Annual review 2023
Moving from Full-time employment to Solopreneurship, creative sabbatical, indie hacking and more ✨
Highlights:
Leaving Nintee and going independent
Creating and shipping my 2nd info product - visual design guide
Making money from my info product
Consistent with newsletter release
Weekly session with Kalyanamitas
Prioritising spiritual practice
Doing a workout at least once a week from June onwards
The head of design role didn’t work out (which turned out to be a good thing later on :) )
Low lights
Didn’t ship enough
Deep work was not prioritise
Just made one course. Wanted to ship 3 courses at least.
Procrastinate a lot for marketing-related activities
Still not a 10x designer
Didn’t contribute enough to the communities
Leaving full-time employment
I worked as a full-time product designer and manager at Nintee. Everything changed after January; Paras pivoted from the calorie tracker app. I had designed the app from my own hands, not only the app but HSE, website, did the product and GTM work as well. We had great reviews, but it was operationally heavy, and the competitive domain and scale weren’t as much as the founder and VC wanted.
Anyway, I still cherish the last meetup in Bangalore. I’m so grateful to Paras for nudging us to start writing in public. It was one of my core motivations to restart my blog/newsletter, and it’s still going strong. I have consistently written almost every week. 55 editions!!
I’m still grateful for the opportunity. In this role, I went out of my comfort zone and took on core product responsibility in addition to designing. I wrote PRDs and worked closely with developers on design implementation. It was intense and fun spending one year at Nintee. We shipped four products. I still remember talking to users and hearing great feedback. I'm so grateful.
I initially joined the company because I was aligned with its north star—“Reduce suffering in the world.” However, as the company pivoted, I felt moved away from our original mission. I wasn’t satisfied with some new decisions. I started working half-heartedly, and eventually, I decided to quit. I discussed this with Paras, and he embraced my decision gently. I left in May.
Creative sabbatical
I felt relieved. I needed some break; I had worked relentlessly for the last ten months. Nintee has been a sprint. I learned a lot about both design and product.
I decided to take a sabbatical. From June to August, I read a lot. I was figuring out what to do next.
What’s the most essential thing in my life? What matters the most to me?
I was asking myself many contemplative questions. I realized that whenever I do something that positively impacts others, that kind of work makes me happy. I wanted a lifestyle that gives me flexibility over my schedule. I love to do a one—to two-week retreat annually. Staying in a Buddhist monastic environment gives me immense joy, and I want to do more of that.
I have many years of design experience and want to help people with that and earn a living. I combined all of these. I decided I’d be making educational products, starting with courses. At the core of this, I wanted to impart practical product design knowledge to everyone. I wanted to make education accessible to everyone, regardless of money and location.
During this time, I kept my newsletter (the one you’re reading rn :) ) going by trying different experiments. I travelled with my partner to Rishikesh and then stayed at a nunnery in Dharamshala.
I wanted to centre my work around it. Deep within myself, I knew I didn’t want to work under someone else. Markets were terrible, too; remote jobs were disappearing. I first spent time helping Rajeshwari transition to the product. I made her portfolio and helped her with product design. She was getting depressed, I couldn’t see that so I started to apply from her side. Within a few weeks, she landed a job at Airveda. It was funny, when I was working she was unemployed and now visa versa.
Though I wouldn’t call myself unemployed, I was restarting my self-employment journey. I figured out it won’t be easy to make a living from an info product. Building my SaaS tool or some other product is another option. I have just tried educational products for now. Honestly, I don’t know what SaaS product I want to build. Technical constraints aside, knowing why and what to build is way more important than knowing how to build. I think I’ll get back to design consulting for now. I’m considering experimenting with a fractional design partner for early-stage startups; let’s see how it goes.
I don’t want this lifestyle to end. Slow mornings, the ability to stroll during weekday afternoons, and going into retreats as per my flexibility—this is too good. This is the lifestyle I always wanted. I don’t know how to sustain this without a remote FT job. By hook or crook, I want to make it work. I aim to try something between an independent studio and a productized design agency. I feel this bet can work and aligns well with my skills and interests.
On a good note, my visual design guide has started generating some revenue! Small win 🥳
Focus on building products, not on audience building
The Audience building is overrated - it’s full of noise. I spent too much time creating content on Twitter and LinkedIn, and the ROI was not satisfactory. Looking back, I realized that time could have been spent on things like learning new tools and launching new courses.
Rejections
Cadmus reached out to me for the head of the design role. I was excited as they were solving a real problem in the ed-tech space, but it didn’t work out. I also applied to teach memorisely, but that didn’t work out either. Good, bad, who knows?
Picture of 2023
My favourite tweet of 2023
Photo dump from 2023
Thank you for reading 🙏🏽
Much love,
Shivam
P.S. - I’ll be launching some exciting stuff on my YouTube channel, subscribe if you’re interested
What an inspiring review, Shivam! And was that photo taken in Dharamshala? Breathtaking.