I launched stuff, I pivoted, I embraced new tech; but I also saw where the landscape of software entrepreneurship has changed, and made next to no revenue all year.

This is not what I’d hoped for, nor what I expected.

Coming back fresh from a year building a cabin should leave you limber, right? Ready to slay? Nope. I still had my skillset, but I had let my tools get a little rusty. The landscape had changed and external life influences destabilised me nearly all year.

But despite that, I think things went well.

AI now feels like a force multiplier.

The two start-ups and an email course I have ready to launch feel more viable.

I start 2025 less wrong. LFG.

Here’s a run-down of my year, as much for me as for you If you want to see my plan for 2025 it’s here.

Things that went well

Overall I consistently committed to labour, spending about 80% of my time developing and 20% marketing. While this might have worked in 2020, I don’t think we can do this distribution in 2025, not at least without master marketing skills I do not have.

• Work
  • Got back into my product-making groove, despite external challenges
    • Fully adopted Cursor/other AI tools into my workflow
    • Setup a repeatable github system for each project
    • Reconnected with kanban via Github
    • Days to MVP massively reduced (~3m at start of year to ~5d at end)
    • Rebooted lots of my old business systems, including tracking sheets, idea matrix, and overall business checklists
    • Retooled my brain to set myself up to catch grace. Used sales safari, rather than forcing startup ideas
    • Sharpened my ability to cull floundering projects
    • New camera setup (Sony Alpha 7)
    • 240hz monitor reduced migraines
    • Refreshed desk setup for focus & efficacy
  • Projects:
    • [Shipped] Rebuilt WoodyHayday.com
    • [Shipped] Rebooted Project Pages
    • [Shelved] BuildProfit.io built in the right vane, but shelved for now
    • [Shipped] BurnoutNutrition.com to get the concept out of my head
    • [Shipped] Built a micro bet – CoupleFlow for Telegram
    • [95%] Mobile app MVP in 5 days (2025 Q1 release)
    • [Ready] Built NicheReports (2025 Q1 release)
    • [In-hand] Drafted 25% of my new 1 year startup course (which pivoted into a new AI entrepreneurship challenge) – Profit Swarm .ai
• IRL:
  • Finished Cabin build:
    • Interior
    • 3.5m Ash Desk
    • Cladding
    • Welsh reclaimed slate roof
    • Stove installed, Custom heatshield (acid etched Henry Thoreau passage)
    • Compost loo started
    • Quad Port
    • Lots more, (thanks to Evan)
  • Makes:
    • Food Forest 3 planted
    • House finished (bathroom)
    • Trailer Mods
    • Garden steps x 2
    • Seagull defence
    • Saddle stool prototype
    • Garden beautification
    • Gym in garage started
  • 240hz monitor for migraines
  • Gave up smoking
  • Gave up gaming
  • Brought my truck back from severe chassis rot
  • Travel:
    • Hertfordshire x 3
    • Budapest
    • Tenerife
    • Cardiff
    • Visited my Dad plenty
    • Sadly missed a trip to Prague
    • Japan & Seoul with Bro
    • Christmas in Portugal
    • Fam in Fishguard
    • Friend meetups x 7

Things that didn’t fly

Failure is information, and I got a chunk of it out of 2024. But I’m happy; I still have runway and am now much more in my groove.

• Revenue – I made under $1k all year. I put this down to:
  • Me being out of the entrepreneurial groove
  • The software space moving on since I last started fresh (SEO, Launches, AI-built stuff, and just generally the now more frothy nature of the space)
  • Sales Safari + Re-matrixing ideas – out of practice, I chose suboptimal bets for ⅔ of the year. Startup brain is coming back slowly
  • External life effects destabilising me a lot
• Launches – the landscape has changed since I last seriously launched products ~6y ago. Launches, and indeed distribution, has evolved. I’m catching up with this curve in 2025
• SEO – this has changed to. Oh the good old days of grey hat ranking, (I owned spot 1-3 for ‘modified cars’ for years before). Managed some success towards end of year, but generally I needed a refresh of my skills again here
• Developing a week-in-out schedule – I tried splitting my week several ways, but in the end, as per history, I was just trying to fit too much in. I’ve let go of that assumption, and will be building a better, leaner weekly ‘system’ this year
• #buildinpublic – I tried to get involved in this movement on X, but I found that while there were some cool people around it, it has also become a bit of a copycat low-strike-rate minefield
• I refreshed my SLR with the intention to build on YouTube (maker videos and business stuff). I did use my camera a bit, but not at all how I’d envisaged. I hope to make more use of it this year, but it’s not realistic to balance small bets & maker stuff with my current state of health & household
• Scattered notes – I still have notes and writing scattered across Evernote, Notion, Telegram, Google Docs, various phone writing apps. This is an endless struggle between ADHD/ASD natures, but I do still believe I will find a system to match my nature, eventually
• I admit I got a little distracted by memecoins
• Migraines: I’ve made gratingly little progress overall, though I have found a balance where work is totally achievable; provided I regulate the plethora of other things I’d set myself to do IRL
  • Hospitalised for 4 days at one point
  • Tried a lot of therapies/pharma solutions this year, approached the bottom of the list of possible ‘cures’: Myofascia, Rimegepant, Pizotofen, Botox, etc. etc.
  • Have found a healthy balance with work by the end of the year though, work’s good now
• Alexander Technique drop off – I have started to notice the effect of dropping my routine AT lessons; bad backs that I have not had in 10y or so
• In the polytunnel: My old lemon tree is still plagued by Scaley bug, the peach tree by red mites, and the fig tree has rust. Otherwise the growing season is set to be very good in 2025

