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Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨ If you enjoy this, please forward it to your friends 👍. If this email was forwarded to you, then don’t forget to subscribe and become a supporter. You can also follow me on X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Welcome Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩 We're already at the end of 2024. A ton has happened this year. In this last edition, I'm going to share the key insights from my yearly review, along with my plans for 2025. I want to wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Take time to rest. Enjoy the holidays, and make the best of the year to come! The one keyword that is now everywhere is "AI". It's changing the world, and the pace is accelerating. I've heavily used AI this year, and will use it even more next year. There's hype for sure, but AI is really impactful, for so many things, even many we don't yet perceive. AI-enabled devices are going to flood the market, and AI will find its way in all aspects of our lives. But for me, even though AI did play a big role this year, the one thing I keep thinking about is the fact that I'm getting married. She said yes, and I'm so in love with her. Alright, let's gooooo 🚀 Hard Deadline The main question that's been on my mind this year is the following: Does it make sense for me to lose ~50% of my day job salary to work on these side projects, knowing that... - It's barely surviving
- I've not paid myself a single cent for over a year (basically since I stopped consulting)
The Opportunity cost of all the work that I do for this business is HUGE. At this point, if I had worked full time as an employee or freelancer, I would probably have saved up $200K or more (I really prefer not to think about it too much). I've been at it for six years, and haven't reached the goal I set for myself of becoming financially independent. There's been highs and lows. Right now, I'm at the lowest possible point. My business has very runway left, and my accountant asked me if I wanted to file for bankruptcy. I said no so far, but I don't have much time left, there's no doubt about it. The only way to keep this business going is for me to invest some more of my own savings into this business (likely within the next two months). I will probably do it, but I can't afford to continue like that for long.... The burden on my personal finances is already too heavy at this point. Worse, I don't yet see a clear path forward. I don't feel like I've found the right way to approach things. Many stars are aligned, but it's not enough. I'm highly motivated, dedicated, persistent, focused, and convinced that what I have to share with the world has value. Still, I haven't managed to reach and convince enough people that I can help. My conclusion is that I failed to learn the new skills I needed quickly enough (sales, marketing, copy writing, content strategy, video editing, simplicity, etc). And I probably still have a ton more to learn that I don't even know about (black swans). I learned a ton, but the solution still eludes me. I wrote multiple books, hundreds of articles, 180+ newsletters, created multiple products, courses, created websites and landing pages, created communities, etc. I really did a lot. And I did it relentlessly. For years. Those did generate money (~$40K so far), but not from enough for my business to be sustainable. And that's the hard lesson: hard work is not enough. Motivation is not enough. Dedication is not enough. Focus is not enough. Passion is not enough. There's something missing... And I don't really know what or why. Here's a breakdown of the sales I made so far on Gumroad: I've decided to give myself one more year. One last year to either succeed or fail. If I'm still roughly at the same point at the end of 2025, then I'll give up. Not because I want to, but because it's the only sane thing to do. I don't want to keep falling for the Sunk Cost Fallacy, like I already did with my last startup.
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With this hard deadline in front of me, this "12-steps journey", there will be a fire under my butt. I know that I need to try new things, approach it all differently, experiment more, iterate faster. That's the only hope I have to turn things around. Because my current approach is too slow. We'll see how that goes. Before I share my current plans, let's do a small recap of what happened this year. Highlights of the year This year, the most important thing that happened was the fact that I proposed to her in Rome, and she said YES. It was such an intense moment. I'll never forget it.  She Said YES We both had a truly wonderful year. So many things happened... We went on vacation in France (Brittany again), at the Belgian coast, visited many places, and spent wonderful moments with friends and family. Health This year, I bought and e-bike, and hit the road many times. I regularly went on hikes, and had tons of fun discovering Paddel.
