Year half empty, or year half full?
As we're passing this year's turning point, I'm back with the regular quarterly update on how my solo business journey is progressing. Not to forget the next installment of the Summer Promo!
Welcome to the second article in the Sudo Make Me a CTO Community Summer Promo.
With Summer here, it's a good time to take a step back, reflect on your current situation, and make deliberate investments in your personal and professional future. It's a great time to explore new avenues, discover new interests, and educate yourself on topics that interest and are relevant to you.
During 4 weeks, I'll share discount codes and special offers for joining the community. We're not in week 2 of the promo.
This is a reminder of the sequence of discounts:
π Week 1:50% discount for the first 12 months.Closed last weekπ Week 2 (today): 40% discount for the first 12 months π
π Week 3: 30% discount for the first 6 months
π Week 4: 20% discount for the first 6 months
Each coupon will be redeemable 5 times before it expires.
π€― The 5 seats for Week 1 sold out in less than 12 hours.
Do not miss this second opportunity to join us at a special price!
Read through the article to find this week's code and the link to join us at a special rate before it's sold out!
πͺWhat Happened in Q2
As I do every quarter, today I'm taking a break from writing about the specifics of engineering leadership and taking a look at how the solopreneurship journey is going.
It's been 1,5 years since I started this journey. I've committed since the beginning to building in public and letting other people learn from my successes and mistakes.
As usual, after a retrospective on the quarter that just closed, I'll share some details about what's next.
B2B reconfiguration
There have been some important changes on the B2B front in Q2. While the collaboration with Subito is progressing steadily, I decided to stop my engagement as Fractional CTO for Volumio shortly after launching the first version of the Coord app. I won't go into the reasons for that decision, as that would be very unprofessional here, but I can share that it had a short-term impact on my projected revenues for the quarter.
But that's the only bad news here, and some good news is worth sharing.
In May, I started a new role as Advisor for a company in the online marketplace space, whose name I'll disclose further down the road as we're still formalising some details. I've also landed an interesting one-off project to do a full assessment of a Product and Tech organization for an exciting and promising scale-up, which will keep me busy most of the summer.
With this setup, 2025 looks solid on the B2B side, which will leave me a lot more mental space to focus on developing the other business lines.
CTOBox approaching release
I had originally planned to launch CTOBox publicly before the end of Q2. I missed that target for two main reasons:
I've been quite busy on other fronts, especially B2B.
The Career Architect functionality proved more complex than I originally anticipated.
The first one is simply good news.
I have had weeks in which I couldn't make any progress on the code. From the narrow perspective of the joy of coding and seeing CTOBox progress, that sucks. But from the broader perspective of building a business, that means prioritizing what matters first.
I am deliberately taking a Slow Productivity approach in building this product, as it's something I'm building for the long term.
For those familiar with the 3 horizons model from McKinsey1, CTOBox clearly belongs to Horizon 3.
Putting my current business lines on those three horizons, this is how I see them:
Horizon 1 - B2B Consulting and Advisory: Consulting, Due Diligence, Fractional CTO roles, etc
Horizon 2 - B2C Coaching: Individual coaching and the Sudo Make Me a CTO Community
Horizon 3 - CTOBox
Using that approach, it makes a ton of sense to spend a limited portion of my time in Horizon 3, while most of it still goes on Horizon 1.
On the fact that the Career Architect module is proving more complex than I originally envisioned, that's due to a combination of factors: I wanted to nail the UI, which took me a lot of time.
Furthermore, as I progressed with the implementation, I discovered elements that should be included. I'm constantly fighting to keep the initial scope as small as possible while ensuring I can help leaders deal with defining and operationalizing career ladders in their teams.
The good news is that I'm making constant progress.
While it's still in private beta, I regularly open it up for users who signed up for the waitlist. For more details on how to sign up, check out this article.
Summer Promo Boosting the Community
I have shared in the past how I was finding it challenging to grow the community. Despite the great level of satisfaction and engagement with existing members, finding new ones proved to be difficult.
In full honesty, marketing and selling are the activities I'm the weakest at, and despite telling myself I should do more of them, I always come up with creative ways to procrastinate. That's what we call productive procrastination, and to some extent, CTOBox was born out of that, before it became something more serious.
I have been suffering from this issue most of Q2, until literally last week, when I decided to launch the Summer Promo I mentioned in the intro.
The results of the first week blew me away.
The 5 seats I put up with a 50% discount over 12 months were sold out in less than 12 hours. Unfortunately, Stripe doesn't have statistics about how many more times people try to use an expired coupon code, but I can only suppose a few more people tried to benefit from that offer.
With today's article, I'm opening up week 2 of the promo, and I'm genuinely curious to see what the reaction will be.
This has been an interesting learning on how to get more people onboard. In the long term, I don't want to dilute the value of the community too aggressively, but I realise I need to do more tests for price sensitivity in this relatively early stage.
Stay tuned for the Q3 update in which I'll break down the results of the full 4-week promo period.