All in all I’ve had a great year despite all of the challenges. I’m very grateful to have had the runway and capital to recover my tools, travel with my peeps, and make some cool things.

I look forward to further refining my product building/launching loops in 2025; to less external knocks, more focus, revenue and stability.

I hope you have a great 2025!

P.S. If you want to keep up to date with my business adventures, and tool up your software entrepreneurship in 2025, Join ProfitSwarm.ai (launching soon).

Doubling back from my 2024 small bets post, I said I’d answer a few questions, so I’m going to do that here:

Is it possible to get iterative benefits while exploring disparate small bet models?

Yes, I definitely saw iterative benefits despite my small bets being a bit scattershot. I’d say there’d be more iterative benefits if the bets had been aimed more closely at one audience, primarily in the fact I ended up building a few different email lists/target audiences, which I couldn’t cross-sell to.

Technology wise, though, there are definitely stack benefits to building different models; e.g. I now have a good base to build mobile apps, telegram integrations, AI wrappers etc. that can be applied this year to a single audience.

Might it have been better to go all-in on a single idea?

I don’t think so. Mostly because my startup-idea validating brain was out of practice. I think all my ideas had merit, and to some extent it was my rusty processes which meant they produced only meagre returns.

I think being nimble and exploring a range of ideas was good for me to get my mind back in the game, to learn the new landscape, and to fully iron out the kinks from my workflows.

What code libraries/scripts did I build which will be useful going forwards?

Lots! Telegram, AI, Turnstile, and Stripe integrations. A nice new ‘domain for sale’ lander. I learned Flutter and Dart and built a decent MVP mobile app.

I suspect lots of these libs/scripts will be useful in 2025.

Did I hit my targets?

Nope. Not by a long shot, though I am fairly confident I know the reasons why, and am pivoting in the right direction. I don’t want to let my bias sugar coat the fact that I made next to no revenue, but I do think it’s rational I’ll get there in 2025.

Did I move towards a greater authenticity?

Yes, I think so. I’ve been doing this (software entrepreneurship) for most of my adult life, mostly successfully; it feels authentic and right. I started 2024 in a less authentic place than I ended it.

Having been working on the rock face all year I reconnected with that natural builder in me, saw that I can build well, fast. Most importantly for me I accepted that my aspirations were, as usual, unrealistic (to moon shot a small bet, finish building a cabin, plant a new food forest, sustain a nurturing family household, make stuff IRL, etc. all with chronic migraines).

By dialling back my aspirations, doubling down on this entrepreneurship focus, I hope and expect to make more progress in 2025.

Am I excited to carry on this experiment in 2025?

Yes! It’s my authentic self to be making new stuff to help others solve problems. I really look forward to launching, iterating, pivoting, and generally delivering good outcomes that produce win-win results.

Long live makership!

The post 2024 Year in Review first appeared on Woody Hayday.

No longer.

I’ve got a lot to say after the past 7 years, it’s been quite a journey:

• 2 major burnouts. Chronic fatigue syndrome, an ambulance, a long road to recovery.
• Hung up my author-hat and set about surviving; and back to software engineering.
• Built and sold another software company (Zero BS CRM to Automattic).
• Worked at Automattic for 3 years; learned a lot.
• Refurbished a whole house, mostly by hand, DIY.
• Went from panic attacks daily to freedom from them.
• Purchased 37 acres of land to grow more trees on.
• Took a year long sabbatical and built a cabin in the woods.
• Got solidly into making things with my hands.
• Now, finally, picking back up the keyboard and making digital things again; writing here.

It’s been a long time, internet; now let’s get to making cool shit.

