do. I felt like a bit of an impostor ending the streak, but the nice thing was that I realized I had built a lot more writing muscle, so even if I wasn't on a streak, writing was still a lot easier. If I'm the first person to wake up in the morning, I tend to write. That rarely happens these days sadly.
I really felt like I cracked the code for myself when I comes to writing, and I was excited to share it with others. So I decided to write a book about writing... but instead I ended up writing +5,000 words about it and making it available for free on a sick domain I bought for $1,500: WritingHabit.com.
Really, if you want to write more in 2025, read the guide—it's really good 😉.
Another new side projec this year was the podcast I started with Mikkel Malmberg. We started out in Danish, but recently pivoted to English. After ending Out of Beta last year, it was awesome to have an outlet to talk shop and keep each other accountable. The podcast is very raw and unfiltered, with no editing whatsoever—maybe too unfiltered?
I'll briefly touch on Sampler—another project I got involved with this year. My Internet friend Rasmus built Sampler around the time Bjørn and I built Reform and I always really loved the idea (Reform is still a customer). I've always encouraged Rasmus to do more with the idea, but of course it's always easier said than done. This year I got the chance to put my action where my mouth was, when Rasmus asked if I wanted to work with him on Sampler (I first tried to buy it from him). We worked out some very simple handshake terms and thought of it as an experiment. Could I find some customers and kickstart things a bit? The experiment wasn't super successful, for a few reasons—mainly just life circumstances, so we called it off after a few weeks. Even though it didn't really work out, I think it was a success because we got to test the setup in a few weeks and learned a bunch without wasting too much time. Working on Sampler also gave me a bunch of new ideas, which emphasizes how important inertia is in this game! It's so hard to think up business ideas from scratch—they show up much easier once you're in motion.
The final side project I worked on this year was obviously inspired by Sampler. I guess I never explained what Sampler is: Basically, it's a way to turn Figma into an image API and the main use case for Reform is to generate social sharing images for forms. So after spending weeks thinking about social sharing images, or social cards, I came up with the idea for Social Card Creator: A super simple way to quickly add social sharing images to your website. My friend Niklas challenged me to build something as quickly as possible that him and I could use and it turned out to be the perfect goal. In something like two weeks, I had a working product, and a few weeks later, I launched it for strangers to sign up. The product is still super simple with only one template, but I hope to add some more features once I'm back in the office in January. The product is currently at $87 ARR 🤪, so not much, but more than zero, and it's fun to have something "real" out there again. Social Card Creator was the first time I really leaned into AI coding tools, like Cursor. It was mind blowing how much faster it is to build stuff these days with AI by our sides.
Personal life
As I'm sitting here in our new house writing this post, with two little boys sleeping in their beds, I have a strong feeling of having found my footing again. In 2020, my (very pregnant) wife and I uprooted our lives in Scotland and moved "home" to Denmark. Until finally buying a house earlier this year, it never really felt like we had settled down. In addition to moving several times, there's been some very difficult family-related stuff I've had to finally confront. It's been really tough, but not really something I feel like talking about publicly—at least not yet. In my own little family, we've had to deal with a lot of disease and hospitals in the past year (thankfully nothing too bad!), which has been really draining. My wife and I don't have a lot of external support, but we're a good team and we've made the most of it. Thankfully our kids are really easy to love even though they are a ton of work 😉 More and more, it feels like my own little family of four is the nuclear family in my life (as opposed to the one I grew up in), and I feel more and more like and adult. It's a good feeling and the cliché "today is the first day of the rest of your life" feels really true these days.
We bought our first house this year, which has been pretty great. It was a very stressful time because we had to navigate selling our summerhouse + appartment in order to afford the house we wanted, but in the end it all worked out.
Here's the house:
And here's the view from our rooftop terrace overlooking the little "forrest" we live next to:
As much as 2024 felt like an uneventful year, I guess it wasn't really—it never really is!
Thanks for reading along and see you in 2025.