2023 New Year's resolutions check-up

I'm not a fan of setting multiple resolutions (hardcore focus), so I've only set one for this year: to get 1 (one) paying user for my SaaS app.

It didn't help that I finished building it in November, but well... here I am still waiting for that one Stripe notification.

Next year I'll try something easier, like running a half-marathon or something.

My goals for 2023 were:

- Alternate marketing weeks and coding weeks to force myself to actually do marketing work.

- Focus on SEO and get to 5,000 monthly visitors.

- Get to $5k MRR (which I think is a bit more realistic than my $10k goal last year).

I'm off by an order of magnitude on the traffic goal and still at $0 MRR. Here's my 2022 year in review post where I laid out those goals: https://www.teaminal.com/blog/2022-year-in-review/ (2023 coming soon)

If something's worth doing, why wait for the new year? Just start today!

I started trying to exercise every day last year. I've been getting lots of compliments about my body, so it must have helped!

Also now I can do a full back-bridge without assistance from an exercise ball.

1. Fix one of my abandoned projects since 2018 or so: Tremendous success.

I planned to get it up for the users who paid a one time fee $25 for it in the past, and the product had a ton of tech debt. Heroku was charging $5-$7 for it so I hesitated. Ended up getting hosting fees tax deducted and getting it up and running opened up a firehose of potential wealth. Made new friends as well, which counts for more than money.

2. Released some products at work: also tremendous success, and we're barely keeping up with this. Kind of fun just randomly searching the internet and finding a review or people on social media offering tips on your product.

3. Learn langchain and code a raytracer in Android totally using AI: Mixed

Ironically, this was probably the easiest. Bear in mind GPT-4 was only released this year. At the start of 2023, 3.5 was pretty dumb and there were lots of complex architectural plans to teach it to do this. Now I could probably just upload a PDF and some template code. I might just do this next week before the year ends.

In the stoic tradition, I don't compare myself to others, only compare to who I was yesterday, and if I didn't get better, then it's a hard fail. So my resolution is to continuously improve from the day before.

My goal was to improve my trait conscientiousness, mostly organisation etc.

Ive done this to some success, moving from low single digits percentile to somewhere near the population mean.