Me and Piyush started working on Curated Connections in 2023 with Piyush working full-time and me doing part-time. We shipped our MVP and got our first few paying customers that year. 2024 was the year when I joined him full-time.

We went from 1 tool to 4 tools + 1 in Alpha, 8x'ed our revenue and collected a bunch of nice testimonials from strangers using our product. But we haven't hit ramen profitability yet.

So, as we get into 2025 I wanted to count our wins and measure our losses before setting a direction for the year.

Wins

Here are some of our small and big wins in a roughly chronogical order:

1. We got a ton of inbound leads this year. In fact, 90% of our leads are inbound - divided roughly equally between people discovering us on Google and people discovering us through word of mouth.

2. Conversations with Nate Ritter were amazing. I found my first startup mentor and each call felt like I unlocked new key strategy to boost the business. From rebranding Beginner Maps to an email course to simple things like adding a "Book a demo" button on the website header - Nate gave me some really effective advice. Thanks Nate!

3. Talking of Beginner Maps (the marketing arm of our business), we extracted lessons from our podcast, turned it into an email course and rebuilt the website to talk about those lessons instead of the podcast.

Best insight ever! People loved it, sent thank you messages for the lessons and we collected many more emails with this.

Most importantly - I'm now confident that we created something people love. ✅

4. We quietly released an annual plan and got four subscriptions for it!

5. Multiple people told us that they were frustrated with our competitors - primarily Intros and Orbit - and that Curated Connections was not just a less expensive product but also a more robust product.

6. We created alternative comparison pages for our VC-funded B2B competitors and those have became a major discovery point of our product. At this point, it has become normal but April 2024 was the first month we saw a complete stranger go through the flow of discovering us through Google → free trial → hitting paywall → become a customer.

7. A Youtuber created a freaking video walkthrough of our product! Complete stranger who posted a video on her channel to tell her audience of community builders about us. Thank you Carmen!

8. We onboarded Health Tech Nerds as a customer - which was a massive win. This is the biggest community that we have, serving more than 5000 members. It is safe to say that at this point, Abbey, the COO, knows more about the ins and outs of CC than we do simply because she has stress tested every nook and cranny of our product.

9. We got accepted into the Slack app directory. So Curated Connections is an official Slack app.

10. Rails Foundation used us for their annual Rails World conference, second year in a row. This is special for us because Curated Connections is built using Rails.

11. We built Thread Archive v1 in 4 weeks. And before we even had a paywall for it, someone reached out on email asking how to pay for it. She was using it for free and she could have kept using it for free unlimited. But she wanted to pay for it, unprompted! 🥹

12. Someone from NASA started using Curated Connections for Women in Aerospace Network. She said that she LOVES our platform.

13. And finally, we built an entire wall of testimonials from people saying nice things about our the first SaaS product we ever built. It's surreal because I didn't know any of these people before we started working on Curated Connections in 2023.

Misses: How I half-assed my content efforts in 2024

Okay now it's time for painful vulnerability.

You ever heard the advice of "double down on your wins"? It simply means that when you see something working, keep doing it.

Turns out, I have a hard time doing this. 2024 was filled with instances where I didn't do it.

1. We published 25 new episodes with some of the top community creators on the Beginner Maps podcast. The plan was to create minimum one lesson per creator to the email course I mentioned above. I wrote 5 lessons, launched the email course and crushed our success metric.

And yet, I didn't create a proper, repeatable process to keep writing those lessons. We ended 2024, with ~250 new signups to the course.

2. I wanted to explore partnerships with other creators to boost email signups. The first one I explored was with a much bigger SaaS company called Bonjoro. And somehow, the founder agreed to a trade of getting us in front of an email list of 100k+ in exchange for an email list of barely 200 signups - just because he was impressed with our content.

This should have empowered me to reach out to more such creators. But I didn't.

3. At this point, you know that people really loved Beginner Maps website and email course. And yet, I kept using bad tools - Super and Mailerlite. Bad in the sense that they were cheap and made me procrastinate about updating the website. At one point, I had released 4 new episodes, published them on socials but not updated the website itself.

The straw that broke the camel's back? Realising that most of my articles on the website weren't even being indexed on Google.

I have just changed the infrastructure now. But in hindsight, I should have done this sooner.

4. I created 2 standalone programs to showcase the power of our product - Indie Cofounder Dating and Masterminds for community creators. Both exceeded expectations in terms of the number of people who signed up for them.

The plan was to keep launching such programs as stand-alone products and create value for our target customers while fostering meaningful connections.

How many did we launch in 2024? 2 🤦🏻‍♂️

5. Thread Archive - We created a new product, told 1 person about it, got 2 paying customers before we had set up payments. And yet.. I've done 0 marketing for it. In fact, I haven't even told my existing customers about it.

6. As I mentioned at the beginning, one of the main ways people discover our product is by seeing us in other communities. We've received a lot of business this way.

So the logical thing to experiment is to just gift 25 of my favourite communities with free access to the tool and see what happens. But we haven't done that yet.

7. Most people posting on social media struggle with not having stuff to post about. I've got tonnes of stuff to cool post about - new product updates, testimonials, podcasts, articles and testimonials. I could be posting 3 times a week just by talking about the cool shit we have done that week. But I most of those posts never get written. Big miss.

8. Same thing with the Circle community. That is an active community which had vocally appreciated it when I shared one of our essays from Beginner Maps there. I should be sharing all new content there regularly.

9. Talking of social media, our LinkedIn, Twitter and Youtube cover images are so dumb. We need to fix them.

10. Thoughtful cold reachouts - I sent 2 cold DMs to creators I admire and both responded positively to my messages. But even then, I never cold DM'ed anyone else.

To be fair, I got discouraged when both of them declined to use the product or even get on a call to understand how it worked. But statistically, a 100% positive reply rate means that I should keep digging.

11. Finally, we have onboarded so many creators to the product - both free and paid - and yet I haven't set up an automated email sequence to properly onboard them to the product. That is so stupid.

I can be telling them about how to use the product and be more successful with the product. I can be asking them for feedback, for referrals. Probably our biggest low hanging fruit.

As I'm writing this, I realize there might be a problem with me where as soon as I get a little win somewhere, instead of doubling down on it, I'm stupid enough to ignore it and move on to a different thing. Even though that win is really small and definitely inconsequential at the point where I leave it. I need to fix that in 2025.

If we can just double down on these wins that I already know works, while improving the product, there should be no stopping us in 2025.

We 8x'ed the business in 2024. There's no reason why we can't accelerate that growth even further in 2025.