The post Back from sabbatical first appeared on Woody Hayday.

Note: Since writing this original post I’ve collected all my thoughts on Burnout, Chronic Fatigue etc. into a single post, please read it!

I’ll plant a tree when you buy my book, because trees are the great stabiliser of our environment. They make our air breathable, improve our soils, and many feed us.

I’ve burned myself out and exist in a compromised state after I dwelt in the sad truths of our species (massacres, war, environmental etc.). When I found a local contribution I could make (planting a food forest) I hit a money-requirement wall which lead me to overwork up to breaking point. I’m now processing the wave of sadness which consequently rolled in, and planting trees is the only thing that makes me feel better. So this is mostly a selfish pursuit

Pre-order here, and I’ll send you a pic of your tree!

This post explainswhyI decided to plant a tree for each pre-order, if you want to read how I’ll do it, read this.

How I got here

My evenings had become full of fizzing rage. My brain felt mauled and my eyes burned. I snapped at those closest, and myself. Every daytime hour I buried myself in work. This setup eventually lead to breakdowns, and panic attacks, which collapsed me into a compromised state.

Something waspissing me off. I’d recover, and do the same damned thing again. I’ve been stuck in that loop for a few years now, and even with reading and meditating, tweaking and trying, I’m only just starting to figure it out.

The source

Eventually I found a moment amongst the stress to dig in and track these feelings to their source.What else had I been doing Was this a cocktail effect Screen time and French wine

I skipped back through my mental history and found it. Facebook (or more specifically – my social feeds). But it wasn’t just the blue colour-scheme, designed to trigger the pathways in my brain related to daytime blue skies to keep me awake and scrolling. It wasn’t the bullshit ads for shit no one should buy. It wasn’t the hollow harpings of my social choir.

It was the stories.

Bastardised

The way social media has evolved is to provide us with an ever looping echo chamber of our preference. We like or ignore posts about subjects and social media uses it’s giant machine brain to plot a narrative that’ll please us. It’s become our priest and our story-teller, and it wants sole custody of our traditions, our memes, and our political outlook. Somewhere on Facebook’s servers is a bastardised version of yourself, a machine-learned counterpart with none of your complex humanity, but a fairly accurate model of what interests you.

And what interests me, and has for at least the facebook-enabled-decade, is the truth.

But what truth gets clicked most Hard, painful, sad, fear-inducing, grim, etc.

Knowing the technology and the dark patterns, I had told myself, meant I was less corralled by the thing. I could log in, conscious of the fan-service clickbait and just message a friend. Lies. All of us are human. We are all subject to compromised logic a chunk of the time. Many things can mess with our rationality if we’re ever lucky enough to have found a way to build some in. These meat vehicles and thought protocols can be perfected, surely, but it might not be us, this generation alive now, who achieves that. We should plan accordingly.

Years of liking Chomsky articles, Permaculture posts and posting Bill Hicks specials had steered and trimmed this social bubble until it reflected where I’d reached. Cynicism as a way of dealing with brutal truths. An addiction to the bleak side of the universe, overextended beyond a sensible weathering.

Degrees of truth

It’s taken me an embarrassing amount of words to get to the meat here.

By spending years absorbing hard facts about humanity, our tendency and our history, I had built for myself a nest of sadness. Massacres, environmental idiocy, and brutal unfairness is the real picture, or at least a part of it, (not commonly told). We in this system have been, and continue to, tell ourselves comforting lies. Things are not okay. Our bubble is protected. Our wellbeing assured by zeros and ones in a guarded data warehouse. But if you even slightly poke your head out of that false cocoon, you’ll see quite a different story. In unconsciously forming my Facebook feed I’d created an environment which nearly took my head off each time I entered it. It gave me a little glimpse of a bigger truth. It was lop-sided, over-emphasised, but real. Monsanto do exist. History is full of winners-lies. And ultimately, where this was heading for me: we are shitting on our own doorstep.

It sucks to acknowledge it. I know. But then I started looking for remedies…

Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.

Marcus Aurelius

The search for land

Land, I subconsciously, (and later consciously) realised, was my fix. A personal, achievable action to balance some of this bad. I’d happened into Permaculture, and then Forest Gardening in 2016. The word Permaculture is my kind of a word. Permanent culture: as in rationally building ways of living which don’t trip ourselves up. If we we’re to draw a spectrum of mental models – what would the end points be. For me, I’d put Permaculture far on one end.

Capitalism, or whatever word you want to use to describe what we’re doing these days isnt particularly well thought out. It doesn’t take much internet browsing to see it for it’s occasional good human stewardship, it trips itself up chronically. Mine one place and sell to another But you need that mined land later – if your infinite plan for expansion should materialise. It’s a short-sighted carnival, with only a few tent poles, and a lot of human sweat, holding it together.

