My 2019 Goals

For the last couple of years I’ve done a post the weekend after Thanksgiving to outline for goals for the coming year.

Last year I went pretty big with my goals, a la Grant Cardone and the 10X Rule. But this isn’t a recap post, so I’m not quite ready to talk about how this year has played out in regard to the goals I had published a year ago.

What I am here to get out of my head and into the world is what I am hoping to accomplish in 2019.

Even though it’s pretty one sided and there’s no real accountability through the year, I do find that putting the keyboard to vim and openly publishing my goals does give me a bit more motivation. If nothing else, I don’t want to be one of those types that says they are going to do shit and never does.

To steal something from my buddy Will a/k/a Team Health & Team Wealth, my goals for this coming year are going to revolve solely around those two categories.

Pretty sure it’s been established in the past that I am in fact a Capitalist Pig, more so after taking a year off from a paycheck to focus on another startup.

Money doesn’t grow on trees and the war chest isn’t going to refill itself.

During that stint, I also came to realize how much of a toll wandering around aimlessly on a product was taking on me mentally but also how much of a negative impact my previous employer had on me.

Things are a fuck ton better now, but doubling down on what’s working and cutting what isn’t is going to be a recurring theme moving forward.

Life’s too short to spend even a second on things that aren’t working.

Before I jump into the mountain I have planned for myself to climb in 2019 I do want to mention that I avoid setting goals like “eat better” or anything somewhat subjective.

If you can’t track it, you can’t measure it, and it’s pretty much worthless if you want to ensure that you’re actually moving the needle in the right direction.

Team Health

It’s a marathon, not a sprint as they say. I tend to sprint a lot more than I should but as of late have been embracing sleep over caffeine and really leaning into short bursts of focused effort.

I’m fortunate to be self-aware of my own mental health and hope to improve both mentally and physically in 2019.

Daily Workouts

Last year I started doing the 7 Minute Workout to help with my fitness goal of doing more body weight exercise.. It’s an absolute pain to work out every single day, but that pain came with a by-product of being in significantly better shape.

Instead of getting a gym membership or anything like that, I plan to continue the daily routine but expand into doing different, and longer, workouts while introducing weights to help things along.

Unlike last year where I was tracking how many repetitions I was doing per month, I’m moving to a more boolean metric, did I work out today or not?

This may seem somewhat subjective and sure I could punk out and justify taking a brief walk as a workout, but that’s not how I roll. Since I am planning to continue to use the 7 Minute Workout app (maybe even upgrading to the paid version after all this time ;) there’s a level of honesty that will come into play.

Release Some Music on Spotify

Spoiler alert to last year’s goals, but as it stands right now, I’ve yet to formally release any music in the digital age outside of my noise releases on various netlabels back in the day.

I know this may not seem like a health related goal, but taking some time to be creative is as about as healthy and therapeutic as can be.

Bit of a scale back here, I’m not looking to release an LP or even an EP next year, I just want to get a single song completed, mixed, mastered and released on Spotify.

Work Free Weekends

Over the past few months I’ve been getting better at just hanging up everything work-related (job, side shit, blog, et cetera) for the entirety of Saturday and most of the day on Sunday.

This has been extremely hard because I feel like my time to be productive is already severely limited.

These limits also help me manage my time better. Less fucking around on the Internet, less drinking during the week and such. Just focusing on getting shit done so that I can actually enjoy the down time.

There are 52 full weekends in 2019. 104 days that I want to cut out of my working schedule. 2496 hours to spend more time with the family and recharge.

Hell, I may even try to catch up on all those games I’ve bought during Steam sales and from Humble Bundle!

Team Wealth

In the past I’ve shied away from posting anything meaningful in regard to my side hustle / business goals. This was mostly because I’m always a bit apprehensive about sharing my personal successes.

When it comes to having side income, bringing it up tends to change the tone of things with the people you’re with. I’m not ashamed that I have built some nice little side hustles, but I am definitely not a fan of listening to people say things like “it’s not like I have extra money like you do”.

I try to keep it private outside of my close friends, but this year I did venture into putting one of my side projects up on Indie Hackers and while weird at first, it’s been a positive experience.

Always nice when you start being flooded with acquisition offers, lol.

Blog to 50k MAU

This was not only one of my secret business goals from last year, it’s also been something that I’ve gotten super fucking close to accomplishing but as of late have been falling short.

This one’s pretty simple, I want to get this blog to over 50,000 monthly active users, up from ~40,000.

HolidayAPI to $5k MRR

Aside from my blog, HolidayAPI is my side hustle bae. This is also the project I mentioned exposing financials for over on Indie Hackers.

Going from open source project to premium API was a tough decision but well worth it. I’m not much of a sales person, but I sold those early customers and still do a decent amount of inbound sales for the platform.

Unfortunately, Indie Hackers only shows monthly revenue, not normalized monthly recurring revenue. Currently that’s sitting around $1,000 and I want to push things up to $5,000 per month.

At present, even growing by 10% per month would mean falling short by over $1,800 by year end. I like a good challenge though, like they say:

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

Launch Something New

Even though I got a pretty full plate for 2019, especially with growing existing projects while cutting more time out of my week, I do want to get something new out there.

Coming off of my last startup experience, I’m ready for a new win, even if it’s just a little one.

And who the hell knows, maybe that next thing will be the thing that finally takes me to Y Combinator!

Here’s to 2019, a month early :)