Reflecting on 2024

As is often the case, the Christmas period was a busy one, full of delightful moments with loved ones. I wanted to write a little about 2024 in 2024 but, predictably, I ran out of time.

We are just teetering on the edge of ”Happy New Year!” being a stale greeting, so it’s now-or-never for me to share a look back at 2024 and jot thoughts down about the year ahead.

Highlights of 2024

2024 has been a momentous year for me, with some life-defining moments I will never forget.

Engagement

I don’t think my partner would forgive me if I didn’t put this at the top of my list.

In January I took a trip to Rome and proposed. In fact, it was on this very day last year.

It felt like a dream, and was a moment I had envisioned for a long time. Somehow I managed to keep it secret, even though my ~~partner~~ fiancée is a rather impressive detective!

There's not a detail about the weekend I would change. It underscored my love for the person I am choosing to spend my life with, and for Italy!

Running and exercise

Accountability

Both 2023 and 2024 have been big years for my exercise regime. Early in 2023 I began working Daily Body Coach, run by a friend of mine. The experience has driven me to achieve things I never thought possible. I've transformed my attitude to fitness, to eating, to routines, and have been blown away by the results.

While DBC was not specifically about running, it clearly had an impact here. I have written about running before, and while I didn't run a marathon in 2024 it was still a personal-record-breaking year for me.

Half marathon

I took part in the Royal Parks Half marathon and completed it in my fastest time yet. I wrote a piece shortly after this about why I run.

The Hardest Mile

I also completed an event called The Hardest Mile. It's hard to describe this as anything other than ridiculous. The challenge is to get around a running track four times in an hour. Does that sound hard? No. Not until you add in the small detail of how you get around each lap:

Burpees
Lunges
Bear crawl
Run

It was brutal! Once it was over, and I made my way home on a rail replacement bus service, I reflected. When I was at school, or even just a few years ago, I would never have even contemplated doing something like this.

Parkrun

Parkrun has also been a mainstay of my weekly routine. Almost every Saturday, I get down to my local park and run 5km.

If you've never heard of Parkrun, I can't recommend it enough. It's a free, community event where you can walk, jog, or run 5km around your local park. You can volunteer or spectate as people make their way around, and they happen all around the world.

Having taken part in Parkrun

Olympic precision, and advice from Sam Altman — weekly roundup

Last week I shared a post summarising what I had learned in the week.

I found it helpful for myself, and hopefully it may be at least mildly interesting for others too.

Here’s a few things I found interesting this week.

An incredibly densely packed set of wisdom from Sam Altman. I found this very motivating to read:

7 frameworks Sam Altman wishes someone told him earlier

I found this via Joel Hansen of Napkin Notes.

Getting an idea off the ground: “Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.”
Thinking long term: “Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.”
Hiring: “Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fastrate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.”
Coworkers: “Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.”
Making bets: “Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.”
Wasting time: “Fight b*llshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.”
Time: “Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it's usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.”

Other things this week

The first week of the Olympics in Paris has been incredible. Beautiful venues, Paris at its best.
I’m blown away by how little separates Olympic athletes between a gold medal and no medal. The men’s 100m final separated gold from silver by just 0.005 of a second.
We wrapped up July at EcoSend and it was a busy month.
I figured out how to add the Lost and Founder to YouTube. A while ago I started sharing my deepest darkest thoughts as a founder. I haven’t published in a while but I’m hoping to change that. I’ve just started posting old episodes to YouTube to give them a new lease of life. Stay tuned to YouTube for more.
I’m excited for something new for GoSquared next week. Stay tuned!

A quote for the week ahead

"The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty." — James Clear

P.S. If you’re receiving this via email, you might notice it’s not sent from EcoSend. I’ll be changing that soon!

What happened at EcoSend in July 2024?

Chris has put together another video showing what we've been up to at EcoSend in the last month.

Almost always, I am stunned by how much our little team can achieve in just one month.

July featured a bunch of new features and product improvements, a slew of helpful and inspiring new videos published, 5 episodes of our podcast, and a whole lot of volunteering and doing good.

Do check this out if you're interested to learn more!

What sells? Climate or ROI?

What sells? 🌍 Climate, or 💰 ROI?

In the world of sustainability, what *actually* sells?

Is it a friendly, climate-focused tagline?

Or is it cold, hard business return-on-investment?

As someone who’s been leading with a sustainability focused message for over a year, just asking that question makes me feel a little uncomfortable.

When selling a product in a crowded market, you always need to stand out from the rest of the industry. And it’s hard to dislike a more sustainable alternative.

Standing out from the industry tends to mean leading with a proposition that is different. If everyone else leads with a pitch around ROI, then how do you lead with a pitch on ROI and still maintain differentiation?

I recently had an inspiring conversation with Tim Schumacher who put the question to me: do people buy based on environmental benefits or business benefits?

What gets you in the door might not be what gets you bought.

From what we’ve seen at EcoSend, leading with a pitch around climate is a fantastic way to drive awareness and attention, and it expresses our values in building the most environmentally conscious email marketing platform in the world.

However, leading with an environmental pitch doesn’t always drive business.

In fact it’s a challenge I’ve heard many times from other founders in the climate space — people love the idea of changing the world for the better, but when push comes to shove the business decision almost always wins out.

That business decision might be:

Switching will take time, so we’ll stick with our current tool.
We will go with the most trusted brand, to avoid unnecessary risk.
There’s a specific feature we need that your product doesn’t have.
We can get this cheaper elsewhere.

Fortunately with many environmental focused products and propositions the trade-off of climate vs ROI doesn’t necessarily need to exist.

Often what is better for the environment is also the more effective, more impactful decision for the business.

The challenge is finding the right balance between communicating your climate focus while driving awareness of business impact.

It’s something we’re going to experiment with more at EcoSend — by focusing on sustainability, we’re building a highly optimised, efficient platform where your emails are much more likely to get delivered, opened, read, and actioned.

Can we ultimately drive more people to a climate conscious solution by leading with a business focused pitch?

We’ll find out.

An interview on the Misfit Founders podcast

The incredibly generous and supportive Biro Florin recently invited me on his show Misfit Founders.

The show was filmed in his beautiful house in Brighton, UK, and we chatted about building a SaaS business, and a whole lot more.

It's the first time I've spoken at length about our work on EcoSend and how GoSquared fits into a bigger picture more than ever.

It's a very long show (the best part of two hours!) so if you have the time, I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you Biro, for inviting me on, and helping to set my life goals for a podcasting setup like yours!