2021 Year-End Review

As we approach a new year, I love taking this time to give a "State of the Vargas address" in the form of a year-end review. In the previous iterations, I would break it down by categories discussing how I was feeling for each, such as Hobbies, Career, Social, etc. For better or worse 2021 was dominated by a focus on my career. So instead of going by category, I'm going to detail a more chronological telling of my year.

Previous year end reviews:

• 2020

Reflecting on 2021

I gave myself a deadline. December 1st, 2021 would be judgment day - the day to decide if my venture into trying to become a full-time open-source indie hacker was sustainable enough to keep going or if it was time to search for a job again. I had somewhat loose criteria on which factors would influence which direction I would go, but my general sentiment was that if I still felt growth then the decision would be to keep going.

I almost gave up in January. Just one month into the new year.

I consider myself a pretty confident person, but the confidence that I would "make it" as an indie hacker hit an all-time low. I began to feel silly that most of the work that I was known for was on the back of somebody else's product. I started to ask myself why was I making my life so difficult when I could easily just get a 6-figure tech job. I hated the fact that I couldn't afford my own Lasik surgery or car, and that my mom had to cover the former and I had to beg so that she would allow me to take a loan on the latter. What a waste an MIT education is if after three years I still can't provide for myself.

Getting COVID and isolating myself with these thoughts for two weeks certainly didn't help.

There were two things I kept telling myself that helped me turn a corner:

• Everything you're feeling right now is expected

• You promised yourself to keep going until December no matter what

So we pushed forward. By March, I released my first couple of SaaS services on RoamJS. By April, I finally made enough to start paying back my mentor on our Income Share Agreement. By June, I felt confident enough about making money on my own that I no longer needed to receive checks from my investor.

People frequently ask "how is work going" and the question feels impossible to answer. There are some metrics that I look at like MRR, which currently only sits at $929/month, and I think we are WAY behind where we need to be. But there are others I look at like how RoamJS sees about 5000 downloads/day, 464 users signed up, and 903 emails subscribed to the digest, and I feel encouraged about where we're heading.

But most importantly, I'm enjoying the autonomy. I'm enjoying interacting directly with users. I value that my work is all open source and available for anybody who would want to work with me to see. So on net, I still feel like I'm growing enough to keep going.

I've referenced this startup curve several times, because it feels so accurate. I've overlaid approximate dates along the curve for my journey so far.

Reviewing 2021 Goals

I set a few goals in the beginning of each year so that I could look back on them at the end to see how we did. The exercise also informs what changed in my mindset, particularly for goals I missed.

Reach $10K MRR ❌

As I mentioned, monthly recurring revenue is sub $1K. But I'm also starting to reconsider my mindset around MRR. Especially since in December I made close to $10K and on the year I made more than my total projection.

MRR is typically the holy grail of SaaS products and indie hackers. There's an implicit assumption that users are actually using your product for the month that they pay for. What you don't realize until you start building is that an uncomfortable percentage of that MRR is what I've seen called "Phantom Revenue" - people who pay but don't use the product. It's scary thinking that at any moment, an expired credit card or budget audit could then lead to a decrease of revenue.

This was not why I left my job. Another way to think about full time employment is having a single customer pay $10K MRR for my engineering services. I left this arrangement because I felt I was not putting out my best work and I felt a detachment from users. So, looking ahead to 2022, I'm looking to start migrating my business model to be around "pay per use" or "pay per transaction", similar to how AWS and most of web3 operate.

Release 3 Web Apps ✅

It depends on how we define "web app" and "release". RoamJS has 2 paid extensions, which I have for the sake of this goal considered as separate web apps. Then I've also been working on WorkInPublic, which though I haven't formally launched anywhere, I've started to share progress with users.

I think the spirit behind this goal was for me to start diversifying from Roam. Currently the projects I'm working on include:

• RoamJS - Focused on

  • Discourse Graph Extension

  • Static Site Extension

  • Multiplayer Extension

  • Smart Assistant Extension

• An ISA Platform

• Creator Cabins

• WorkInPublic

• A Play to Earn Game

Based on the current state of my workload, I'd say we are successfully on our way towards diversifying the web application portfolio.

Grow Userbase to 10K ❌

This is another goal that was poorly defined. What counts as a user? There are people that are signed up on RoamJS but don't use extensions. There are people using extensions that are not signed up on RoamJS. This question gets even more difficult to answer once I start adding in more web applications.

However I choose to define it, I could confidently say I did not meet this number. But I am humbled by the number of people I have interacted with. The number of personal messages I have received from people sending their thanks fired me up during my January lull enough to keep going. Besides, as I move what I build towards more of a pay-per-use model, whatever future financial goal I set will be an appropriate proxy for a User goal.

Maintain 15% Body Fat ✅

I've been able to work out 5-6 times/week for over 2 years now. I want to start being more intentional with something that I'm spending this much time on. So, I first decided that body fat would be this metric.

I had a scale that would report that I was consistently in the ~20% ballpark, which led me to eating a lot less and constantly being hungry. Then, I found a body fat reader that said I was actually 14% and I needed to eat more, at which point I threw my hands up and said "fuck this" to the body fat goal.

There is one reason why I work out and it is to feel good during the day. So I think I need a better goal to reflect this motivation.

