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A Look Back at 2022 and Goals for 2023

Zilvinas Kucinskas

Published Jan 2nd, 2023

It was a big year for my career in 2022! Here are some of the highlights:

In April, I reduced my freelancing from 5 to 2 days a week and made the switch to full-time indie hacking in September. You can read more about the decision in this Twitter thread.
I grew my business, ExportData, significantly, with a 90% increase in revenue, 3x growth in traffic, and a jump in domain rating from 21 to 33.
Every feature I built for ExportData was requested by a customer at some point, which was a great validation of my product development process.
Had plenty of time to work with Hotwire ⚡️.
I launched my personal website - ziku.dev, and hired my first Ruby on Rails intern in December.

In 2022, I made some great progress in my personal and fitness goals:

I managed to stay smoke-free all year, which was a big accomplishment for me. 🚭
I finished InvisAlign treatment and finally got my perfect smile.
I spent the year between 12%-17% body fat, with the help of Eric Helms’s book, The Muscle & Strength Pyramid. I also tracked my food intake with MyFitnessPal for about 4 months, which helped me get into the best shape of my life.

While there were many successes in 2022, I also had some setbacks:

I was rejected from the TinySeed Europe program and the AWS Lofts Startup accelerator.
My investments in cryptocurrency didn’t go as planned, and I lost 90%+ of my portfolio. While it was a financial setback, I learned a valuable lesson to focus on areas where I have much more expertise, such as Ruby on Rails, SaaS, SEO, and software engineering.
I didn’t succeed in launching another SaaS product, but I am still in progress on this goal.

As I look ahead to 2023, I have set some ambitious goals for myself:

Reach $20k MRR across my businesses.
Build a larger Twitter audience - my goal is to grow my account to 2k followers. I want to try syndicating larger posts to LinkedIn.
Write quarterly goals and keep myself accountable.
Launch another SaaS product. Currently in progress. 🚧
Launch my first info product. (Small bet)
Incorporate consulting services to my personal website.
Write 4 tech blog posts.
Attend Railsconf and/or The Rails SaaS Conference.

Follow a schedule of two cycles of 4 months of gaining followed by 1 month of cutting, with the goal of adding 8kg of mass while maintaining less than 15% body fat.
Improve my exercise routine. I have a set of 12.5kg, 15kg, 17.5kg, and 20kg dumbbells at home, but I may need to incorporate the gym on Saturdays to target certain muscle groups.
Have my 2nd burn at Burning Man if everything goes according to the plan.

Thanks for reading! It would mean a lot if you shared this post with others!