2024 review - downsizing and regrouping

Last year was my most difficult year as an entrepreneur. I feel like I’ve hit rock bottom but… luckily managed to bounce back. Hopefully now the only way is up and to the right! But yeah, 2024 was something else… that’s why I procrastinated writing this summary, my 11th one and published it only now, at the end of March, when we’re already 3 months in 2025… This will be my most candid yearly summary yet… hopefully this much transparency will serve other struggling entrepreneurs:

• Roller-coaster of running my business…
• Downsizing and letting 3 people go…
• How it went down and what happened next…
• Regrouping - Nozbe reunion and rest of the year…
• Nozbe as product got upgraded significantly!
• Back to regular podcasting
• Shortcuts - more advanced Shortcuts are coming
• M4 Gear - new iPad Pro and Mac Mini
• Sports - consistent but nothing to brag about…
• Trips - first time in Taiwan!
• Concerts - Maná, Ed Sheeran, Placebo!
• Weekends with my wife
• What a tough year 2024 was!

Roller-coaster of running my business…

The whole year was a roller-coaster for Nozbe. Despite pretty stable growth, for the first time in my entrepreneurship journey we had cashflow problems and had to go into debt to cover our costs. It was frustrating.

The steady growth was there over the first four months of the year and all the parameters were slowly growing, but the fixed costs were unforgiving. Almost every other month my company had to borrow at least some money to meet payroll. This meant we were constantly in debt. After so many profitable years of running my company, it felt like a brutal cold shower. 🥶

Why this all happened? Many contributing factors collided. The Nozbe Classic user base kept shrinking. While the new Nozbe kept growing, it wasn’t fast enough. There’s much more competition on the market and the competitors are well-funded so they have lots of marking dollars to burn. It’s just really really hard to keep attracting new customers. It’s virtually impossible to go viral or even get recommendations.

Yet, whenever I talked to my customers, they’d tell me how much they loved our app and how it made them more productive. However, it’s not enough to have a great product these days. And you just have too keep your costs to minimum. You have to be lean as hell to survive. So I had to shrink the team… But:

How do you let people go when you really like and value them and have been working with them for the last many years? And who do you let go?

Downsizing and letting 3 people go…

After a few good months, in May and June of last year our growth stalled and this meant I had to make a drastic decision. For the first time in my entrepreneurial life I had to let people go to cut costs. I couldn’t sleep. I felt awful. My stomach hurt. Everything hurt. I felt like a failure.

I went on a lunch with one of my closest mentors, Adam, and he helped me see what had to be done. Talking to him helped me separate myself emotionally from all this and see clearly what needed to be done. Then I talked to my closest advisors within the company: Iwona, Tom and my dad… and got their support.

I had to make a deep cut and let go of 3 people at once, in order to cut fixed costs related to their salaries in the future. I also had to communicate to the rest of the team that there will be no more cuts and the rest of the team is staying.

Now, who do you let go? Well, it wasn’t so much about who, because all of the people were great professionals, but it was more about which position in the company we reduce. It was about: without which roles can we keep going? In the end I decided to let go of:

Rafal, VP of Product - this was the hardest. Over more than a decade we’ve been working together and we became close friends. And he is an amazing product manager. However, I realized that for us to keep going we could distribute his responsibilities among our QA engineer, lead designer and me. I also believed that after a decade at Nozbe, Rafal could benefit from a change and would grow more at a slightly bigger company. If you’re looking for a great product manager, look no further and contact Rafal. His enthusiasm, professionalism, work ethic and eagerness to learn are all contagious. Just check one of past episodes of NoOffice podcast to get a feel of how he rolls. I miss him a lot.

Dominika, customer support - we had to shrink our customer support team and it was very hard, too. Dominika is amazing, you could have met her on one of my webinars, like this one. We were confident she’s gonna find a great job quickly and she did.

Ewelina, marketing - again, we decided to reduce our marketing team and she was the most junior member on our team. She’s a great person and whatever you throw at her, she’ll do it with a smile.

That’s it. I didn’t want to let go of any of our programmers as I didn’t want the quality of our software to suffer. After all, Nozbe is our customers’ trusted productivity system!

How it went down and what happened next…

At the last day of July I scheduled video calls with all three members of our team and broke the news. I apologized for doing this. I admitted I let them down. I assured them I’d give them glowing reviews and would help them in any way I could to find new jobs. I also reiterated to them that they’ll be paid full 3-month severance package. I asked them to take a week to pass their responsibilities on to other people on the team so that they get a fully-paid 3-month period to find new jobs.

