My predictions for 2025!
A random clickbaity title to trick you into reading my 2024 retrospective, which is grounded in reality rather than delusional predictions
I hate yearly predictions. Passionately.
More generally, I hate predictions as they feed the false sense of predictability and control humans long for.
Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. Instead of engaging in such an unproductive exercise, I would instead invest my energy in preparing for whatever life might throw my way, whether at the microscopic or macroscopic level.
But since some of you might have fallen for the clickbaity title, I feel I owe you the courtesy of sharing my thoroughly researched predictions for 2025.
Buckle up; here we go.
My 2025 Predictions
In 2025, we will see intimidation, violence, and armed conflicts being used as a way to solve tensions caused by diverging views on religion, money, or whose genital apparatus is bigger/prettier/stronger than the other.
In 2025, we will observe and suffer disasters, misery, and discomfort caused by the climate crisis.
In 2025, some people will try to convince you GenAI is the solution to all humanity's problems, while others will try to convince you it's the end of humanity. In the middle of all this, others will try to research and quantify its impacts and keep the dialogue sober and rational. However, most public discourse will ignore them because their views are too dull.
And finally, 2025 will be the year of Linux on desktops.
Needless to say, I have very low confidence in all the predictions above, except the last one.
Before moving into more serious territories and saying, "Enough with this nonsense!" — a sentence I plan to use a lot more in 2025 — I want to share two of the recent news that I'm afraid are a good illustration of what's in stock for 2025.
After all, 2025 being an odd number, it makes sense for it to be an odd year.
Breaking news 1: Adolf Hitler was a communist
Alice Weidel went on record stating the following:
“The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right[-wing] and conservative, he was exactly the opposite,[…] He wasn't a conservative, he wasn't a libertarian, he was a communist, socialist guy, and we are the opposite.”1
When I first heard that, I was left speechless.
What an incredible example of git push -f History
As a fan of Sci-Fi, I can only be thrilled at the perspective of finally living in a dystopian world after reading so much about them.
Dear Orwell, if only you'd be around to witness it!
Breaking news 2: As of January 10th, the richest 1% burn through their entire annual carbon limit
These are the limits of CO2 estimated to keep the atmosphere below 1.5C of warming. Comparatively, it would take someone from the poorest 50% about three years — 1022 days — to use up their share of the annual global carbon budget.
According to this Oxfam research2 — a renowned bunch of Communists who always sympathized with Hitler, as everybody should know by now — to meet the 1.5C goal, the wealthiest 1 percent need to cut their emissions by 97% by 2030.
As a wannabe adept at system thinking, I keep my cool by observing how the climate crisis is one of the purest examples of the tragedy of the commons we — as a species — could ever invent.
A sneaky way to affirm our supremacy over any other living species when it comes to burning our house down while everyone is inside partying.
Enough material to inspire conspiracy theories aficionados. I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with the theory of a group of mad alien scientists, each testing their ability to manipulate a species into self-destruction, and that we happen to be in the winning team.
With this exciting news for the new year, it's time to shout, "Enough of this nonsense" (see, I'm practicing), remind ourselves of the Stoics' virtue of focusing on what we can control, and move on with the recap of 2024!
My 2024 Recap
As I've been doing every previous quarter, it's time for a quarterly update on how the business has been going. This time, it'll cover the entire year, starting from having a look at the high-level goals I had set for 2024:
Build a strong online presence
Create a sustainable business
Live a healthier life
Let's review each one of them.
1. Build a strong online presence
The intention for setting this goal was twofold. Getting to a place where I could leverage an audience to help sustain my business and developing the discipline of regularly writing.
Though I missed the numeric targets I had set for myself, I don't consider the goal a failure.
While I spent a significant amount of time checking and chasing those numbers early in the year, the more the year progressed, the more I distanced myself from them. There are a few reasons for that. First and foremost, my plan is not to monetize my content directly. As of today, I have no plans to introduce a paid tier for this newsletter, and there is no reason why that should change in the foreseeable future.
My online presence allows me to establish myself as a recognized voice. But that, too, is not the ultimate goal.
There are both personal and professional reasons why I believe this investment makes sense.
Writing publicly makes me a better writer and a better thinker. It forces me to take the time to go deep on a topic, develop a more intimate understanding of it, and ultimately leverage it more effectively in my daily life.
When people find my content helpful and aligned with their views, they will discover we have something in common. If we have something in common, they're more likely to be willing to engage with me on a professional level. I've written about this mechanism a few times.
So, while traditional engagement metrics are pretty ephemeral and tend to fall into vanity metrics, I find other metrics emerging as more relevant. Specifically, I'm more interested in people contacting me directly to enquire about a potential collaboration or referring to a specific article I wrote in a live conversation.
Those are the outcomes I'm looking for; everything else is one of many ways to get there.
Furthermore, I have decided to focus my writing efforts entirely on Substack and stopped publishing posts for LinkedIn. I only use that platform to broadcast news about new articles, inquiries, or promotions.
There are many reasons for that.