Permaculture, on the other hand, is living by design. It’s long-sighted. It thinks about tomorrow, about the self, and more than anything, it accepts. These two ideologies probably don’t make up the extremes of a spectrum, but personally, I’d rather be toward the end which is self-aware, the end which isn’t constantly tripping it’s brother up, only to find out that it’s a conjoined twin.

So land, then, was my way out. Buy a few acres, do it right. Plant enough for me and others. Steward and promote and try. Try damn it try. And I still am trying.

Local truth

So why wasn’t looking at land solving this painful angry state Rather, it seemed to be lumped in with the beating that the internet was giving me with it’s fists of truth. Well, then there’s the local truths. George Monbiot taught me (via the internet, and his great book Feral), about the enclosure movement wherein common lands and small landholdings we’re grouped and enclosed, and peasants rights revoked, creating a farmer & labour split which ultimately lead to the moving of people into cities. As this ideology continues to dominate here less and less farmers end up owning more and more land per head.

Access to land is a big deal now, especially for the interior me whom just wants a fucking way to offset the misery. When I would look at land, I would see the opportunity. The huge potential of a ragged old field that had housed sheep for three decades. The food and wellness it could sustain. It felt like a super-power potential-vision, it still does. And this pursuit will, ultimately, pan out. I’ll find land and plant trees. But the reason it still aggravated me was the feasibility problem.

Land prices have risen steadily here, as have house prices. (I’m aware that what I pay in rent I could shift into a mortgage and buy a place, aren’t I lucky that I get to pay 200% for a house at an inflated price? I should be thankful even for that, I am aware.) But then you look at the planning and governing around land combined with houses and you hit an idiotic wall, built three times too thick to make up for it’s stupid design. To buy a house, and any acreage, in Britain, is expensive (and increasingly rare, as land-holders buy up land that sits next to theirs). To do so within a few hours of London (where most of my family chose to exist), is beyond the reach of even most bankers. To buy land separate to a house is feasible, though increasingly only available in gigantic lumps or in tiny planning-enabled plots at gigantic prices. It’s an awkward, wonky position, created by corrupt or ill-thought-out legislation.

So, then, to help me have an outlet to offset the awful reality I’ve learned I have to participate in the system enough to siphon off shiny-things equating to more money than most people earn ever. Just to farm a few acres. As sincere and researched as my intention, this place at this time, does not support rational sustainable living. Great another painful truth. And thats where I found myself. Laying in bed, laptop closed, struggling against the wrongs, caged from enacting a visible solution.

I was frustrated.

So I worked harder. I burned every caffeine-filled cell I had to make money, to deserve, (in this biassed gambling house of a system), the opportunity to cultivate land. I made some cash, perhaps enough to beg a bank to help me acquire a few-allotments worth of sheep-sick land. But now I am broken, and persist in a compromised state. I happily pay, if this is what is required, but I’m not sure it is.

So this is me. This is why I am going to plant a tree for every pre-order of this book. And plant more, and write more, too, because you can’t stop me. I’m going to use every bit of energy I have left to balance against these things I’ve learned and don’t like. This is going to be my tiny dent in the universe, probably, and I welcome it as part of the ride. These systems we’ve developed, mental models for the individual and governmental ones for the species, are dysfunctional. They always will be. And so the only rational thing we can do is try to disregard the useless parts, to let go to find and invent new parts that work better for the whole (which is in itself, a cascading loop). To thrive in these times we must not shy away from truths, but stomach them, and turn them to fuel.

We must plant trees because you can only do something long-sighted when you believe in the future.

Pre-order my book Canopy Harvest here, and I’ll plant you a tree

CanopyHarvest.com

The post Why I’m going to plant a tree for every pre-order of Canopy Harvest first appeared on Woody Hayday.

To begin with these trees will be planted at several sites in Wales where they will be secure for decades to come. But this is just the beginning.

Along with launching my book, I’ve decided to start up a new collective – an initiative for authors wherein they can commit a proportion of their book revenues to the planting of useful trees.

Enter: Plant a Book

Plant a Book is a simple initiative: An author-led movement, where authors themselves plant trees. By pledging to contribute a percentage of their book revenues, authors super-charge the sustainability cycle. Trees get planted, books get imagined. Trees get harvested, books get made, and sold. Authors plant more trees. The intention is to unite the story-makers of our time to sustain literature while bettering the planet in a practical way.

Visit Plant a Book

The post Introducing Plant a Book first appeared on Woody Hayday.