That’s the thing, when you let people go in July, you’ll still be paying their salaries through October, so the cost-savings are coming only in November… so the quicker you make a decision the better for the company.

Before I had video calls with the 3 downsized team members I recorded a video vlog to my team, explaining the situation and assuring them that these were the cuts and there will be no more. Once I concluded my calls with the people who were let go, I published the video to the team.

Regrouping - Nozbe reunion and rest of the year…

After all that I took some much-needed vacation time in August to try to finally get some sleep and rest emotionally. And let people digest the situation and get accustomed to our smaller team of 15. I made sure we still were on for our annual Nozbe reunion in early October in Warsaw so we could hang out together and regroup.

There were also some positives that emerged after all this. Our growth picked up already in August and didn’t stop until the end of the year. We had a great Black Friday promo and managed to pay off all of our debts and even finished the year with a small profit!

And while the team was in shock and confused at the beginning, over the next months they assured me they’d got my back and regrouped completely.

Additionally, as the sales picked up and we lowered our costs, we could start re-investing in the team again. At our reunion I realized that some of our team members had really outdated hardware because we were scrapping by. Slowly but surely we started ordering stuff. We even managed to raise everyone’s salaries for 2025. We bounced back.

However, two people still decided to leave in the meantime, that’s why we are hiring now to cover these roles in programming and customer support. Apply if you think you’re a match.

Anyway, 2024 is over and now things are looking up and I promised myself that I’d make everything in my power to never have to go through something like this ever again.

I don’t want to downsize and let go of people I value and like. I don’t want to borrow money to meet payroll. I want to stay lean and growing.

That’s the plan for 2025 and beyond. Wish me luck!

Nozbe as product got upgraded significantly!

Overall it wasn’t a bad year for Nozbe as a product. We introduced Messages in Nozbe where you can chat with individual team members. Soon we’re shipping team-wide messages as well. This makes Nozbe a perfect app to run a company - you have all the organization (projects and tasks) and all the communication (comments and messages) in one app. On every device!

The old “Nozbe Personal” has been renamed to Nozbe Classic and now we’re migrating many more users to the new Nozbe. If you still like Nozbe Classic, we welcome you to try out new Nozbe, but if you’re not ready to switch, no problem, the Classic is here to stay for you.

Some additional stats:

• We increased our new Nozbe paid accounts by 40%
• Our MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) from new Nozbe grew by 60% (plan was to double it, but we didn’t manage - maybe this year?)
• Paid seats in new Nozbe almost doubled. This means that not only single users are using Nozbe, but there are many more teams and businesses using it, with an average of 4 seats per team.

The growth is there, but we are hungry for more and I hope this year will be our breakthrough year and would put Nozbe on a path to predictable growth. There are so many small teams and businesses that should use Nozbe to get everything organized!

Back to regular podcasting

I haven’t fired myself from the VP of Marketing role yet… and I’ll be running marketing for foreseeable future. As part of our regular content strategy, we are recording a new episode of both NoOffice FM and NieMaBiura (in Polish) podcasts every two weeks.

I’ve been also semi-regularly co-hosting one of the leading lifestyle podcasts in Poland - Nadgryzieni and for 2025 I’ve been officially welcomed as a regular member of the crew together with Wojtek and Thomas. We record every week on Friday morning Polish time.

Shortcuts - more advanced Shortcuts are coming

As we have a smaller team I’m also working on being more efficient so over the past months I’ve improved many of my Shortcuts. My most used ones like Journal, Watchnotes and Clipboard manager had to be rewritten from scratch for iOS18. I still haven’t come around to publishing them but stay tuned. Over the next few months they will drop for you to enjoy for free.

M4 Gear - new iPad Pro and Mac Mini

After 3 years I’ve upgraded from 13” M1 iPad Pro to the M4 iPad Pro and it’s been a big deal. My eldest daughter inherited the old iPad and she loves it, but I love my new one even more. Its thinness, lightness and battery life have brought me joy when I needed it.

Throughout 2024 I had many ideas how to improve my home office but only at the beginning of 2025 I managed to remodel it completely featuring an M4 Mac Mini at its heart. My recording studio got so much better.

My new main backpack became Peak Design’s Outdoor 25L and my go-to small backpack for short trips became Peak Design’s ZIP 15L.

