What an exciting year 2024 was!
I’ll highlight some important points.
VC done wrong
The year 2024 started on a high note when, together with Simon we raised ~ 100k USD of VC money to bring the future of EV truck charging. It was an idea that we worked on for a couple of months at that point in the whole Antler program. It looked very promising too as we had 3 Letters of Intent from companies that wanted to give it a go with us.
However, through the couple of months that followed, we couldn’t manage to get any customers onboarded, and the day-to-day turned into a cold-calling struggle. Neither of us two co-founders was enjoying that part, and we had no good fit background either.
In the end, we decided to fold down the company (a pretty lengthy process) and return around half of the investment to the investor.
It was an amazing experience. Intense and uncomfortable at times, but I learned so so much and stretched my comfort zone a to,n too. And that is not only true for non-technical parts. One highlight was a trip to Germany to learn more about OCPI protocol that governs EV charging, where we were able to basically build a prototype while testing on real chargers within a day!
Web Plugins treasure
The development of our web plugins is hands down the biggest win of the year that changed my life and the direction of Beaver Codes as a whole.
At the start of the year, the flagship Wix app – Google Reviews was at the nice side income that needed small maintenance. I was not ready for the magic of SaaS compounding. I did some modelling to try to predict how that revenue would evolve, but I was not sure if my math was mathing until I saw it.
At this point, the income from the 7 published plugins across different platforms (although, let’s be real it is mostly Wix) is enough that I am considering hiring a person to the team.
I was also able to build a much more versatile version of the plugins and learn a ton about how those systems can work and inject into existing websites and platforms. I have some exciting things to experiment in 2025 for sure.
As a cherry on top, I was invited to my favourite podcast as a guest to talk about all of it.
Software is not enough
During the summer, I got more into Hardware. I refreshed some dormant skill sets and gained many new ones.
I’ve built AI powered camera that reads numbers, EV chargebox (quite simplified) and many more simple home automation experiments (which makes our home life measurably worse by complicating easy tasks 🙂 ).
As part of the journey, I became a friend with a 3D printer. More an acquaintance than a friend, I guess. I learned a ton about milk farming automation for some reason.
No business outcome of this, though … yet.
Take down those trees
One last thing that significantly changed my life and business is treework. I got into tree climbing as a hobby this summer and it turns out to be exactly as much fun as it looks like.
So, after a lot of time and money invested, I did what every sensible person does to destroy their hobbies. I turned it into business and started tree service 🙂 I’ve been subcontracting as a tree climber for a more established company at least once a week and did some own gigs, too.
In November, I also got a proper certification, which feels like an important step.
For 2025 my biggest ambition is to actually marry software with the tree climbing in some way, which is very exciting. Let’s see how that turns out.