Revenues Breakdown
Those with good memory and attention to detail might remember that last year, about 94% of my revenues came from B2B engagements (Fractional CTO, Consulting, etc.). You might also remember that my goal this year is to increase the share of B2C revenues to gradually reduce the dependency on billable hours and shift more towards a recurring model.
The breakdown for Q2 is in line with what we saw in Q1. Overall revenues ended up slightly short of the forecast due to the decision to stop one of the ongoing B2B collaborations early in the quarter. That bump led to missing the target by about 3%. Nothing too worrying at this stage, considering the recovery towards the end of the quarter.
The overall breakdown for Q2 and H1 respectively, look like this:
B2B Consulting and Advisory: Q2: 90,73% - H1: 90,02%
Individual Coaching: Q2: 5,27% - H1: 4,75%
Community: Q2: 3,45% - H1: 4,20%
Other (Newsletter Sponsorship): Q2: 1,02% - H1: 0,55%
Compared to Q1, there has been a slight decline in the share of revenues coming from B2C, but the overall is still in line with the target of 10% for the full year.
π§ Looking Forward
π Grow the Community Further
Pumped with the results of the first week of the Summer Promo, and thanks to the stabilized situation on the B2B front, I want to invest a lot of my mental energy and creativity in finding more effective ways to grow the community. The main levers I want to pull on are:
Do more promotions like the summer promo to help people get a foot in the door
Keep improving the content and quality of the sessions. We have one on Team Topologies coming up soon that I'm really excited about.
Help more people discover it. I might be doing one or more live sessions towards the end of Q3, and test other ways of getting people a taste of what they're missing out.
I promise by the end of Q3, I will have some solid updates on this front.
π€ Look for a long-term B2B contract for 2026
As we're getting into the second half of the year, I'll be looking into finding a stable B2B commitment for all of 2026, similarly to the collaboration with Subito during this year. Such "long" contracts provide stability and allow me to focus my energy on developing and growing the Horizon 2 and 3 initiatives, rather than being stressed about short-term financials.
I don't expect to have this nailed down in Q3, but I'll explore options as a way to move into Q4 with some discussions already ongoing.
π CTOBox official launch
Unless something major happens on Horizon 1 and 2, I'm highly confident that CTOBox will go live with a public release during Q3. Besides finishing the work on Career Architect, I'll need to nail a few more details around pricing and payments, improving the landing page, etc.
I'm curious about how this will go as it'll be the first time I build and launch a complete product from scratch in solo mode. I do expect a lot of learning and surprises, and hopefully some encouraging early results.
Don't forget to sign up for the waitlist if you're interested in trying it out before it goes live.
π‘ Explore the idea of bundling products
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and with the launch of CTOBox, I'm planning to explore the idea of bundling products. Nothing groundbreaking, which is also why I think it's a good idea to try it out: it's a proven strategy to sell more while offering discounts on individual prices. Win-win. So, besides being able to subscribe to CTOBox and the Community separately, or having monthly 1-to-1 coaching and mentoring sessions, I might be offering the following bundles:
Sudo Make Me a CTO Community + CTOBox joint subscription
Sudo Make Me a CTO Community + Monthly 1-to-1 coaching session subscription
Sudo Make Me a CTO Community + CTOBox + Monthly 1-to-1 coaching session subscription
You get the drill.
As this is an idea I want to explore, I'm very interested in hearing from you, dear readers, on whether you'd be interested in any of the above, considering that they'll all come with a meaningful discount over purchasing each service separately.
Please share your thoughts in the comments section or reply to this email.
Thanks in advance!
π Travel for 2 months
Last but not least, by the time this article goes live, I will already be on the road with the family. We're taking off with our motorhome for about 2 months of travel. I'll be working most of July, doing my unsexy version of digital nomadism: no tropical beaches, no expensive flights, no cocktails besides laptop pictures, while I'll be off most of August.
I'll still be attending and moderating community calls during those weeks off, but I'm not sure yet whether I'll be publishing weekly articles here or not. Expect the frequency to be less regular, though, as I'm leaning towards taking a break from online life as much as possible.
Summer Promo - Week 2 Discount Code
If you missed your opportunity to snatch a great deal last week, this is your second chance.
Here is this week's code to join us at a special price.
Using the code SUMMER4012 you'll benefit from a 40% discount over the first 12 months, or click on the link below to have it automatically applied to your checkout.
The standard 30-day money-back guarantee applies.
Don't forget: there are only 5 seats available at this price, and the coupon will only be valid for one week.
Last week's seats sold out in less than 12 hours!
Don't miss this opportunity to join a community of talented and thoughtful engineering leaders to accelerate your personal development.
To find out more about the community and the promo, visit the official Notion page where you'll find all the details.
I'm looking forward to getting to know you in person very soon!
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If you want to read more on the 3 horizons model, check out this article, which is where I've taken the screenshot from.
Thanks for the update, Sergio!
P.S. The title "Year half empty, or year half full?" is great β I couldn't resist commenting. I have a thing for good titles and playing with words.