My main health-related problem has been to stop smoking. It's been really challenging. I regret touching the first cigarette. Kind of stupid to start when you're 40yo! This reminded me that bad habits are still habits. They're TOUGH to get rid of. So we're better off building good habits instead. Family This year, my son Matthieu broke his arm in August while riding an electric scooter for the first time. It took months for him to heal. It's been tough because I had to bring him to the hospital many times over. This robbed me of many hours to work on the business. My daughter Amandine, who "suffers" from ADHD also needed a lot of attention from me. She struggles to focus on her work, so I need to be around all the time and help her. Otherwise, she won't make it at school. Meanwhile, Raphaël, who is now 3yo started going to school, and changed dramatically as a result. The explosion of social interactions completely changed his behavior, in fun, and annoying ways ^^. My father also had an important surgery, and I was really worried that he wouldn't survive. It generated even more stress. Lastly, I also lost a crazy amount of time because of the leak we had beneath the ground floor. It took months to repair, and was really tiresome. This happened when I wanted to get back to launching my Knowledge Management course. It delayed everything, and it killed my motivation for a long while. Leisure This year, I've mostly failed to take real time off. I was stressed because of my dying business, the family issues I discussed above, and I didn't manage to find the "off" button. I almost didn't play this year. I spent maybe 5 hours playing Final Fantasy XVI, and a couple hours here and there to play other games, but that's it. I was in "work mode" all year long. And that's not a good thing. Although, one thing that brought me joy and peace this year was the turntable and first vinyls I bought. I wanted to change my relationship to music, and it's been a real pleasure to disconnect a bit and enjoy music differently. For many many years, all I did was listen to playlists on random, without really paying attention. The turntable really helped me wind down and enjoy one thing. Business Challenges Apart from the broken arm of my son and the water pipe leak at home, there were other challenges for me this year. I was forced to go back to work 60% of the time as an employee, and that was a hard pill to swallow. I didn't want to, but was forced to. First because my employer insisted (i.e., forced my hand), and second because I needed the money. The one thing I don't want to sacrifice too much is my lifestyle. It would be quite laughable to try and create a "lifestyle business" to ultimately lower my lifestyle quality... I live pretty frugally in different ways, and love living a simple life, but there's a limit to the sacrifices I can make, just to run a business. There's also a minimum level of income I need, simply to pay the bills, and take care of my family. Things would of course be different if I was 25yo, single, and without a mortgage. This change left me with even less time to work on the business, which was highly frustrating. Meanwhile, product sales crashed big time, and I didn't manage to understand how I broke my "sales engine". In 2023, I made ~500 sales, and brought in ~15K. In 2024, I made only half of that. Ouch! Maybe I didn't update my products enough, maybe I didn't mention those enough, maybe the prices I set and the focus I put on the Knowledge Worker Kit didn't convince. A lot of maybes, but very little certainty. And that's the crux of my issue. It feels as if I was in the cockpit of a Boeing plane, with thousands of controls in front of me, trying things randomly, and hoping for the plane to take off... Another challenge I faced was focusing on ONE thing. I clearly spread myself too thin. I tried to grow the newsletter, expand the Knowledge Worker Kit, add automation, improve the Obsidian Starter Kit, create a new course, reboot Knowii, explore and leverage AI, redesign my Website, create more content, be more active on social, etc. The underlying theme is clear, it's all about Knowledge Management, so that's good. But without focus, I've only made "tiny" steps in many directions. I think this is one of my biggest lessons this year. I need to focus on LESS, and deliver MORE. It's funny/sad, because I'm the first person to advise everyone around to focus on one thing, and one thing only. And I don't even adhere to my own rules. I know why I did all that though. I was looking for a win. I was looking for one thing that would save my business. But in reality, I made it even weaker by not making any big leap forward with anything. And I think that the problem is the pressure I feel that pushes me to seek "quick wins": - I decided to work on the Knowledge Management for Beginners course in February, bought a domain, created the landing page, managed to get 25+ preorders, prepared the course plan and a part of the course, recorded multiple modules... Then put it all on hold
- I lacked consistency with the newsletter, and lost my weekly rhythm
- I didn't improve the Obsidian Starter Kit drastically apart from the 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 releases. I spent time launching it on Product Hunt, which did have a positive impact, but it certainly wasn't worth the time I spent
