Founder’s Newsletter no. 11) End of year reflections 🎄✨

Dec 29, 2023

It's always healthy to do some reflecting to help with personal and professional growth. For someone like me who's bad a giving themselves credit, I think it's especially helpful to reflect on the past year. It helps me remember how far I've come, even if I'm not done or at the point where I want to be yet. And it's just important to check-in with yourself once in a while, to keep a good mental health.

For me the year started with being accepted in Tech Nordic Advocates’ Women in Tech international mentoring programme. During the first half of the year I got to focus on creating a solid business plan, and really making sure I have the necessary knowledge to start a company.

In the beginning I did look for co-founders, without finding the right match. The knowledge I felt I didn’t have enough of at the time, I feel I have gained during the TNA programme and through building the software myself. That’s why I’ve stopped looking for co-founders. At this time, it feels like adding a co-founder would only be to please potential investors, so they can feel like their investment is “safer”, and not because it feels right for me and the company. When other people can successfully be solo entrepreneurs, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same? I have spent +8 years alone as a freelancer anyway.

After that, I’ve focused on building the first version of my software. At first I tried to build everything in no-code, but quickly realized that what I want, is technical complex and some parts of it simply can’t be done with no-code. So I decided to learn how to code. I’ve previously learned front-end coding, so I didn’t start from scratch. When I look at what I have created so far, I feel super proud of it. It’s not done, I still have about 5 elements that needs to be coded. Some of them is simple and some more complex. Since I’m not an experienced software developer it’s difficult to say how long it’s going to take. I was hoping it would be done in the fall/winter, but what I want is too complex and too many elements has to be coded for that to be realistic. So now I’m hoping it can be done in Q1 (maybe it’ll be Q2 if I encounter too many technical challenges, or if I have too much freelance work to do).

Besides learning new things and building new skills, I feel like this year for me personally has been about growth and about taking a break. After spending years as a freelancer within performing arts, everything suddenly changed with Covid and all the lockdowns. Getting work before that was easy enough. But the rules of the game has changed. That’s why I decided to switch direction and focus on building my own company, instead of just sitting still and waiting for people to need me again. So this year I’ve done a lot of work on my mental health, to make sure that I’m moving in the right direction. And creating this company feels right to me. Making decisions about how I want to live my life, and taking action to move in that direction feels great. Creating a company is not an easy task, and I know how hard I’ll have to work, especially once I register and launch the company. I feel like this year has been about preparing myself for that and setting up the best conditions for myself to handle that.

A part of that has been forcing myself to not work during Christmas. And I haven’t done any coding for a week even though I wanted to. I've also found it super difficult to not think about ideas and strategies during that time. Turning my brain off is simply not possible.

To end on a fun? note, here’s a short personal Q&A if that’s your thing:

Most important lesson learned this year:

Just get started even if it's imperfect and scary. There's never going to be a perfect time to start.

Most important improvement for the future:

I'm too nice and helpful, which makes me terrible at negotiating and setting fair boundaries with people. Therefore I've set up a fixed structure for my freelance work, which should help. (www.formta.com/freelance)