Goodbye, 2021! What $83,333 Bought Me

Week 15 of Founding Typogram

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There is a lot more to say about what I have experienced in the passing year, but let me start by yelling: “what a year, 2021!”

I remember I welcomed this year’s arrival by making a CSS drawing of 2021 because CSS ICON was my favorite passion project. At the time, all I wanted to do was to do more passion projects and hope one day live off these passion projects. It was nothing but daydreaming at the time.

Codepen: https://codepen.io/wentin/pen/KKgoPez

Since then, I have taken a leap of faith toward that goal - I quit my job and started my company in August 2021, a decision that was questioned by my family and strangers on the Internet. I jokingly said that I bought a year of time for $200,000; with that math, I have spent $83,333 from the time I quit and now. What did $83,333 buy me exactly?

• Five months of free time to explore ideas

• Launched

  • Brand Workshop Kit, demo

  • Coding Font, demo

• Under development

  • Typogram, demo

• Wrote

  • 45 issues of newsletters

There were a few highlights that I am genuinely proud of:

• Made money selling Brand Workshop Kit on the second week after I started

  • You can read more in Made Money While I Slept

• Made the first business collaboration with another company Retool

  • How I created a coding font game with low code

• Get on the front page of Hacker News two days in a row

• Reached 22k total visitors on launch day for Coding Font 

However, I will be honest with you - I am a little disappointed with how I performed for the first five months of my entrepreneur career. I feel I don’t have complete control over my work ethic; now completely free from outside responsibilities and pressure, I tend to be lazy and find excuses for myself. The progress on the main Typogram app halted every now and then for different reasons or excuses, but all in all, mainly because I was technically challenged and feared that challenge. I constantly missed my sprint goals and rescheduled our weekly sprint meeting to make more progress to report and even failed to do so sometimes. 

When I asked myself earlier that if I were to spend $83,333 to buy the results that I got, would I be satisfied with the purchase, I hesitated. It pains me to say “No, it is not worth it,” as it would be regretting a decision I was and am truly proud of, but it equally pains me to say “Yes, totally worth it.” because I really wish I achieved more. 

There's no point in dwelling in the past. Looking forward, I have a roadmap for early 2022:

• Launch pre-order of Typogram in February 2022

• Launch beta version of Typogram to early customers in May 2022

I get excited thinking about achieving these two milestones and look forward to putting in the time and sweat to make this happen! 

I wish you a happy holiday and see you in 2022! Don’t forget - there will be a nice gift waiting for you in the first issue of 2022!