First and foremost, social networks are productivity poison. Tens of thousands of bright engineers spend their day optimizing those platforms to keep you hooked as long as possible. You can't fight with that.
Secondly, the content pushed to eyeballs is designed to trigger emotional reactions, not rational and deep reflection. Those platforms optimize for engagement, not depth or quality. Entertainment and education can overlap, but more often than not, they don't. There is value in brevity, but I find it frequently leads to an abundance of over-simplification. Nuance is important.
Therefore, all my writing efforts will be directed toward the newsletter, with very little dedicated to marketing and promoting it. I'm OK with the slower, steadier organic growth.
2. Create a sustainable business
This area is where numbers and metrics are the leading indicators. They can be broken down into these three questions:
Am I making enough money?
Am I working at a sustainable pace?
Is the business growing/stable or declining?
Let's look at them individually.
Am I making enough money?
Setting specific goals in advance and time boxing an effort are both techniques I learned the hard way. They are instrumental in reducing the risk of falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
When I decided to become my boss at the end of 2023, I set a specific, reasonably ambitious, and achievable target for the first year.
I was coming from a job with an excellent salary. I knew I couldn't match it in my first year as a solopreneur. At the same time, I wanted to make enough money to sustain the family and handle all those unexpected expenses that life throws your way.
I settled for half my previous salary as the target to achieve. If I made less than that in the first year, I would call an end to the initiative and go back to a regular job. But If I'd made that amount or more, I'd continue for at least one more year.
I'm delighted to report that I've passed this first test, closing the year at about 140% of the original target, or about 70% of the previous year's salary.3
Regarding revenue breakdown, about 94.5% of the revenues in 2024 came from B2B gigs, 4% from individual coaching and mentoring, and about 1.5% from the membership product I launched in late August.
B2B is where the money is, and I'm happy about that. Yet, I intend to eventually achieve a more balanced split between the different revenue lines.
Let's move on to the other questions.
Am I working at a sustainable pace?
Though I had not initially made this an explicit metric, I paid close attention to it throughout the year. One of the primary motivators for leaving my regular 9-to-5 job was gaining more autonomy over my time.
In retrospect, I spent about eight weeks entirely off in 2024—roughly two months—during which I deliberately did not do any client work.
For most of those weeks, I was regularly engaged in intellectual activities closely related to what constitutes work: writing articles, reading about interesting topics, hacking ideas, etc.
Being off doesn't mean switching off your brain. It's about disconnecting from external obligations and commitments.
I've never been able to take as much time off since starting my professional career, and I've enjoyed every minute of it: skiing with my kids during their winter holidays or traveling with the whole family in our motorhome during the summer.
Of course, there have been periods of very intense activity, too. The end-of-year rush has been particularly crazy, peaking right before Christmas break in December. Working sustainably means peaks and dips, not a monotonous flat line. Something Cal Newport defines as seasonality in his latest book Slow Productivity4
Eight weeks now feels like a good benchmark to keep as a reference for the years to come.
Is the business growing / stable or declining?
This question requires a bit more processing. Let's start by looking at raw numbers.
Q1 was my highest-revenue quarter. That was mainly because I transitioned my full-time job into an advisor role from day one, effectively granting me a smooth transition between the two setups and a continuity in income.
Conversely, Q3 was the worst quarter of the year. I wrote about it in a previous post5, so I won't go into the details again.
In fact, If you sorted quarters just by revenues, you'd get Q1, Q3, Q4, and Q3.
That doesn't look too exciting, does it? Is Q4 a bump in an overall declining trend? Or what else is going on there?
That's where context — and a pinch of entrepreneurial perseverance — comes into play.
Two essential pieces of information can help with interpretation.
The first one is that December has been a weird month. I've done some work that I couldn't invoice until January 2025 for reasons that would be irrelevant here. If I had accounted for those delayed revenues, Q4 would have become the best quarter of the year, 10% above Q1.
Secondly, in December, I landed a substantial agreement with a new client that will last at least 12 and no more than 18 months starting in January 2025. When we account for that, and assuming no major incidents, my 2025 revenue projection is already in line with my new targets.
There is no certainty in the future; things can go south anytime. Still, I guess analysts at Moody's would look at those signs with a positive outlook.
From a business perspective, I am confident that things are heading in the right direction. It won't be easy and never will be, but it is within my reach.
3. Live a healthier life
Lastly, catering to my constitution ensures that the brain, body, and spirit are well cared for. This is a very personal space that, in my view, covers more than just physical exercise. Due to past underinvestments, I still have a long way to go in this area. That said, I'm also happy with the progress made in 2024.
I'll start with an interesting lagging indicator: I haven't had a single sick day during the often challenging fall and the beginning of the winter. Of course, I've had days with higher or lower energy and a few days when my Oura ring6 told me to take it easy because I had not recovered well from the previous day. This is not too bad, considering my immune system has been noticeably weaker than usual since the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Another interesting lagging indicator is that the same ring reported that my peak cardiovascular age was -2.5 years in September compared to my actual age. I'm not focusing on this indicator narrowly, as it's been quite volatile, but it's an interesting data point.