- I didn't improve the Knowledge Worker Kit all that much apart from a few more articles
- I spent almost three months rebooting Knowii before putting it aside again, realizing that I wouldn't be able to generate revenue with it quickly enough
- I built automation rules with Zapier and EmailOctopus, paid those dearly, but didn't do much apart copying information from A to B, and sending welcome emails with an offer
- I wanted to grow on Substack but didn't manage to
- I wanted to resume working on my YouTube channel, created a cool dashboard in Obsidian and created a template for my videos, but only published one or two
- I wanted to publish more consistently on social, but didn't. I joined Bluesky, Threads.net and started publishing to those, but not enough. I improved my profiles and bio, but didn't see any difference. My efforts actually led to a net negative. I lost followers, and felt like talking to a wall during the whole year
- I wanted to start with Tiktok, learned about Editing for TikTok, posted a few videos, then put the idea aside
- I launched my podcast on Substack on a whim while playing with NotebookLM, and it took yet more of my time away
- I didn't promote my PKM Coaching offer, and even though I had multiple successful sessions, great ratings and testimonials, I failed to leverage that activity
- I tried applying to become a coach on MentorCruise, but got rejected
- I abandoned the Personal Knowledge Management Library, even though I have thousands of new resources to add
- I set up Google Analytics for Gumroad, but didn't look at the data
- I tried running ads, but didn't help at all, and I gave it up given how costly it was, another failed experiment
- I spent time adding sponsorship options to my open source projects on GitHub, but noone cared
- I started building a CIS Benchmark Audit tool for GitLab (SaaS), but did not complete it
- I created new communities on LinkedIn and WhatsApp, but didn't spend any time growing those
- I let my existing communities die a slow and painful death (e.g., the PKM Community on Slack)
- ...
I did a lot, published articles/newsletters and worked hard, but the net result is that I didn't deliver anything valuable enough for people/you to buy. No new course, no new product, no new YouTube videos, etc. Seen under this light, it's actually not that surprising that my business is still in the red area... While that's pretty clear, it doesn't tell me what the "best next step" is. And I know for a fact that nobody cares apart from me. Achievements While I didn't make key breakthroughs this year, I did work a lot, learned a ton, and achieved many things. First of all, I learned a whole lot about AI, and integrated Large Language Models (LLMs) in many aspects of my life and work. I used ChatGPT, Claude, Ollama, Cursor.com, FLUX.1, NotebookLM, Replicate.com, as well as AI plugins for Obsidian (e.g., Companion plugin for Obsidian, Smart Connections plugin for Obsidian) almost every single day. I started generating images for my articles, analyzing my landing pages, my Website, improving my notes, etc. More importantly, I created my on AI Ghostwriter, helping me with many aspects of the creation process. I used the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect Claude Desktop to my Obsidian Vault, and drastically improved my usage of AI for content creation. I spent some time analyzing the tweet structure of successful creators, and documented my findings: This helped me rethink my templates, and led me to go further, and clearly document my writing style, my content strategy, my target audience, content pillars, etc. This has helped me create a much more powerful AI ghostwriter that I started to leverage recently. During the year, I also created two successful lead magnets: I delivered those by e-mail, and automatically added everyone to the newsletter members list. Thanks to this, hundreds of us have joined the newsletter, and have started discovering my work. Next year, I want to double down on this, and provide more valuable resources for free. I also added a way for people to support me by buying me a coffee on Gumroad and on BuyMeACoffee.com: It doesn't change much, but every dollar I can generate moves the needle toward sustainability. Another thing I did well was asking for ratings/reviews/testimonials. Many people have a positive opinion about my products and services, but very few take time to leave a review. After asking past customers directly, I received many positive feedback, 14 new testimonials, and 18 additional 5-star ratings. Pretty awesome! The other big change I made to my products this year was putting the Knowledge Worker Kit front and center. Knowledge Management is one of many elements helping knowledge workers level up. And I actually want to focus on all aspects of knowledge work. That's why I've decided to include ALL my knowledge management products as free bonuses of the Knowledge Worker Kit. On the newsletter side, I published 182 editions so far, and managed to 10x the monthly recurring revenue to $110 after improving the subscription tiers: The newsletter also went from 900 subscribers to ~1900. The growth is still quite slow, but has accelerated a lot thanks to the lead magnets. The issue with this growth though is that the cost of running the newsletter has increased to $480 a year, and will probably increase again next year. Another important step I took this year was publishing my notes over at https://notes.dsebastien.net. As my knowledge base grew, I knew I wanted to make the knowledge accessible to everyone.  