Visit 15 New Cities ✅

I spent at least one night in the following cities:

1. Stanleytown, VA

2. Little Rock, AK

3. Austin, TX

4. New Orleans, LA

5. Breckenridge, CO

6. Denver, CO

7. Salt Lake City, UT

8. Palm Springs, CA

9. Las Vegas, NV

10. St. George, UT

11. Lincoln, NE

12. Chicago, IL

13. Washington DC

14. Myrtle Beach, SC

15. Redington, FL

17 months in and I still love digital nomading. I moved my legal residence to Florida to avoid paying NY state tax and on a prediction that it will be my home state when I finally decide to settle down. But for now, I'm ready to start going international in 2022 🎉.

Publish 60 Articles ❌

This year end review will be the 10th.

Engineering work started to really pick up with clients around April. At the same time, I started to become really comfortable with the idea that I'm not trying to grow an audience through writing, but rather it's meant to supplement the actual craft I'm trying to grow an audience with which is engineering. That means it's not as important to keep a consistent writing schedule, but rather to publish articles when the moment and motivation call for it.

Regardless, I would like to start doing far better than 10. I've come to terms with the fact that effectively communicating what I work on is as or more important than what I'm building. To be an effective engineer is to be able to communicate to users, peers, and investors what I'm building and why it matters. Setting a goal around the number of articles to publish each year is a great way of practicing this skill.

Take More Initiative with Friends & Family ❌

I like to make my last yearly goal more abstract and judge reflectively. In this case, I failed. I thought work would be able to stabilize enough for me to feel comfortable prioritizing others before myself in social settings, but in reality, uncertainty just grew every month.

I did start dating again which I did not expect to do until 2023. I'm really happy I did. Daysi has been really supportive of what I'm trying to do with my career and has also been a great person to talk to when there has been a lot of uncertainty. I hope that I could eventually return the favor.

I've accepted that relationships are just something that will suffer for now until I feel the same way I did in college. When I was in school, I felt certainty around what I was working towards and how much was needed to get there, allowing for more free time to invest in relationships around me. I feel a lot closer to this point after 1 year but am prepared for the possibility of it taking another 4 or 5 based on what I read about other people's journeys. What motivates me through it all is the possibility of being able to eventually only work 15-20 hours per week, on work that is impactful, and being able to spend the rest of that time with my future kids.

Goals for 2022

Now, for the seven goals I'm setting for myself in 2022.

Make $145000 in Revenue

As I mentioned earlier, MRR has become an antiquated metric in my head to optimize, and instead, I only care about increasing revenue. I want to make $1 Million by 2024, and I made $54,646.72 in 2021. So I used an exponential model of y = ab^t to calculate what I should make the next two years to get to that point:

• At t = 0, y = 54646.72, therefore a = 54646.72

• At t = 3, y = 1000000, therefore b = 2.623522

• At t=1, y = 143459.66, so I rounded up to $145K

Emotionally, this feels like an appropriate target to strive for since I would be making around that much this year had I stayed at Mark43. So it will feel great to reach feature parity in this respect.

Launch 3 Products

I'm going to rigorously define launch here as having at least 1 user signed up and use the product. Product will also be defined as something that is in its own URL and not a part of RoamJS/WorkInPublic. There are already three products that are in progress that I referenced above that could help me hit this goal this year.

Twitch Stream for 720 Hours

I released an article last year about launching a Twitch channel where I would literally work in public. I'm in a unique position to do so since all of the source code I work on is open source anyway, and my hypothesis is that it would be a great way to engage with potential users and collaborators.

Doing so consistently while nomading proved to be challenging, but not insurmountable. But I let road blocks like not having a dedicated desk or not having a second screen get in the way of pursuing this more actively.

So this year, I want to put in the reps to consistently Twitch stream for a year and see what happens. I expect there to be a huge potential for serendipitous encounters as well as potential additional income streams.

720 hours is streaming 3 hours/day, 5 days/week, for 48 weeks in the year. I feel that if I just get to that number, I'll learn a ton about how to make an actually engaging development channel.

Live in 10 Countries

We usually spend 4 weeks in each of our digital nomading destination. In 2021, they were all in the U.S., due to COVID regulations and being a part of a bigger crew. Now that it's just Daysi and I, we have more flexibility to go international and I'm excited to do so.

Living in 10 countries means we can have at most 2 months next year spend in the U.S. Our first stop is Mexico City on January 7th, followed by Antigua, Guatemala on February 5th!

Publish 24 Blog Posts

60 may have been ambitious last year, but when I started writing online, I was pumping out 2 per week. Now with increased responsibilities and a refined focus, shooting for 2 per month I think will be a enough to practice the skill while still prioritizing engineering.

Lift 245lbs. and 8 miles in an hour

Since body fat was impossible to measure, going to strive for more active goals. I want to hit lifting 245 pounds in the bench press, deadlift, and squat, while being able to reach 8 miles during my Saturday 1 hour runs. Reaching these metrics serve as a proxy for actually going to the gym every weekday.

Eliminate remaining uncertainty about indie hacking indefinitely

When I started, I cautiously planned to only try to work in this way for a single gap year. Now that I'm 17 months in, I could see the path that will allow me to do this indefinitely.

But there is still a lot of uncertainty about getting there. Is this the best way for me to impact as many users as possible? Could I find ways to fund long-term projects today consistently? Am I still enjoying this way of working? This uncertainty caused me to set a new deadline to reevaluate. The goal is that by the end of 2022, I will feel confident that there will never be another deadline again.

Happy New Year everyone!