I take those lagging indicators as the results of a few initiatives I've taken: I spent the first half of the year training in martial arts, while in the second part of the year, I've invested a lot more in daily strenuous walks on the hills besides where I live. I've monitored my sleep time, aiming for an average of 7:30 per night, and practiced intermittent fasting most weekdays.
I plan to improve in this area in the upcoming months, and all these habits will be an integral part of my life. A strong foundation to build on top of.
I am delighted with how 2024 went, but I have only mentioned the key highlights. I didn't mention all the new relationships I've built or the ones I've been able to cultivate further, even though they played an instrumental role throughout the year. There is no space to get into such details.
One more thing deserves special mention: the new product I launched at the end of the summer. I initially named it Group Mentoring and Coaching Sessions—not very creative—and recently rebranded it into Sudo Make Me a CTO Community.
A word on the Sudo Make Me A CTO Community
Soft-launched in August 2024 for my Newsletter readers7 based on an intuition, the product went through various iterations of tools, schedules, and formats until it landed on its current incarnation.
Today, we are a small and cozy group of highly engaged and talented people. There are currently 10 paying members, two free members (more on this later), and two people who are supposed to join soon.
When put in these terms, it surely won't be a contender for the Best Business of 2024 prize.
But I'm taking a page from Company of One8 and other books and allowing myself to be patient. As I mentioned in a previous post9, the official launch in November, when I tried to scale up access to the membership, was not the success I'd hoped for.
I acknowledge that I have an Acquisition problem, but I'm not desperate because I know I do not have a Retention problem. In my professional experience, I've seen enough Leacky Buckets to recognize one when I see it. You know what I'm talking about: products that churn through users, whose growth is only artificially sustained by massive marketing budgets.
The community does not seem to be showing this problem, but let me explain why I believe that's the case.
Since starting in August, I've had three people leaving it.
One realized they would not have the required time to dedicate to it.
Another one left because they couldn't discuss confidential details about their company due to the presence of other employees.
The third one disappeared at the end of the first month and never replied to my emails since. Yes, apparently, there are still people who do that.
Except maybe for this third person, none left because they didn't find value in the product. Besides, current members are very active and engaged in every session. One has recently upgraded from a monthly to an annual plan.
Yes, I would love to see it grow faster, but I'd pick that problem 100 times over a retention problem. Not having a retention problem allows me to focus on incremental product improvements while experimenting with different acquisition strategies. For every new member who joins the group, I'll be able to dedicate more time to making it more valuable for everyone. I can see the compounding effects kicking in relatively soon, and I look forward to that.
If you're still wondering whether this is something you'd benefit from, head over to this page for more details, and don't forget that you have a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's worth noting that nobody has used this guarantee so far.
That said, showing the value is a thousand times more effective than telling about it. Show, don't tell, as the saying goes.
That's why, following the good experience in Q4, I will offer two free seats for the membership period February - April. The offer is open to anyone who wants to improve their engineering leadership skills.
The only limitation is that you should not be an already existing customer of mine.
Please complete this form by the end of this week, January 26th, so I can review the applications and grant the free seats ahead of the first February call.
I'm looking forward to welcoming these two new members soon!
That's a wrap for today, and I look forward to next week's article, where I'll share my 2025 plans. It's great to be back, despite all the crap around us. A great moment to remind ourselves of the serenity prayer:
O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.
Happy 2025 to everyone!
I copied the quote from this wired article. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leader-weidel-hitler-communist/ If you're still among that declining portion of the population who respects the views of people whose job is to study and research more than statements of random people with a truckload of conflict of interest on the topic, you could also read up on this article from DW: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-afd-head-called-hitler-communist-he-was-not/a-71274756
Here you can find the Oxfam articles sharing the results from the research: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-burn-through-their-entire-annual-carbon-limit-just-10-days
There is a reason why I'm sharing percentages and not absolute numbers. First of all, absolute numbers are very context-specific, and what I might consider "a lot" in one case would be regarded as peanuts in a different one. Speaking about percentages removes a lot of interpretations from it. Secondly, and more importantly, I'm still waiting for the official closing from my accountant. I don't want tax authorities on my back because I published a number slightly different from the one reported in my tax declaration. I consider this a basic financial discipline: don't share numbers until they have been validated by those whose job is to do that. Besides, the intent is to report progress, not to brag. That said, if I know you and you want to chat on the topic I'm happy to share more specific details. There are no secrets, just sensible data.
I wrote about Slow Productivity in this article. But you can skip the review and get your copy here, you'll thank me later.
You can find the Q3 update here:
I've been a happy user of Oura for the past 2,5 years. Use this referral link to get yours with a 10% discount.
This is the original announcement. Remember that the founder's plan sold out a while back, so you can no longer subscribe to it. Use the link shared in the article instead.
Thank you for taking the effort to write this detailed report. As someone who is at the very start of his solopreneaur journey, this is extremely helpful!
Good luck!