Annual Review 2025

As was the case in 2023, I’m back in Yunnan writing the annual review. This time sitting in Matchbox coffee shop in Shaxi, the sky is pure blue and the farmers fields below are a dusty yellow. My fingers are freezing as I type but the pain is negated by the joy of wearing a sweater.

Life and Work

In just 12 months the world of building software feels so different.

Better LLMs and workflows (Cursor + Claude code) have further folded design, product, and engineering. The biggest gains I have experienced are in high-enough fidelity prototyping and shipping quality of life and polish improvements.

For example, in the current sprint (2 week period) I shipped 17 PRs ranging from translation support to fixing sticky hover on touch devices. All of these things would have been done at some point, but when? Likely 2-4 weeks later as engineers focus on implementing bigger features.

With the continuing trend toward lower cost of building software, the art and science of identifying the right thing to build (and then building it right) becomes paramount. Designers and product-minded people should relish this shift as a moment of liberation.

At Jenni our MRR has plateaued at $600k MRR (down 5% from 2024). Despite product improving (as measured by reducing churn and increasing depth of subscriber usage), we’ve struggled to find scalable top of the funnel channels.

On a more positive note, good strategic acquisitions have helped grow Jenni Group revenues to ~$10m ARR, you can now track performance on a monthly basis here.

At Jenni we ran 59 product experiments (averaging 2.6 per sprint) as per PostHog data and completed 1,156 issues as per Linear data.

One of our core bets over 2025 was to expand our B2B revenues. As the common knowledge goes, selling to education institutions is slow work. We closed ~10 deals and have ongoing trials with multiple institutions. Despite the underperformance from a revenue perspective, we have a robust motion in place ready to scale the channel in 2026.

As a manager two categories I’m trying to improve upon are instilling a culture of:

  1. Containing chaos and closing loops
  2. Avoiding waste

Containing chaos. As our surface area grows (product complexity, number of team members) there needs to be a resolving loop where divergent experimental work that creates good chaos is resolved into order. Some examples are bets that have been running for months without conclusions or features under feature flags with 10% rollout for multiple months. As is natural across an organization, the ideator oftentimes doesn’t implement the solution, however, the ideator should include a plan for next steps should the idea be supported or refuted. We termed this principle ‘own the full loop’.

Avoiding waste. In order to move fast most team members at Jenni have the ability to make purchases. However, the mindset of driving for the lowest pricing and removing cost when it no longer serves a strategic goal doesn’t always come naturally. To avoid waste and unnecessary spending everyone has to feel like they’re spending their own money. In a startup, any cost that doesn’t serve to differentiate the product/ service has to be reduced. Thus far, I’ve been reviewing spending reports with David and scrutinising higher ticket items, a better outcome would be to achieve a culture whereby individuals strive to reduce waste.

Other updates

I had the chance to speak at Antler/ Stripe’s AI in Singapore event and was featured in Stripe’s APAC event. The kinda things that feel cool but probably don’t merit the time or anxiety spent preparing.

A goal I listed in 2024 was to keep making small software and utilities for myself and friends. Sticky is on the App Store with a handful of users and I built Nibble for Anna who wanted to introduce some friction when itching to play games (Colonist) instead of working.

Since early December I’ve started and committed to weekly guitar lessons with my awesome teacher Bogdan from Moldova. Being forced to focus on details such as timing and playing each note correctly as per the sheet music completely changes the rate of progress compared to loosely playing whatever I want.

Taking hobbies seriously feels like a high ROI strategy. As Schopenhauer proclaimed, “we are destined to oscilate between states of anxiety and boredom”. In my experience, the only escape hatch appears to be meaningful hobbies. The Romans seemed to get it right with their concept of Otium.

In June we moved into a new apartment. The first time committing to our own space and not short term or co-living set ups. The quality of life improvement is huge. In my 2023 review I noted living situation as a source of discontent, investing in a space and designing it has been worth every dollar.

Health and Fitness

I tried strict keto for 6 weeks with the aim of reducing inflammation and joint pain. The result was no effect. The positive outcome is that it forced me to get into the habit of cooking, which I’ve been able to stick to.

My 2024 goal was to hit 110kg squat again, I achieved this in March whilst in Japan. Shortly after, I was mindlessly warming up on 40kg and a disc or something in my lower back alone in a random Japanese gym I lay unable to move on the floor whilst profusely sweating. After this fun episode I decided to forget any weight-related goals and just freestyle workouts depending on how I felt on any given day.

Since then mostly my fitness has been maintenance, 8/10 efforts, meh.

