Rough Draft 2025
The Review of 2024, prepping for 2025
For this year’s Rough Draft I feel the call of brevity. It is, after all, February.
2024 was fantastic and busy.
I started a new job at a fast growing startup (we just announced our series B, woo!), flew all over the US and to Brazil twice for it. It continues to be wonderful and exhausting in the way you want something like that to be wonderful and exhausting.
At the start of 2024 I also launched Cubicle, a simple Pomodoro based task management app. That ended up finding 25ish users and paying for its own domain to live on for another few years… which is cool!
My Substack also grew. I posted 17 posts + essays here and passed 100 monthly readers early into 2024 (approaching 200 now). My personal favorite thing I shared here was either my essay Fasten Seat Belt While Seated about my final work trip at my previous company or Do I Dare Disturb The Universe? a very personal exploration of the past 10 years of creative work. The most popular post of the year (and of all time for me) was I’ve built a city, now it needs residents about my project Greenwich. That one is my first piece of writing to be read by tens of thousands of people rather than hundreds.
Speaking of Greenwich… that was a super fun project from the year. It was purely an experiment that grew from a burst of manic weekend creativity. Allowing space for stuff like Greenwich is super important to me. It’s nice when these experiments come somewhat fully formed, with a strong aesthetic and functional concept. The project got a lot of love online which is always encouraging.
Printernet also continued humming along in 2024. By April, we’d surpassed the total revenue Printernet had accumulated ever in just those four short months. This was wild and inspiring for me. Later in the year, I got the chance to parter with Sublime and launch Woah through Metalabel, featuring interviews from brilliant people like Anjan Katta (Daylight Computer) and Melanie Masarin (Ghia). That sold out immediately and ended up doubling the total issues I’ve shipped since starting Printernet. It was delightful collaborating with Sari, Alex, and Gabe over at Sublime and reaching a few new countries we hadn’t shipped to along the way.
I also moved to a beautiful new home, witnessed a total solar eclipse, turned 28, visited Mexico + Mexico City for the first time, celebrated my first anniversary since Tessa and I got married, met my new Nephew for the first time, saw Dr. Dog at Red Rocks, visited my brother in law and sister in law’s gorgeous home in the Washington woods for the first time, got to go back to our family’s annual beach trip for the first time in 10 years, hosted the Austin HTML Day meetup, got a new pup named Alfred, and more. It was truly a wonderful year.
For 2025…
I am focusing on a single project at the moment that I am not quite ready to share more about. But it was the answer to one of my New Year’s questions: “What’s one thing I’ve always said I wanted to achieve but haven’t started (or finished) yet?” This sort of singular focus is a way of working I’ve been feeling pulled to for a while and one Tim Ferriss endorsed when I asked him how he juggles multiple interests so effectively at SXSW 2023. This project, if executed well, will run up to May / June. I feel patient and calm about it.
I have a similar idea for the second half of the year - focusing on a singular project that also satisfies that same New Year’s question above… but I am deliberately keeping the vision for that fuzzy for now.
For the especially curious, there are clues to both of these projects over at my personal site.
Other things I want to do this year:
Continue to travel and visit family (this is an emerging source of joy for Tessa and me and I’d like it to continue). I am heading to São Paulo soon and will also likely have a mid-year international trip with Tessa if things go our way.
Keep meeting and talking to interesting people making cool things. I’ve already had one fantastic conversation that was recorded and should be available soon. More of that and sharing “Season One” of my podcast is something I’d like 2025 to involve.
At work I’ve transitioned to a leadership role on the management side of things and look forward to learning tons around this. It’s already proving to be fascinating and full of new challenges and games. By the way, if you have a go to resource for lessons / ideas around effective leadership (particularly in a Startup context) I’d love to check them out.
Turning 29… it’s a cliche to be swept up in the surreal nature of time passing but I do feel this way at the idea of entering my final year of this decade.
Continue writing here and over on my site. Writing publicly continues to be my longest running project and one I plan to work on for my entire life.
More updates soon, as always, thanks for reading! If you want to help directly support my writing you can subscribe here.
Wishing you a wonderful year!
Jake