My main knowledge base So far, I have shared 6.3K (!) of my notes. Very few people have noticed, but this is actually a very valuable resource that I provide for free. Those notes include many of the things I have learned over the years, and that I want to leverage in the coming years. I also decided to join the Obsidian Insiders to receive new Obsidian releases as early as possible, enabling me to experiment with new features, and share the lessons learned with you all. The other positive impact of publishing all of this is on the SEO side. The more content I put out there, the more visibility I'm able to gain, all while actually helping people out. Another big achievement for me this year is the fact that I've managed to fix my SEO woes. My Website visits crashed with Google updates last year, and it really took me months reverse the trend. I reworked past articles, changed titles, added content and images, improved descriptions, tags, keywords, structured data, links, etc. It was hard (and boring) work, but it finally paid off:  SEO progress Next to that, I used AI to roast and help me improve the Website structure and design. I built a custom Ghost theme and made many important changes: I created a new landing page, added a start page, revamped the newsletter page, the blog page, added a page listing all the tags, and another one listing all the articles. I also cleaned up the tags, and made everything clearer. I also made UI improvements (new footer, new sidebar, etc). This work took a few days, but it has already paid off. On the software development side, as I mentioned above, I rebooted Knowii, my open source Community Knowledge Management project. Even though I ultimately decided to put it on hold again, I'm glad I worked on it for a few months. It helped me rediscover PHP, and taught me a ton about Laravel. I'll surely be able to leverage that knowledge for future software development projects. Rebooting Knowii with this was refreshing, and convinced my that building SaaS using Laravel is a great idea. I'm not abandoning Knowii, but I have realized that it's not (yet) the right time to focus on it. I'll only be able to build it once my business is sustainable or if I get funding. Aside from that, I started building Obsidian plugins. I created an open source plugin template, and built multiple plugins: Those have helped me strengthen my system and make things easier. I've also integrated the Dataview Serializer and Update time plugins into the Obsidian Starter Kit, heavily improving it. Knowing how to build Obsidian plugins is important, because it's one less barrier to further improve my Knowledge Management practice, and help the whole community. For instance, the Dataview Serializer plugin that I've created provides a solution for a problem faced by thousands of Obsidian users. I want to build more plugins in the future to be able to further strengthen and leverage my knowledge base, and help other Obsidian users do the same for themselves. One last important thing I did this year was launching my own podcast. Even though I consider this as one more example of my scattered focus, and even though this hasn't led to anything positive for the business, I'm still glad I did. I launched the podcast on Substack, and Spotify. So far, I've generated the episodes based on my articles using NotebookLM, but in the future I want to create "genuine" episodes, invite other people to discuss with me about PKM, Knowledge Work and how to best leverage AI. But one thing at a time! Last but not least, I read ~20 books this year, and managed to share some of my notes. I want to do this more often in the coming years: After I found more efficient ways to transition my notes from analog to digital, it became easier to add my book notes to Obsidian: I also created a dashboard for my book library in Obsidian, which I then included in the Obsidian Starter Kit, and shared it in the following article: Articles published in 2024 Aside from my other achievements this year, one I'm proud of is my consistency with writing. I've publishing pretty consistently throughout the year, and managed to write and publish: - 23 articles about Knowledge Management and Obsidian
- 12 articles about Knowledge Work, Productivity and Learning
- 1 article about Content creation and writing
That's 36 articles in total this year, thus roughly one every 10 days, in addition to the hundreds of notes I've written, various pieces I've added to the Knowledge Worker Kit, and everything I've shared on social media. Here's the full list: - Knowledge Management and Obsidian
- Knowledge Work, Productivity and Learning
- Content creation and writing
- Miscellaneous
Newsletters published in 2024 This year, I've also published 32 editions of this newsletter. That's roughly one edition every 11 days. In 2025, I want to publish editions more regularly and get closer to one every week.
