Do not index
Do not index
As 2021 is coming to an end, I thought to reflect on what I’ve accomplished this year. Last year was a failure, so I’m glad this year turned out to be ok. Although, just ok.
MY YEAR BY QUARTERS(all figures are in EUR in this section)
Q1 – growing MRR from ~4k to ~6k MRR, went to Lisbon to stay there, couldn’t make it because family.
Q3 – growing MRR from ~7k to ~8.5k MRR
Q4 – went back to 6k MRR and brought back up to 8k MRR. Created my alternative bootstrapped fund. Soft-launched JobScout, Signl, Metaverve, and more. Received my first cease and desist letter ✅
PERSONAL AND HEALTH
On the personal side, my goals didn’t change. I wanted to go live on my own, and live abroad again with my girlfriend.
I didn’t do any of that. My girlfriend started a new job which occupies her most of the day (and only has 30 days of vacation per year). I’m super happy for her because she is doing what she likes but on the other hand, I like freedom and I don’t like the 9-5 thing so.. not sure. It feels like I, too have a 9-5 job now and I actually resigned from actual jobs in the past because of this.
In addition to this, I just can’t decide on whether to stay in Italy and open a new business here so I can stay with my family but basically be broke due to paying a ton of taxes, or move to Lisbon to grow my business and live a more nomadic lifestyle. I wasted a year thinking about this, tomorrow a new year starts, and I still have no clue about what to do 👀
My fitness goals also didn’t change from 2020: I wanted to reach 80kg in weight, run my usual path in less than 20 mins, and be able to do 30 push-ups. And yeah, although I can say I tried, I also completely failed these goals.
MUSIC
Unfortunately, COVID hit the industry hard and I didn’t play live as much as I wanted in 2021. I can count my live shows on two hands.
I did still play by myself – which I enjoy.
BUSINESS
In 2020 I only made $20k, so in 2021 I wanted to make more money. I did that. We made more than $100k in revenue and I managed to save ~$40k while reinvesting most of it on myself and the business itself.
In 2021, we introduced a lot more new products: Leadhall, Signl, JobScout (btw, if you’d like to know about new products we ship you should sign-up for our newsletter here)
I still do pretty much all of the work myself, but I have hired a full-time PA/EA/Head of stuff – Clarice, who’s been helping me and doing an amazing job 🙌
I’m not always at 100%, and that’s a problem. If I’m well, the business does well. If I’m not well, my business does not do well.
Selling and acquiring
This year I acquired two little projects which are complementary to what I’m doing, and I tried to sell Treendly on MicroAcquire. That was a complete fail, as I just get low offers and I think the business is worth $60-100k.
Streams of income
My 2021 was basically about stacking different sources of income. I’m extremely risk-averse so I have SaaS products, a course, a productized service, and I also consult.
On the SaaS products side, I’ve got products that I have partners on, products where I have 100% equity, products that are low-ticket, products that are high-ticket, products that are almost media companies, products that are geared towards enterprises.. let’s just say I’m happy with the risk allocation of my current SaaS portfolio.
Having course sales coming in, and money from the consulting and the productized service is just extra security on top of it.
A job??
I believe you can run all of these streams as a one-person company, and I do. I believe it’s also extremely beneficial for each party involved: me, my clients, my customers, my users. You learn a lot by running all of these sources of income and you apply what you learn to everything else.
In 2021 I wanted to also add a job on top of the other streams and that has proven to be very difficult. I applied to work at Gumroad, and at TinySeed but it didn’t work out.
It’s funny how businesses would hire people straight out of college, but not hire me. I have been in business for years and made 6-figures this year alone – alone. That has to count for something.
I recently applied to work at LemList and that seems to be promising, let’s see how it goes.
Near future goals
Business-wise in Q1 2022 I aim to do a big marketing launch, something never done before. If you want to support the launch, please over to https://rubini.link/phs 🙌I also plan to begin selling some of my SaaS products, and to drastically grow the revenue of one-three of them.
Finally, I’d like to stack a job on top of my revenue streams.
2022 GOALS
So, my goals for 2022 are pretty much the same as in 2021 on the personal side and health side. Whereas, on the business side, I think we can at least double our revenue.
For the love of data,Mike Rubini
