Happy 2024! It’s going to be an exciting year ahead 🥳
Today, in 10 minutes or less, you'll learn:
- 2023 Recap
- 2024 Vision
- Strategy
- Goals
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🗺️ 2024 Business Looking Ahead
Today, I’m sharing my entrepreneurial vision, strategy, and goals for 2024.
Before we dive in though, let me first recap my lessons learned from 2023:
🪞2023 Recap
For the past 10 years, I’ve been building and growing products across Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Southeast Asia. I’ve worked as a product leader and PM for public companies (Dropbox) and growth-stage startups (Xendit, Creativelive).
I left my full-time job managing a team of 10 PMs and started two businesses: 1/ fractional product leadership 2/ Money Abroad newsletter
My first year running my own show has been a rollercoaster ride.
Highlights
- Grew from 0 to over 5,000 newsletter subscribers, 5x’ed my Linkedin followers, launched our Webflow website, and been featured by global brands.
- Nearly hit my revenue goal of US$10,000 in a month (across newsletter + consulting).
- Monetized the newsletter with our first course beta program (38 paid students) + US Expat Tax Service (~5 referrals/mo).
- Built a content engine that consistently delivered high-NPS content.
Lowlights
- Fell short of our newsletter growth goal of 10,000 subscribers.
- Didn’t crack the code (yet) for some of the other monetization experiments.
Lessons
- Building an (online) business is a mentally grueling marathon. You must stay laser focused, lean into what energizes you, and find your tribe.
- Consulting and coaching are challenging to scale-up.
- Differentiate in the market by sharing personal stories and a “spiky point of view.”
- Build a value ladder or different tiers of products for different customers.
Didn’t see my business annual review? Go here.
Looking ahead, here’s what I’m thinking about for 2024:
🔮 2024 Vision
By the end of the year, I envision laying the foundations of a long-term portfolio of thriving businesses, including a B2B commercial service (new), product consulting, and Money Abroad as a media platform.
♟️Strategy
Drive 50% of revenue from non-consulting income streams.
Consulting and coaching can be rewarding and lucrative, but difficult to scale-up. Over the next 12 months, I aim to replace a portion of my service income through a combination of affiliates, courses, and business cashflow.
🎯 Goals
Acquire a B2B commercial service and build it to last forever.
Over the next 6-9 months, my wife and I are looking to buy a B2B service companies with solid customer satisfaction, but lacking operational or online marketing excellence in US states like Texas, Georgia, or Michigan. Examples of B2B services: financial services (accounting, tax), IT services, commercial cleaning, training, health and safety.
Why? In short, we believe there’s a lot of risk in starting new ventures. Execution risk, team risk, etc. As I mentioned in my 2023 review, it’s mentally grueling. Buying, then building, helps to mitigate risk substantially with the right business. We’ve done a fair bit of research and talked to a few industry folks. Now we need to test our hypothesis against the market. So if you have any leads, please email me. 🙏
Unlock more growth on a video-based platform like Youtube or Tiktok.
For Money Abroad, 2023 was all about writing. 2024 will be all about adding video to the mix. Fincon made it clear to me that video is the future for reaching my audience in the money niche. As I mentioned in my learnings last year, I strongly believe sharing my personal stories and “spiky point of view” will be critical to differentiate in the market. As much I love written content, video is a more powerful format for sharing these stories and perspectives.
Launch the Remote Side Hustle Profits course in the spring
After finishing the beta program, I look forward to launching the full course to a broader audience. I’m still debating whether to offer it as an evergreen course or as a cohort-based course once every 6 months. Right now, I’m leaning towards the latter to offer two plans: 1/ on-demand content only and 2/ on-demand content + peer-based cohorts.
Last year, I also thought a lot about how to design my value ladder. Creating courses will be a key first step to building out offerings for different tiers of customers.
🌐 Beyond your borders
🇰🇷 South Korea introduces a 2-year digital nomad visa. Yes, you can now finally gorge on bbq and hot pot, catch your favorite k-pop idols live, all while working remotely for over a year. Dreams do come true. (link)
📽️ How to make 2024 the best year of your life yet. For the annual planning nerds, here’s three more planning & reflection exercises. Wheel of Life is one of my favorites (link)
🇸🇬 MoM releases the highest demanded jobs for 2024. You see the usual suspects like software developers and sales, but I noticed a couple roles that surprised me. Which ones surprise you? (link)