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My plans for 2025 Now that I've set a hard deadline, I have to carefully choose my next steps. Based on my analysis, the main problem with my approach so far is the fact that I did not focus my efforts on ONE thing. In 2025, I intend to fix that. Launch the Knowledge Management for Beginners course My first goal is to finally launch the Knowledge Management for Beginners course. I intend to work on it in January, and release it before the end of the month. To achieve that goal, I will forbid myself from working on anything else. The only other thing I'll do is continue publishing this newsletter. Once the course will be launched, I'll run a survey to ask you all about what you need/want from me next. I will take all the feedback I receive into account to adjust course. The second thing I intend to do is reboot and regroup all my communities in a single place (probably circle.so). My goal is to help us reach critical mass faster, and deliver more value for everyone. I see this goal high-risk high-reward. It's high risk because it'll probably cost $50-$70 each month, meaning that if I don't manage to generate more money as a result, my company won't survive long. But it's high-reward, because if it works, then I could increase my monthly recurring revenue, hopefully leading to a more sustainable situation, which is exactly what I need right now. The new community space will be called "Knowledge Workers United" or something similar, and will focus on: - Knowledge Work
- Knowledge Management
- AI
- Learning
- Zen Productivity
- Content Creation
- Personal Development
- Personal Organization
There will be areas dedicated to each topic. This new community space will have both free and paid parts. Different membership levels will be granted based on your relationship with me: - Free newsletter subscribers
- Paid newsletter subscribers
- Knowledge Worker Kit customers
- Obsidian Starter Kit customers
- Existing community members (e.g., PKM community, focusd community, ...)
- etc
Depending on your membership level, you will have access to different things: - Chat rooms
- Exclusive content and discounts
- Live events, meetups, workshops and AMA sessions
- Access to my courses
- Access to my existing products
- Interviews
- Newsletter archives
- ...
In February, I will: - Create the new community space
- Buy a dedicated domain for it
- Add a landing page for it on my Website
- Promote it
- Organize a first workshop
- Schedule additional ones
- Onboard the first members
- Brainstorm about the next steps
Starting around April, I will organize monthly community meetups targeting specific topics. The goal will be to share knowledge and experiences within the community. Through those meetups, I will answer your questions, show you how I work, which tools I use and how, how i organize my work, and more. The community will discuss and decide what each meetup will be about. My goal is for this new community to become my main offer. The price will increase over time, as the content library grows. The first members will benefit from the best possible price. If you're interested, then drop me a mail. Grow the newsletter to $1K MRR Another important goal I have for 2025 is 10x the revenue of this newsletter.
I don't have a clear plan for that yet, but it will be an important theme for the year. Some things I want to try: - Rework the tiers
- Improve the premium tier (more value but higher price point)
- Associate paid membership with community access and specific benefits
- Find sponsors
- Promote it more regularly
- Improve the welcome email sequence to ensure that new members get as much information and value as possible, ending with an offer to join our community
Publish a Free PKM Guide Once I'm done with the email sequence, and in preparation of a future book project, I will write a Free Personal Knowledge Management guide. This guide will be at least 50 pages long, and will cover the key elements on Personal Knowledge Management. Once created and published, I will complement it with 7-10 emails to help people integrate PKM in their lives, ultimately trying to convince them to join our community and grow together. Create Obsidian Template Packs A small bet I want to make next is to sell the templates I use separately from the Obsidian Starter Kit. Understandably, some people don't want to buy/use the Obsidian Starter Kit because they already have a working system. Although, I've received questions about getting access to separate parts of the kit. With this small bet, I'll see if there's interest. If I manage to sell at least 100 copies of the templates, I'll consider "unbundling" more of my Obsidian system and selling more parts separately. I could also launch a service to help people build the Obsidian templates they need, potentially leading to a template marketplace, which would be beneficial for the whole Obsidian community. Launch an AI Ghostwriter course The more we can align AI with who we are and our goals, the better we can leverage its power to make progress. Now that I have created my own AI Ghostwriter and documented the whole process, I want to turn the approach into a dedicated course. I really believe that this "runbook" is highly valuable, and will become even more valuable over time. My AI Ghostwriter works extremely well, and I want other people to be able to create and leverage the approach for themselves. Improve the