Happy 2024! It’s going to be an exciting year ahead 🥳

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Today, I’m sharing my entrepreneurial vision, strategy, and goals for 2024.

Before we dive in though, let me first recap my lessons learned from 2023:

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).

I left my full-time job managing a team of 10 PMs and started two businesses: 1/ fractional product leadership 2/ Money Abroad newsletter

My first year running my own show has been a rollercoaster ride.

Highlights

Lowlights

Lessons

Didn’t see my business annual review? Go here.

Looking ahead, here’s what I’m thinking about for 2024:

By the end of the year, I envision laying the foundations of a long-term portfolio of thriving businesses, including a B2B commercial service (new), product consulting, and Money Abroad as a media platform.

Drive 50% of revenue from non-consulting income streams.

Consulting and coaching can be rewarding and lucrative, but difficult to scale-up. Over the next 12 months, I aim to replace a portion of my service income through a combination of affiliates, courses, and business cashflow.

Acquire a B2B commercial service and build it to last forever.

Over the next 6-9 months, my wife and I are looking to buy a B2B service companies with solid customer satisfaction, but lacking operational or online marketing excellence in US states like Texas, Georgia, or Michigan. Examples of B2B services: financial services (accounting, tax), IT services, commercial cleaning, training, health and safety.

Why? In short, we believe there’s a lot of risk in starting new ventures. Execution risk, team risk, etc. As I mentioned in my 2023 review, it’s mentally grueling. Buying, then building, helps to mitigate risk substantially with the right business. We’ve done a fair bit of research and talked to a few industry folks. Now we need to test our hypothesis against the market. So if you have any leads, please email me. 🙏

Unlock more growth on a video-based platform like Youtube or Tiktok.

For Money Abroad, 2023 was all about writing. 2024 will be all about adding video to the mix. Fincon made it clear to me that video is the future for reaching my audience in the money niche. As I mentioned in my learnings last year, I strongly believe sharing my personal stories and “spiky point of view” will be critical to differentiate in the market. As much I love written content, video is a more powerful format for sharing these stories and perspectives.

Launch the Remote Side Hustle Profits course in the spring

After finishing the beta program, I look forward to launching the full course to a broader audience. I’m still debating whether to offer it as an evergreen course or as a cohort-based course once every 6 months. Right now, I’m leaning towards the latter to offer two plans: 1/ on-demand content only and 2/ on-demand content + peer-based cohorts.

Last year, I also thought a lot about how to design my value ladder. Creating courses will be a key first step to building out offerings for different tiers of customers.

🇰🇷 South Korea introduces a 2-year digital nomad visa. Yes, you can now finally gorge on bbq and hot pot, catch your favorite k-pop idols live, all while working remotely for over a year. Dreams do come true. (link)

📽 How to make 2024 the best year of your life yet. For the annual planning nerds, here’s three more planning & reflection exercises. Wheel of Life is one of my favorites (link)

🇸🇬 MoM releases the highest demanded jobs for 2024. You see the usual suspects like software developers and sales, but I noticed a couple roles that surprised me. Which ones surprise you? (link)

That’s all for today!

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

For daily insights, follow me on X (@dexteryz) or Linkedin.