Amazed by the 2022 growth of Startuplandia.

• 2022 ended with a 72% increase in sales (appox $900k topline), a 130% increase in gross revenue and a 178% increase in net revenue.
• In 2022, I finally began to manage the business from both an intuitive (team, leadership, fun) and a quantitative (financial reporting) point of view.
• Approx 23 team members worked on 11 projects, with the exception of a few people who are co-located in Brazil and a few Americans, each of the 23 people live in a different global country. Of the 11 projects, some were venture backed, some were self financed green field prototypes and some were funded by stable businesses looking to push the envelope.
• Looking at the 2022 income statement, I’ve realized that I can’t win solely by growing topline, I must also tightly control costs, avoid paying any legal services and at all times, maintain financial discipline.
• Considering I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2012 and had never worked in programming or any technical capacity, in 10 years, I moved from junior engineer to CTO leading my own startup factory, 2022 represents a milestone on an important skills journey. Since Jan 2021 Startuplandia has seen approx $1.7M in sales.

Grateful for the amazing state of my family & 1 year old daughter.

• Most people would have thought that I would have never married, built a family or enjoyed the process of having a daughter.
• In 2015, I distanced myself from the founder’s that I knew, I understood that 1. I lacked the skills to be in charge of growth 2. Understood that I had surrounded myself with mildly toxic founders and 3. That I needed to improve my personal life before I could get my professional life in order.
• I then embarked on a mission that involved seeing a therapist, digging through myself and coming to terms with my personal nature, all of which resulted in finding and amazing spouse and fast forward to January of 2021, we moved to Bend, Oregon, possibly the happiest place in existence, and in December 2021, we had a very health baby girl named Aurora.
• 2022 involved taking care of Aurora and helping my wife recover from the birth, it drained me of energy but has overall been an amazing process to witness and participate in.

Excited for the travels that might happen.

• In 2022, I traveled to Asheville, SC for the Founder’s Summit, my family and I spent two weeks in Istanbul, I journeyed to France & Luxembourg to see a StartupLandia team engineer, my family journeyed to Portland, I flew the entire StartupLandia team to Playa del Carmen Mexico, I traveled to San Francisco and various other trips to Arizona & California (not to mention a bunch of amazing day trips in the Central Oregon area).
• In 2023, I expect at a minimum to attend the US Micro-Conf, I will travel to Goiania, Brazil to see the wedding of a StartupLandia team engineer.
• I would like to do some back country snowboarding in the Bend, Oregon area, I’ve been out on snowshoes and recently started cross country skiing more.
• There exists the possibility of taking the StartupLandia team to the 2024 World Cup in Mexico.
• What else… Dear Reader, you tell me :)

Concerned about the growth of Startuplandia.

• I don’t have the same referral activity that I had going into 2022
• I have calculated a financial days until death, it isn’t very long out into the future
• I don’t think that marketing and growth of a pipeline is my greatest skill, though I have confidence in selling what we do.
• As I enter the realm of “Fractional CTO” I frequently look at much more technical people out there and suffer severe “imposter syndrome”.
• When I think about the moments of my career that have been the funnest, most financially rewarding, I think about pairing on features with my team, telling jokes and generally enjoying the process of building, debugging, I love what I do.
• Aiming the love of what I do at the fear of future helps me regain a calm, relaxed state.

I end the previous year knowing my joyful life requires both hard work, luck and social karma.

• I think that people sometimes form an idea that success comes from one of these three (hard work, luck or social karma).
• Some people might also believe that luck and social karma are the same, I believe that luck happens at the personal level and social karma is the reflection in others, of your individual past actions.
• I know that my successes have come from all three, hard work happens when I learn a new programming tool and spend hours meeting new people on linkedin.
• Luck happens when (the stars align).
• Social Karma happens when someone out in the multi-verse asks someone else, do you know a good team who could build X and someone scans their internal map and the StartupLandia team pops into mind. We don’t pop into mind because they like us a friends, or because of luck, we pop into mind because we put in hard work and produce good results in an economically efficient manner, all of which builds our social karma.

Ok, yada yada, that’s more than a few words. I will be producing 1 post a month for both this more personally leaning page and 1 a month for StartupLandia.