Other than these changes, I’m still rocking the same iPhone 15 Pro and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and I love both of these.

Sports - consistent but nothing to brag about…

Last year I reported struggling with my weight at 75kg and now I’m at 80kg… so things are not looking great. I think being 45+ is not helping me here. I find it really difficult to lose weight. Slow carb diet no longer helps me, so now I’ve reduced my portion sizes and I’m learning to eat slower. Hope it helps a little. Would love to finish 2025 back at 75kg at least.

Now, as to sports, I did OK, but far off from my goals. The difficult year in business hasn’t helped me much:

• 🏃‍♂️ Running - 432km total or 36km per month is actually not that bad, better than in the last few years. I think 400km of running a year should remain my realistic goal for now. (10K7, P2P5)
• 🚶‍♂️ Walking - 305km total is my absolute best record. I’d like to keep aiming at 300km annually, which means I have longer walks with my wife and kids and I also do more meetings while walking.
• 🚴‍♂️ Cycling - 925km total is my absolute worst since I started doing sports more regularly. I couldn’t find the time to cycle. I think I should be able to get back at it and will make 1200km a year (or 100km a month) a minimum goal for 2025. (R3, RV7, SV6, M1)
• 🏊‍♂️ Swimming - 9.5km total is again my worst in history. I need to get back to swimming. Unfortunately in 2025 things are not looking up as I haven’t swam a meter yet and we’re 3 months in! Still, let’s re-engage and juts beat 15km total in 2025, shall we?
• 🎾 Tennis - 46 hours total which is perfect and just slightly less than the year prior. I love playing tennis, I very often feel I need to hit this furry ball hard once in a while. My realistic goal remains above 40 hours per year or slightly less than an hour a week.
• 💪 Weight training - 9.5 hours total which doesn’t look so good, but compared to previous years of only 5 hours per year is pretty decent. This year I’m hoping to finally break the record of 20 hours per year. Hope it accelerates my weight loss.
• ⛷️ Skiing - 46km total which means I’ve doubled last year. As I mentioned before, I’m slowly but surely spreading the ski love among my family and this time around I went with my 2 youngest daughters to ski and we had lots of fun.

Overall if you calculate all these scores, my overall fitness score is above 4K, or 4149 to be exact, which is not so bad. However, I’ve had years above 6K as well in the past, but let’s be conservative and try to hit my new goals and get past 4.5K points in 2025. I’ve also completed ONE triathlon by myself and I already signed up for another one in May!

One of the highlights of last year was the fact that I started running with my middle daughter, 12-year-young Emilia. She loves running with daddy and we really enjoy our time together every Tuesday. She can already run 5km no problem! I’m so proud of her!

As a bonus I managed to get away for 2 hiking weekends with my fellow buddies/dads and it was a blast. Hiking together, hanging out and talking is always a blast.

Trips - first time in Taiwan!

I haven’t been to Asia in a while so I managed to combine business with pleasure and take my family to Taiwan. The trip was epic, I also recorded lots of videos for my Channel and met with my co-worker, Emilia.

Other than that, as a family we also managed to visit Tenerife for the first time and as usual, rent an RV Camper to visit Sweden and Norway. Sweden was amazing as usual, Norway was too rainy for my tastes. One last trip in the year was Belgium and Germany.

Concerts - Maná, Ed Sheeran, Placebo!

My dream came true as I could see my favorite Spanish-singing rock band, Maná. I used to use their lyrics to learn Spanish. Yes, I know they’re Mexican, but seriously, their lyrics rock.

My youngest daughter insisted on going to see Ed Sheeran concert and it was amazing. He’s really a one-man-orchestra! And my eldest daughter insisted on seeing Placebo at a festival in Łódź. So cool. Their Japanese is better, if you know what I mean.

Weekends with my wife

As every year despite being busy and raising 3 children and having stressful time in our jobs, we still managed to get away for 4 weekends just two of us. First in January, then in May and later in June and November.

The planning weekend in January didn’t go so well, but the other trips were really cool. We didn’t manage to get away for a whole week this year, but these 4 weekends together are good enough!

What a tough year 2024 was!

Now that I’m first quarter into 2025 I can see clearly that this will be a better year for me, for Nozbe and for everyone around. There’s still lots of work to be done. I’m still not completely out of the woods just yet, but I’m getting there.

I hope next year I’m gonna publish a summary in January and it’s not gonna be that long. And that painful. Here’s hoping! 💪