Knowledge Worker Kit In 2025, I also want to add more content to the Knowledge Worker Kit. I have an endless list of content ideas (cfr the future content page in the guide). Ultimately, everything in there will be part of the new community resources, but for now I want to enrich the knowledge base, and share more ideas about modern knowledge work. Sell everything through my Website Right now, my products and services are scattered around. In 2025, I want to sell everything through my Website. I will add dedicated landing pages for each of my products and services, and find the best way to sell. I don't know if I'll keep using Gumroad, but I will evaluate and experiment with alternatives. Systematize and automate offers At this point, I have no clear system for running promotions. I have no offer calendar, and each time I decide to run one, it's very manual and disorganized. In 2025, I want to clearly define a system for offers, define a clear calendar, and automate it all. I intend to dive into n8n as a replacement for Zapier (too costly), and see where I can get with that. I want to add offers for new newsletter subscribers, past customers, etc. Write more articles and with a clearer target audience In 2025, I also want to triple the number of articles I publish. I want to publish a new article every 3 days. To achieve this, I will leverage my knowledge base and my AI Ghostwriter. There are tons and tons of notes that I want to turn into articles. In addition, I will ensure that each article I write and publish is fully aligned with my content pillars and targets a very specific audience. I will continue to focus more on timeless content, but I'll also create more practical guides (e.g., about Obsidian). Last but not least, I will migrate all my software development articles to my notes Website, maximizing the focus of my main website. I will use time blocking for improving my social media publishing consistency. Right now I'm not very consistent because I don't dedicate time blocks to planning social media posts. I just take time here and there when I think about it. I intend to fix that to maximize my reach. My idea here is to do two things: - Schedule regular time blocks to plan social media posts
- Schedule regular time blocks to increase my visibility and engagement
Capture and analyze the data One thing I suck at is data analysis. I create and publish a lot of content, but I don't track the data. Hence, I can't leverage the wins easily. As pointed out by Nicolas Cole in The Art and Business of Online Writing (book), I should follow the data. To achieve this goal, I will look for ways to automate data gathering (e.g., through Typefully, Ghost, X, Bluesky, etc), and once I have a solution in place, I'll regularly analyze the data and adjust. The end goal with this is to get to a point where I have automation in place to identify the "winners", and automate their reuse (e.g., re-share popular tweets). Seek a book deal In 2025, I want to try and negotiate a book deal about Knowledge Management. At this point, I already have a ton of content, articles and notes that I could clearly turn into a book. I love writing, and I believe that the Knowledge Management space deserves more books. I will probably not have enough bandwidth to write that book in 2025, but if I manage to negotiate a book deal, I will definitely write it. I could self-publish it, but my goal with this book isn't to directly make money, but rather to spread important ideas and expand my reach. This is a secondary goal, but I'll give it a try. Ready. Set. Go! There's a lot more I have in mind and want to achieve, but I don't want to list everything here. The list above is already pretty aggressive and optimistic. Hopefully, this will force me to make fast and hard choices. Each goal will have a definitive deadline, and I will take all the shortcuts I can, even if my perfectionist side will surely struggle. I need to feel the fire under my butt. I need to deliver. I'll review and share my progress regularly, and we'll see how it all goes. Time to get started! Prepare my wedding I have other personal goals, but the main one I'll focus on in 2025 is my wedding preparation. This will probably take a lot of time. Luckily, the wedding is planned for the end of 2026, so I should be able to distribute the effort over the next 1.5y. Latest articles I published three articles recently. The first one is an overview of the Personal Knowledge Management process (the way I think about it): The second one is an article aiming to convince more people that Obsidian is a great choice: The last one is an in-depth introduction to the new Obsidian Web Clipper: If you're using Obsidian, I strongly advise you to check this one out. Books I read a number of cool books this year. Mostly fiction, but also a few non-fiction gems. Here's the full list: The last one I read was The Art and Business of Online Writing (book) by Nicolas Cole. You can check out my notes here: LINK: The Art and Business of Online Writing (book) The main thing I realized while reading this book is that my content strategy was not clearly defined. I failed to niche-down, and wanted to write for everyone. And this has certainly slowed down my progress. Now, thanks to this book, I've vastly improved my approach, and you're certainly going to see the difference next year. Quotes of the week That's it for this year ✨
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