Since October I started doing 1 ice bath and 5 sauna sessions per week. I’m still unsure if there are any physical benefits (research is inconclusive) but there is a certainly cognitive benefits with improved focus and possibly sleep.

  1. Lifting (~100 sessions)
  2. Bouldering (approx 7 sessions)
  3. Swimming (approx 30 swims)
  4. Long distance cycles (2 rides)
  5. Tennis (approx 15 matches)

Cycling adventures:

  1. 799km from Osaka to Fukuoka with Marius. The longest ride we’ve done to date over the course of 7 days.
  2. 100km from Seoul to Yeoju with David and Brian from the Jenni team. This was a super fun, impromptu ride whilst working from the Korea office.
  3. 70km Montes de Málaga loop with Anna, which she detested me for both on the brutal 1,200m climb and arguably more on the precarious decent.
  4. 160km Bergamo to Lake Iseo loop with Marius and Anna. Very chilled ride, amazing scenery and ample cappucino’s.
  5. The annual Cotswolds loop with Dan, finished with a pie and a pint.

Places I visited

I spent almost 3 months of the year in Japan, primarily in Osaka. Osaka isn’t the prettiest city in Japan but buying an old Bridgestone city bike and getting to know the locals in the Sumiyoshitaisha area we stayed was unforgettable.

  1. Japan
  2. Vietnam
  3. China
  4. Italy
  5. Spain
  6. UK
  7. South Korea
  8. Hong Kong

What were my highlights?

  • Cycling from Osaka to Fukuoka
  • Jenni team retreats in Japan and Vietnam
  • Cooking Christmas dinner from scratch with friends
  • Relaxing in this onsen in Shirahama
  • Watching Leeds beat Wolves 3-1

Reading

I’ve doubled down on history the past few months. Since a child I’ve always been fascinated by history, for some time I tended toward psychology, economics, or design – likely through a false premise that such books would be ‘more useful’.

Recently I’m enthused by history again. I struggled through a few books and assumed my attention span had deteriorated into play-doh but after starting the When Money Dies which documented the collapse of Weimar Germany post-WW1 I couldn’t put it down.

I’ve come to believe that an understanding of history is essential to avoid being buffeted around by seemingly novel current events.

Whilst in Japan I read 2 Japanese novels: Kokoro and No Longer Human. Both books have a deep sadness and central characters suffering inner turmoil that appears to reflect parts of Japanese culture, at least from my outside perspective.

Completed

  1. Why Information Grows by César Hidalgo
  2. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire by Eugene Rogan
  3. The Master and Margherita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  5. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki
  6. The Science of Managing our Digital Stuff by Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker
  7. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
  8. When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

From the list my favourites are When Money Dies and The Master and Margherita.

In progress

  1. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  2. Competitive Advantage by Michael E. Porter

Did not finish

  1. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  2. Apple in China by Patrick McGee

I desperately want to finish The Brothers Karamazov but it is so long winded and heavy going.

As for Apple in China, the writing standard is so poor compared to everything else I’ve read I had to give up at the halfway point.

Up next

The next books are going to be marathons. Gulp.

  1. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
  2. Deng Xiaoping and The Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel
  3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez – second attempt to read after enjoying Master and Margherita so much
  4. The British are Coming by Rick Atkinson

Review of 2025’s intentions

  1. Continue to write blogs posts
    • I managed 11 posts including this annual review which is acceptable. I have 8 more stubs in Obsidian that need to be polished. A huge point of tension has been resisting the urge to use an LLM to clean up posts. I’ll often have the seed of an idea and paint splat it into Obsidian in bullet point form. I know an LLM can take this and turn it into prose but after doing it a few times I realise how pointless the whole thing is. My goal of writing is to process my own ideas and force clarity, both of these things are bypassed when using an LLM.
  2. Take more street photography
    • Somewhat successful. I shot a lot in Japan and Europe and kept the Fuji in my backpack.
  3. Continue building software for myself/ friends
  4. 140kg deadlift and 110kg squat
    • Squat goal was hit but deadlift PB capped out at 130kg. I give up with these type of goals from now on.

2026 Intentions

Last year I switched from goals to intentions, of the opinion that bottom-up behavioural changes compound to sustainably better results. Maybe I’d be better served with a mammoth unrealisable goal as per Nietzsche’s recommendations, but until I have one, here goes:

  1. Continue with weekly guitar lessons, supported by at least 1 hour of independent practice per week
  2. Continue writing, same cadence as last year, roughly 12 posts
  3. More reading in down time and less YouTube/ Twitter