2025 has arrived!

2025 - the end of the first quarter of the 21st century is here! 2024 has flown past in what felt like record time (as is typical as we age) but in most respects it has been a pretty good year.

January - March

The year got off to a slow start with the typical Kiwi beach holidays through January while I plugged away trying to get On-Call Optimizer into the hands of those waiting for it.

Growing frustration with my pace of development (in Go) drove me to restart the project from scratch using Rails in February. My intent was to use more of the framework supports to increase my development velocity, allowing me to focus time on sales and marketing as planned.

On-Call Optimizer launched (quietly) in early March and got off to a promising start with some word-of-mouth referrals resulting in new leads to pursue.

April - June

In April, we enjoyed a two-week family trip to Japan, including a visit to Suzuka to watch the F1 Grand Prix and time in Kyoto, Hakone and Tokyo.

Two large organisations (who would become the first paying customers) began trialling On-Call Optimizer. As I got back up to speed with Rails, my development velocity improved (although still not as much as hoped), while a steady stream of bug reports and “feature” requests for basic things it felt like I should have anticipated continued to consume the majority of my time.

My bankrupt local ski field had a terrible snow season. The several hundred dollar season pass I purchased after my “life” pass was dishonoured only got used for one mediocre day of snowboarding.

Benjamin joined the local running club for their runs every Saturday afternoon, resulting in plenty of friendly ribbing in my direction from other club members every week regarding why I wasn’t running too.

July - September

Just in time for the end of the running club’s season I finally succumbed to the pressure (and also a need to increase my weekly exercise duration beyond what my patience with a rowing machine could endure) and started running myself.

Surprisingly, as I’ve always thought running was boring and I wouldn’t enjoy it, this has turned out to be a really enjoyable new hobby - re-evaluating such long-held beliefs every now and again can be worthwhile! You can find me on Strava if you too participate in the mutual back slapping it encourages.

On-Call Optimizer product development and marketing progressed slowly while the majority of my time was consumed slogging through the enterprise purchasing processes required to get contracts landed with the two major customers whose trials were coming to an end. This included learning all about SOC2 and its requirements and some initial (later aborted) attempts to prepare for an audit on the cheap via TrustCloud’s free plan.

October - December

In November, we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary with a long weekend away without the kids (the Japan holiday earlier in the year having also been a whole-family celebratory treat). It was interesting to reflect both on how much 20 years has held and how quickly it’s flown by. I’m grateful for all of it and to Kat for being the best partner to experience it with - here’s to 20+ more!

I finally felt like On-Call Optimizer was in reasonable enough shape that starting to promote and market it more widely was only mildly embarassing. I spent significantly more time on cold-outreach than previously in the year, but still much less than I need to be doing.

Signed contracts and dollars in the bank from the two large customers finally landed and I bit the bullet and committed a chunky investment of cash towards a SOC2 prep consultant and Vanta subscription as it became clear that effectively selling into the types of customers the product most appeals to is almost impossible without these baselines in place.

As the year rounded out Micah finished his time at intermediate school (year 8) and Benjamin completed his primary years (year 6). Next year we’ll have 3 boys at 3 different schools for the first time. Seeing them each continue to thrive and develop their unique personalities and interests brings me joy and provided a very welcome distraction around this point as my unease about how little progress it felt like I’d made over the year grew.

Fitness wise, I managed several 10km runs as well a 16km “crazy-8” loop around the Maungatautari and Pukeatua peaks near home with a friend in early December.

Scoring

I gave myself 3 goals for 2024.

Launch On-Call Optimizer (scheduling) and develop a mature, sustainable sales pipeline that delivers growing revenue and happy customers

Score: 4/10

On-Call Optimizer launched and is serving ~70 users (from just a handful of paying customers) with the ARR sitting around $20k (USD).

While revenue has grown, given the low customer numbers it’s obvious that the sales pipeline is neither mature or sustainable. Contrary to the stated goal, the majority of my time in the year went towards development, not sales and marketing.

On the plus side, the customers are happy and I feel like I’m doing a relatively good job of prioritising what to develop (and what not to) even if the overall time allocation is still skewed in the wrong direction.

Consistently invest in the development and maintenance of my professional network

Score: 2/10

This has been my major miss of the year - while On-Call Optimizer’s score is not great, it at least represents (albeit slower than wanted) progress in the right direction. On this goal, I feel completely stalled.

I keep finding myself in a frustrating cycle where dissatisfaction with my rate of progress and the resulting feelings of failure discourage me from undertaking any of these externally oriented actions, despite knowing that I need to be investing time here to drive the success I’m expecting to see.

The end result is close to zero published writing, and very spotty maintenance of contact with most of my professional network. In turn the overall hesitation to promote myself externally is also holding back the most obvious sales and marketing angle I could pursue for On-Call Optimizer - building my personal brand as an expert in the space.

Exercise at least three times a week and maintain a healthy diet and weight

Score: 10/10

I haven’t actually rigorously counted the 3 times a week bit, but it will be close. More importantly, I feel as fit as I’ve ever been (with metrics to match) and my weight has remained around the level I got to after losing a bunch of weight last year.

My new running habit is a significant contributor to this, but continuing to minimise how much (tasty) bread, other carbohydrates and sugar I include in my diet (lunch salads in particular are a great way to do this) is also playing its part.

2025 Goals

Despite the sobering scores, and my lingering unease that I should be progressing more swiftly, I’m satisifed that the overall direction is correct. So for 2025 I’m sticking with broadly similar goals, with the aim of building on the momentum I do have while giving myself the opportunity to also try a few new approaches to unstick the areas where I’m struggling.

Grow On-Call Optimizer’s revenue to at least $250k ARR (USD) using a sustainable sales and marketing strategy.
Subdue my inhibitions and build a public profile as a trusted participant in the SRE, DevOps and/or Incident Response communities.
Run a 25km (half marathon) race.

I’ll try my best to write and share further details on each of these as the year progresses, and as always, if you have thoughts or feedback I’d love to hear them.