-$40,000+ costs

-$350,000+ opportunity cost | Code, marketing | Healthier relationship with mortality | I can’t work on things I don’t care about | | 💪 Fitness club | Community | 3 years | Healthy lifestyle, friends | Needed to focus on finding job | Healthy friends, 60 members | Community building | Girlfriend | Building the community you want is fun | | 🧑‍💻 Tech club | Community | 1 year | More tech friends | Failed to get sponsors, felt unappreciated | 600 Meetup members, 200 on Discord, 50 in-person events | Community building | Free stuff | Niching helps discovery; I’m not the only lonely one | | 🧑‍💻Productivity Challenge | Community | 15 days | Positive peer pressure | Too much work signing ppl up | Very productive 2 weeks | Community building, sales, copy-writing | Talking with others made me come to decisions faster | Focus on businesses / business owners — they value time most | | 📱 Mobile App Community Manager | Community | 9 months | Keep app alive | Couldn’t attract funding / contributors | Launched app on Play Store, watched it slowly die | Community building, open source | Job interview | Open-source projects need strong leaders. Consensus takes too long. | | 📓 Fiction book | Book | 1.5 years (2014-15) | Creative outlet | Finished it | None - never shared with anyone | Writing, discipline | Self-confidence | Keep writing, but don’t make it sole focus (too isolating) | | 🎦 YouTube Channel | Content | | Grow audience | n/a - ongoing | 43 videos, 554 subs in 2 years | Video editing, story telling | New friends | Technical skill + story telling is a powerful combo for discovery | | ✍️ Blog v1: essays, personal stories | Content | 2 years | Creative outlet | Realized I need to niche | Kept alive for years before moving to new site. Time-consuming to maintain | Design, writing, personal branding | Girlfriend, German pen pal | Putting good things out there and trusting that something will happen works | | ✍️ Blog v2: Deep dive on Chronic Pain | Content | 3 months | Inspire more research | Discouraged by lack of enthusiasm around topic | a few thousand views, no known changes | Writing, research | Improved mental health | I can’t change people’s mind. | | ✍️ Blog v3: Tech Tutorials | Content | 2 years | Branding, get job | n/a - ongoing | A few hundred views, 5 GitHub stars, 7 forks, jobs | Tech, documentation | Frequently searched Google for answer and found own docs | Documenting your solutions as you go saves you and others time | | ✉️Newsletter: Time Management for Happy Ppl | Content | 3 months | Creative outlet, grow app users | Wasn’t getting new subscribers | 15 issues, ~30 subscribers | Writing | More clarity about what makes me happy | Discovery is my bottleneck | | ✉️ Newsletter v2: Compass Changelog | Content | 3 months | Attract investors, early users | Ran out of runway for app | 6 issues, more subs, 3 interested investors, 5 potential cofounders | Writing | Realized I don’t want to raise VC | Discovery is my bottleneck | | 🎙️ Podcast v1: interviewing friends | Content | 6 months | Fun convos | Minimal audience growth | 573 downloads in 6 years | Audio editing, interview prep | Less lonely | Podcasts as supplement to real connection, not replacement | | 🎙️ Podcast v2: Deep dive on Chronic Pain | Content | 6 months | Increase awareness, give back | Minimal audience growth | 515 downloads in 4 years | Story-telling, audio-editing, outsourcing | Closer with family | Don’t over-invest in content concepts — validate first | | 🎙️ Podcast v3: App Deep Dives | Content | 10 months | Grow audience | Minimal audience growth, hard to balance with coding | 1088 downloads in 2 years | Story-telling, audio-editing, outsourcing | New friends | Focus on the thing that makes $ | | 🎙️ Podcast v4: App updates | Content | 8 months | Grow audience | Wasn’t attracting new listeners | 303 downloads in 1 year | Story-telling, audio-editing | Improved mental health | Need to get better at discovery | | 🧑‍💻 App that backs up GDrive files | App | 3 months | Peace of mind | Finished POC, realized too much work to build full version | No peace of mind | API design, Java, how to organize files better | Realized I needed to learn frontend dev | Don’t build things that Google will build anyway | | ⛑️Raspberry Pi helmet | Physical Product | 3 months | Viable business | No one wanted it | -$200 | Hardware, user interviews | Learned to rappel | Keep validating before over-committing | | 🧑‍💻 CRM tool | App | 3 months | See if I like contracting | client didn’t want to keep investing | Finished v1 | Code, how to film code for content | Realized power of CRMs | Focus on clients who are willing to pay |