About

About Me

  • Born in Germany, raised in Germany šŸ‡©šŸ‡Ŗ & the USA šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø
  • Work Past: Iā€™ve worn many hats - from running large tech conferences in Europe to founding a SaaS startup

About 2022

2022 put me on a different path than I expected. In January I was running a 10-person startup, and preparing a funding round. In April I was officially unemployed. A few things came together that made me realize, that I personally was not on the right path and also not the right person to run the company. Quitting the startup I had co-founded and poured my time and passion into for two years was one of the hardest decisions of my life (re-reading The Dip by Seth Godin helped enormously). But since taking the leap, I did not regret it even once.
Ā 
Instead of plunging head first into the next big thing like starting a startup or taking a full-time job, I decided to make the rest of 2022 one big experiment. That path is either going to lead me to the ā€œnext big thingā€ to work on or is going to turn out to be the big thing itself.
The boundaries I set for myself:
  • Learn something new in everything I do
  • Only do things that have the chance to ā€œcompoundā€ (I donā€™t want to do some freelancing that I wonā€™t be able to learn from/build on for something in the future)
  • If I decide to ā€œsell my timeā€, I want to work on my own terms & mostly async
Ā 
A log of what Iā€™ve been up to:

April

  • committed to taking Twitter seriously and start growing an audience
Ā 

May

  • caught COVID (1/10 do not recommend)
  • released my learning project - the result was:
    • bookshare.so - the simplest way to share your favorite books with friends
    • Iā€™m soft-monetizing this through Amazon Affiliate links and so far have made ~$30 šŸ˜…
  • Started renovating my home-office
  • Enjoying life in the countryside and lots of garden work
Ā 

June

  • Started freelancing two days/week as a Software Solution Engineer (as a self-taught developer, this was a big moment)
  • Continuing home-office renovations (learning a ton from my Dad because Iā€™m not very handy (yet))
  • Building a Personal Knowledge Management System and Personal Productivity System in Notion (more soon!)
  • Set up this site
  • Started a new workout routine & diet (still going strong!)
Ā 

July

  • Freelanced a bunch more
  • Crossed $500 in revenue with NotionReads
  • Got a lot more serious with my new workout routine
Ā 

August

  • Went on vacation šŸ”
  • Finally wrote the first blog post on this site
Ā 
Ā 
Ā