2023 Recap: sold SaaS, finished marathon & received MSc.

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What a year it's been. Little did I know how many bucket list items I could check in 2023 at the beginning of the year. If I had to sum up the past twelve months with one word, it would be: finishing.

To keep it short, these were the major achievements of 23:

  1. I sold my first Software-as-a-Service product ThreadStart.io

  2. I graduated from university with an MSc. in business informatics

  3. I finished my first marathon in 4:07

Selling ThreadStart

At the beginning of the year, I was deep into growing ThreadStart and still had big plans of extending it into other social networks. But then APIgate happened, when Twitter's new leadership completely changed how developers could access the official Twitter API. Around that time I first thought about moving to greener pastures and starting something else. But I kept going as long as possible, because the project grew on me over the past years, and so did my customers whom I did not want to disappoint.

Eventually, in August my mind was made up and there was no way to keep going with ThreadStart. A decision needed to be made. In a lucky turn of events, I received an offer to sell it, right when I believed I would have to shut it down. And so, I managed to find the proper ending to my first SaaS endeavor.

Finishing my studies

At that time I was still enrolled at university for my master's degree, despite having all but stopped when I began building ThreadStart. So, right after selling ThreadStart, I reached out to my university supervisor to see if I could quickly finish the remaining parts of my thesis. Well... a couple of weeks later, I sat in front of my finished, printed and bound thesis. Sweet!

Running from stress and towards my goals

My final achievement of this year is the result of having to find a way to counter the stress of running my startup. And what worked best for me was running. Whenever times got insanely stressful and work took over I would go for a run to find some calm. And boy, were there a lot of these times. So, eventually, I figured I'd reward myself for all these hours and miles spent running by doing something everybody thinks about at least once in their life: run a marathon.

After trialing four months of dedicated practice I finished my first marathon in 4:07 hours. Yay! 🥳