In 2018 I finally developed a healthy productivity habit and began to find the motivation to become more open on the web - starting a blog, a newsletter and to try simple ideas like Checkmates without the fear of failure. This theme carried over into 2019 in a big way for me, leading to easily the most productive year of my life.
2019 – A look back
My main goals for 2019 were to work out my personal mission and to launch a product and ideally be earning enough recurring revenue to live on. While the money bit didn’t happen, the launching definitely did!
At the beginning of the year, I was searching for my mission in life - and in April, I found it when I woke up to the climate emergency. That led to a desire to use my skill set to help. I decided to try and motivate the tech community to raise awareness and take action. In the space of 6 months, I launched Impact Makers, ClimateChoice, The Climate Fixathon (and blog interview series) and AirCare. I also ran my own events in Belfast - The Climate Breakdown Brainstorm and Indie Hackers Belfast and spoke at IndieHackers Cologne to pitch an idea I was pursuing at the time.
Getting Burnt out
The result of all this productivity was burning out. I had launched too many things and found it hard to focus. Strangely I also felt a bit demoralised despite having successfully grown the Impact Makers community to 700+ members and created an online hackathon that resulted in the launch of 41 climate tech projects.
Around the same time in September, the business I co-founded and worked on for the past 3 years closed, and I was left without a steady income. Thankfully having been in this situation before with Rumble Labs, I’d learnt my lesson and built a savings fund. That meant I had a financial cushion, enough to buy me time so I could circle back and focus on my main goal for the year - launching my first solo startup business.
Thankfully I had already discovered a problem I was hoping to explore. It came from starting Impact Makers, and noticing how hard it is to keep a Slack community engaged.
Getting Lowdown
When asked by a developer I’ve worked with for years (Phil McClure) if I had any product ideas, I was able to answer an emphatic yes. Phil immediately saw the problem and felt the solution could also work for Slack teams. So we started on the journey of building Lowdown – a tool that turns the best content shared in Slack into a newsletter. Within a couple of months, we had a beta out and began testing with our first users.
Phil and I are aligned in our business sensibilities, particularly around the desire to bootstrap. However, the timing of our beta launch was perfectly in-sync with application deadlines for a couple of local Northern Irish tech grants. We felt we had a strong business idea and decided to apply. I’m delighted to say we were successful and received the Techstart Proof of Concept Plus grant and were also selected as one of 21 companies out of 400 for the Propel pre-accelerator which starts in January. The end of our year has been spent on further Lowdown testing, getting ready to launch our paid plans and preparing for a busy first half of 2020 in Propel.
2020 — The path ahead
2020 is all about focus. Primarily that means a focus on working out how to build a successful business with Lowdown. I’ll be doing this in the open and plan to blog weekly about our journey throughout the Propel accelerator from early January until the end of June.
Unfortunately, this means my climate-related projects will be taking a bit of a backseat for now. Sometimes I feel conflicted about this, but unfortunately at this time, I have to place my own financial survival first, and Lowdown feels like the right idea to follow to achieve this.
To be honest I’m feeling pretty bleak about the direction of our planet and humanity these days. We’re only just beginning to see the effects of rising temperatures, and it’s frightening the complete lack of necessary action by the people running countries around the globe. I think this might be causing me to lose hope a bit with a natural instinct for my own survival coming to the forefront. However, I’m confident my efforts to help with the climate emergency are not over, and I’d still like to help however I can.
Hope for the future
The one real bright spark I see in the world today is in the younger generations who want to save the world and aren’t afraid to do something about. Hopefully, the 2020s will be remembered as the decade our young people came of age, took control, and helped save the planet from devastation. If enough of us wake up and take action, there is still hope.
Other highlights from 2019
Moved from Germany 🇩🇪 > Japan 🇯🇵 > Northern Ireland 🇮🇪🇬🇧
Recorded my first podcast interview
Became a top writer on Medium for Climate Change
Participated in the Global Climate Strike in Tokyo
Launched NI Design Chat - A Slack community of 180+ designers in Northern Ireland
I quit landscape photography in 2018 but I’ve started rediscovering my love for it
