Here’s my reflections from Year 1 of my entrepreneurial journey.

Today, in 10 minutes or less, you'll learn:

• Highlights

• Lowlights

• Learnings

Subscribe | Coaching | Tax | Advertise

 2023 Business Annual Review

Every year, I write a personal Annual Review that I share with my inner circle.

For 2023, I’m experimenting with a business Annual Review, which covers my insights and learnings from my entrepreneurial journey. 🛣️ 

—

To start off, I wanted to share a bit about my career journey for readers who are new to Money Abroad.

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).

In January, I left my last full-time role managing a team of 10 PMs and for the first time in my life, embarked on an entrepreneurial path. I started two businesses: 1/ fractional product leadership and 2/ Money Abroad newsletter.

Why did I decide to go off the beaten path? That’s a story for another time (subscribe to hear more!). But in brief, I sought a new adventure. I saw problems I could solve.

My first year running my own show has been a rollercoaster ride. It’s been filled with chaos and unknowns. It’s been marked by exhilarating highs and frustrating lows. But I still feel happy and fulfilled by choosing this path, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thank you for reading and being on this journey with me. I look forward to sharing more of my learnings with you in 2024!

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.

This year, I’ve gone from avoiding the spotlight to getting decent at playing the distribution game. I’m not minting any book deals like Tim Ferriss yet. But I feel satisfied that I’ve given my best shot.

Linkedin was our primary growth channel, driving ~70% of our subscribers. I hit almost 7M impressions with 8 viral posts doing over 90k impressions each, including one that hit ~3M impressions. The rest of our subscribers came from from a mix of Twitter/Instagram, Twitter ads, and cross-promotions/recommendations.

Along the way, we crossed a few other milestones. We launched a Webflow website in August, growing organic search traffic 30%+ MoM. We were lucky to have also partnered with top brands like Fincon, MoneySmart.sg, Singapore Global Network, Stashaway, Kubera, Carry Finance, and Doola.

Nearly hit my revenue goal of US$10,000 in a month (across newsletter + consulting)

I wanted to celebrate my portfolio coming close to crossing the $10k milestone in my first year of business (even though consulting was the bulk of it). This doesn’t include investment income. Thanks consulting for paying the bills in 2023!

Monetized the newsletter with our first course beta program (38 paid students) + US Expat Tax Service (~5 referrals/mo)

In the last 6 months, we tested a number of monetization levers: sponsorships (needs bigger audience), affiliates (still early), events (hard to scale), career coaching (less demand), courses (working well) and a tax service (working well). This process was messy, and several experiments failed or will take months to ramp up.

But, the Remote Side Hustle Profits beta program (launched in November) surprised me by selling out 100% of our $74 seats in less than 1 week. The internet can sometimes be an incredible place. Now the pressure is on for us to deliver a phenomenal student experience.

The US Expat Tax Service (launched in October) has also seen a steady stream of referrals to our tax partners, despite being in a slow season. The real test will be if the referrals use the service during filing season in 2024.

Built a content engine that consistently delivered high-NPS content.

I’m proud of creating a system to ship useful content every week. We managed to publish 3x-5x Linkedin posts and a newsletter edition every week for the entire year—except for 1 week where I went hiking in Patagonia. It honestly took a lot of work. Setting up a Notion content workflow. Iterating constantly based on what readers said they wanted. But, it was worth it end the year with over 85% of newsletter ratings being 5-stars.

Lowlights