2025: The year I reinvented myself

Iterations

I have been a certain way for as long as I remember (maybe on a 3 year horizon). A purist of a kind, a self-proclaimed perfectionist. 2025 threw me into such chaos that I had to look into myself deeper than I've ever had to.

I realised that the perfectionism and quality that I admire in my idols isn't a result of some internal drive. It's just pure iterations. The first Logan Paul video wasn't as entertaining, the first Apple product wasn't perfect, the first design of Linear wasn't this intuitive. They got there by pure iterations.

In my pursuit of these perfect things I had become so bottlenecked that I almost had 0 iteration speed. I wouldn't do things until I know the output would match an intense level of scrutiny.

I have now learned that I need to build a muscle for things I want to get good at. For that you must go through the process again and again until it becomes so simple that the challenge of leveling up is something you automatically take over.

Advice

I stopped taking raw advice and started thinking for myself. I used to take everything people said to me as advice that's tuned to what I needed. Looking back, it was naive to think that people knew enough about my situation that they could give the correct advice or that they knew enough about the subject matter in order to even know what the right advice was.

Oddly, in the pursuit I also seem to have encountered a few snake oil salesmen. I'm much happier now that I take someone's advice as their experience which is a mere data point in my decision making weighted by their relevance to me and the subject matter.

Startups

I took a step back from active startup involvement this year. Post the closure of Mars in April by an acquihire, which went terribly for what it's worth, I decided to not jump onto anything and rather just take life a week at a time. Working on projects that interest me in the moment and taking time to learn some theory around it.

The way I used to learn as a kid was trying, learning theory, building depth and then spreading wide. I think I'm in the building depth phase. Learning how software companies are built. Luckily I now possess power that lets me build any software I want within minutes.

I can't begin to tell you how much I have accelerated with Claude Code and how the bottleneck between me thinking of an idea and it being implemented will almost be next to none.

This now gives me the opportunity to concentrate more on the next aspect, which is distribution. I have lacked on this part massively and this is my active area of improvement. I think I got lucky with the dynamics of Mars that we couldn't accommodate more than 3-4 companies in a batch & hence never really understood how limited I am here. Distributing software I make and making money with it will be at the top of my 2026 calendar.

Picking a niche

I have had a flip of opinion on this topic. Oddly by looking at Dwarkesh's podcast, Linear & Greptile. All of these are purpose built things that I use. All of them give me an incredible experience. All of them teach me and I should pick a niche and serve it to great lengths.

There's very little point being generic in the domains that I want to conquer. There is a motion going around that niche experiences will not be a thing post AI software becomes prolific, but I don't believe that majority of humankind knows what they exactly want. It's my job as a builder to extract it from them and do the hard work of shaping it. They pay me for this work, not the final output.

For example, if you look at a tool like Linear, you'd imagine that it isn't the toughest thing to build. Although, had I asked you to make Linear without ever looking or experiencing Linear, would you be able to? Probably not. That's why we pay them, not for the software itself but rather to make the great choices that they do.

I'm actively looking for a niche to serve, I haven't found one yet, although it's only a matter of time before I get there.

Closing

If I'm being vulnerable for a moment, I did not expect 2025 to go this way. I thought I'd be accelerating faster than anything into building a new kind of computer. Although with the benefit of hindsight, I think it went exactly how it should have gone. If it had gone the route I wanted, I'd probably have had a harder fall. So I'm in a better position now.