Today marks the last day of 2024 making it a perfect moment to reflect and share my learnings. You’ve probably been following my weekly newsletter and might have read all 52 articles I’ve published this year. Yet, there is much more happening behind the scenes that I don’t often write about.
I love sharing meta topics, but this blog is solely focused on Swift, SwiftUI, and app development. Therefore, I don’t often find a way to tell you about the business learnings, progress as an indie, or other meta-related learnings. It was extra special to give my “From Side Project to Going Indie” talk at several conferences because it was a way for me to share all the meta-learnings I’ve had. Let’s dive into an overview of 2024 lessons learned & achievements, followed by looking ahead for 2025.
Achievements
Going Indie
The most significant achievement of the year must have been going full indie. I wrote a dedicated article on this subject: Going Indie: From Side Project to Going Independent. In short, I decided to leave WeTransfer after 7.5 years to fully focus on SwiftLee & RocketSim.
I had too much untapped potential and a high enough income to take the leap. Time flies and while I tapped into many opportunities, it feels like only more have appeared. It’s been the best decision of the year so far, and I feel more energized than ever. I must admit: it helps that WeTransfer got acquired later in the year, resulting in laying off 75% of my old colleagues. I was able to leave on my own terms and have a nice farewell party: something many of my friends at WeTranfer didn’t get. Super sad to see the company transitioning like this, but it made me feel extra confident that my decision was the right one (without knowing what was coming!).
Altogether, Monthly Recurring Revenue doubled since, and I no longer have to work in the evenings to grow my side projects. Going indie also allowed me to embrace new opportunities that I couldn’t wait to get started.
Launching my first course
I’ve been thinking about launching my first course for a long time, but doing it on the side next to all the other things I did was simply impossible. I knew it would take time to get into the habit of creating videos, let alone setting up a home studio.
To make it efficient, I decided to start with an evergreen course that I could record without much researching. This resulted in launching www.going-indie.com and a course called “From Side Project to Going Indie”.
While I want to launch coding courses, I knew that I would probably have to update these every year. Since I was new to creating courses, I wanted to make sure I didn’t have to recreate it another time since I wouldn’t be happy with the initial quality. However, the Going Indie course turned out to be of high-quality from the get-go since I could benefit from my experience as an audio producer and video editor. I’ve created videos for volunteering projects in the past and I used to be a techno producer from 2009-2014 (yes, really, haha!).
I truly launched this course to help others grow. A coding course would’ve made me more money as an indie developer since employers would pay for their employees to follow it. Funny, if you think about it, if an employer would pay for a course to go indie, they would basically pay to help their employees leave the company (oops). Yet, it made close to 25K in revenue since its launch in September and sales are still flowing. Pretty great result for a first course launch!
Launching my first podcast
Besides a course, I also dreamed of creating a podcast. I’m quite an easy talker, so I knew that starting an interview and flowing a podcast would be something I could enjoy. After doing two guest lectures for the course at a podcast studio in Amsterdam, I felt like it was worth converting it into an official podcast.
This resulted in a podcast named “Going Indie with Antoine van der Lee”. I started it with the mindset that if it fails to be successful, it would at least not be because of not doing enough to make it work. Therefore, it’s recorded in person in Amsterdam at 4K quality. The in-person conversations result in a more natural recording, both a video and an audio recording. Therefore, you can see all conversations on YouTube and get to know the creators better. For example, here’s the first episode with Jordi Bruin:
Starting a joined venture
The final achievement I want to mention is the start of a new venture with two of my good friends. They’re both from my hometown village, so it felt like a great opportunity to work together. Ralph is focused on sales, and Niek is a frontend engineer. Together, we launched RNA Venture to take RocketSim for Teams to the next level.
Expect more future updates around RocketSim for Teams, but here is a quick announcement: you can now order Team Licenses here.
Lessons learned
It’s not all about achievements! Lessons learned help us grow and sharing these with you might help you grow.
Going indie makes it harder to prioritize
The biggest surprise after going indie is that it’s harder to prioritize. I expected to have enough time for pretty much everything, resulting in not really needing prioritization at all. The opposite is true: since you have time to do everything, you can basically do everything!
I truly had to revisit my fundamentals and refocus on what matters most. This is a great segue into another lesson learned.
Focus is the key to success
Prioritizing creates focus. Back in the days when SwiftLee was still a side project, I found myself creating a structured planning and goals for each quarter. Q2 of 2024 was the first quarter in years I didn’t do this. Yes, exactly aligned with the start of my indie journey.
Q3 was already better, but Q4 was a major improvement over both quarters. I’ve gained growed like never before and feel more achieved due to the overview of achievements I’ve managed to create with a dedicated planning.
Focus is key, so make sure you focus on what matters most for growing your side business towards reaching your goals.
It’s not the number of email subscribers that counts
On that journey, I’ve had to decide to leave behind a self-hosted Sendy newsletter provider and migrate my newsletter to Kit. After reaching 20K subscribers, I ran into delivery issues and spam complaints. It turns out that I never cleaned up my list of subscribers, which became apparent after migrating to Kit.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is a professional email provider with many tools and insights. I learned about cold subscribers and how to manage an email list in a way that’s sustainable. Cleaning cold & inactive subscribers combined with enabling double opt-in resulted in an email list with fewer but higher engaged subscribers.
I always felt that I needed to grow towards the biggest list possible for my sponsors, but in fact, they benefit more from a smaller but higher quality list of subscribers. I lost about 1500 subscribers just by cleaning up the list for the first time in nearly 4 years. However, I’m already back at 19,100 subscribers and feel better about my email tooling than ever.
Looking ahead into 2025
After lessons learned and achievements, it’s time to look ahead into my planning for 2025. While it’s not set in stone, these are the topics I’m considering to focus on for the next year.
RocketSim for Teams
As mentioned, I started a new venture with two of my friends. We’re not aiming to hire engineers and grow in such a direction, but we will focus on serving teams better and increasing their productivity. RocketSim 13.0 will launch in January (sneak preview here), and the team’s dashboard will receive several new features over the next quarter based on user feedback.
Coding Courses
You might have seen this one coming. I’m aiming to launch my first course in Q1 of 2025. I’m not entirely sure about the topic yet, but I know it won’t be a video course only. I’ve spoken to many engineers at conferences and asked them how they prefer to learn. Based on that, I’ve come up with a format that serves learning with both text & video while also allowing me to keep courses up to date without re-recording all videos. Stay tuned, and if you don’t want to miss out, subscribe to my newsletter.
Workshops
If you’ve followed my Going Indie course, you know I love creating win-win combinations. The course I’m about to create will also set me up for giving workshops. From all my plans, this format is most uncertain, but I’m thinking about either or both giving workshops online or at companies in-house. The latter would be most fun, I love in-person workshops, but it’s also the one that influences my last goal the most in a negative manner.
Family time
One of the reasons for me to go indie has been to have more time with my family. This partly succeeded already, but I’m aiming to have even more time with my family in 2025. I became a dad of my second son in March this year, so spending time with my wife and two sons is a major goal and something I’d love to improve.
Conclusion
Thanks a lot for your support in 2024. While I didn’t mention this explicitly, I’ll obviously continue to publish weekly articles for free in 2025 as well. I can’t wait to help you grow as an engineer even more next year, and look forward to meeting you at several conferences (maybe this one?).
Have a great 2025!