Last year was the first time I ever did a review of the past year and set some goals for 2024. I will now do it again, review how I did in 2024, and set some new goals for 2025. If you would like to check out last year’s post as a reference, you can do so here.
My overall strategy last year and for the next year is: MAXIMIZE FREEDOM <-> BUILD A LEGACY
2024 Review
- Overall physical health. I wanted to focus on overall physical health instead of my past approach of doing a specific exercise type and focusing on maximizing my progress.
- Played squash 1-3 times per week
- Strength workouts 1-2 times per week
- Something I did for my physical health was to do loads of blood tests to get a baseline of my health biomarkers. (This could be an entire post on its own, but the point is to identify areas where biomarkers are not optimal, focus on improving them, and retest each year.) - it is a bit expensive, mine cost about R3400 to do, but I think it’s a good investment in your health.
- I implemented a supplement regime during the year and I take the following supplements each day:
- Creatine
- Omega 3’s
- Magnesium
- Vitamin D
- Zinc
- Whey Protein
- Tongkat Ali
- Sharpen my coding axe. My goal was to code every day in 2024. I did not code some days on the weekends, and I took some time off in June and December, but I still coded on 71% of the days in 2024. I have upskilled myself so much and I am excited to see what 2025 has in store. I worked on the following projects:
- Daily Bulk Wine - a platform that connects bulk wine buyers and sellers. I mostly did maintenance.
- Daily Sync - an application that manages stock & order fulfillment for The Daily Wine & Koelenhof Wine Cellar’s online orders.
- SendKit - an email marketing service I built to replace the email marketing software used for all my email marketing and allowed me to cut ±R6000 off costs each month.
- Built a marketing website for Carlsdale Wines.
- Built a marketing website for SnapSnap Media.
- Double down on income streams. An overall goal I had for 2024 was to double down on my existing income streams.
- Daily Bulk Wine continued running at a steady pace, but it was a slow year for bulk wine due to an extreme shortage of white wine in South Africa, which meant there was much less wine to be sold. That being said, we still had a few deals and brought in some welcome commissions.
- Kiki & Co Scrub sales slowed down quite a bit. I believe this can be attributed to us running much fewer sales in 2024 and cutting the ad spend significantly (which might have been a mistake)
- Nurudev (a property investment company I started with 6 of my university friends) was at a very critical point, but the great news is that we reached shareholder alignment during the year and we decided to double down on our strategy, reduced the number of directors to increase the speed at which we make decisions, and invested more money to grow the company quicker.
- GoKiddo. In 2023 I had a project to build an app where parents can find fun things to do with their kids near them. I had a goal of focusing on marketing it in 2024 but in the end, I never got to it and spent no time on it. At this moment in time, I am not planning on working on it again.
- The Daily Wine continued being my primary income stream and it was also the one income stream where I learned the most and had the most growth. Here are some of the highlights:
- Koelenhof Wine Cellar’s online sales consulting did great, and we sold 26 times more wine online compared to before I started consulting.
- I hired an executive assistant and it has been one of the greatest choices ever. You can read more about it here.
- Employed a dedicated employee in our warehouse to handle receiving of stock, restocks, dispatching of orders, which has all been made possible and streamlined by the Daily Sync software I built during the year.
- Started SnapSnap Media, a photography studio that focuses on product photography. I invested a lot of money into equipment, but now my business partner is having doubts. I am debating whether I need to grow this business or just keep the equipment and use it for internal photography at The Daily Wine.
- While the extra employees were/are definitely an extra expense to the company, I believe it has allowed me to add incredible value to the company and cut costs by giving me a lot more freedom to code and build solutions to problems we have.
- The Daily Wine had an incredible year of online sales, our best year to date. I attribute this to figuring out what The Daily Wine’s niche is. We are not a fancy wine shop catering to la di da clients. We find the best wines at great prices and deliver them to the clients nationdwide. That’s it.
- I wanted to put down my operating system on paper for future generations. My blog posts do this, but I also started a kind of working document which I aim to update consistently as I change who I am and how I do things. I believe it’s important to continually evolve and mold yourself. You can check it out here.
- I largely stuck to my investment strategy for 2024:
- During the first part of the year, I invested R1000 pm into a Tax-Free Savings Account. Later on, I changed this up a bit by rather investing a larger amount into a retirement annuity (R3100 pm), and benefiting from tax benefits, (thanks to my amazing wife for the advice).
- I invested R500 per month into Bitcoin. Bitcoin had an incredible year in 2024 and increased by 150%. Even though I only invested a small amount each month, I still benefited a lot from this. I did make some mistakes with the Bitcoin during the year though. I tried to trade the volatility a bit (buy low, sell high, repeat) but in the end, this only ended up costing me money, as I mistimed one of the bull runs and missed out on more than 50% of the growth. I would have had much better returns if I just bought the Bitcoin and forgot about it.
- We invested a lot of money in improving our primary residence (paved in front of the house, replaced the garage doors, and the garden is looking incredible) and while the interest rates have started coming down again, we decided to keep our bond payment a bit higher to pay off the bond sooner and we also created a home fund, where we save a little bit of money each month (R1500 pm) which can be used for maintenance and larger projects like repainting our house.
- Invested R1800 monthly into Nurudev (our property company).
- I also removed some of my money from my equities portfolio and bought 4 cattle, as I have had some incredible returns on livestock in the past.
Please note, I am not a financial advisor, and these points are my own personal strategy and by no means financial advice.
Goals for 2025
It’s always difficult to set goals. It’s easy to think that you need to set new audacious goals, but as I get “older” (I am turning 30 this year), I realize that I only need to double down or optimize my goals from the last year, and the growth and progress will continue to snowball. I am still focusing overall on maximizing freedom and building a legacy.
- Focus on overall physical health
- Continue playing squash at least 2 times per week
- Make a commitment to my strength workouts. Don’t skip them to work. I am also going to expand my home gym a bit to make the workouts easier. I want to buy a new bench press and add a pull-up bar. (I have done a lot of research and it looks like having more muscle mass is one of the most important metrics for health as you age)
- Continue with my supplementation regime:
- Creatine
- Omega 3’s
- Magnesium
- Vitamin D
- Zinc
- Whey Protein
- Tongkat Ali
- Coding every day. I am going to continue focusing on coding every day.
- SendKit still has a lot of room for improvement, and I will continue making it better. In the future, if I am happy with the state of the software, I might consider making it available to other businesses on a subscription basis.
- There are some ways I can definitely improve Daily Bulk Wine and I am excited to implement these changes.
- Daily Sync is always evolving and I am excited to implement new features to make it even better this year. It is becoming the heart beat of The Daily Wine.
- Something that’s very annoying at my squash club is that they are still using a pen and paper system for bookings. This leads to a lot of issues and I have been itching for a while to build a simple solution to use at our club (first I will need to pitch it to the manager though) and who knows, maybe I can market it to squash clubs all over the world after I build it. I already bought the domain name squashbooking.com just in case haha.
- As always I am going to try and double down on my income streams, but I think it’s also important to only double down on the things that are working. Otherwise, you are wasting your time. I will be focusing on these:
- Daily Bulk Wine
- Improve the platform by making it easier to use
- Improving outreach by making it more personal
- Kiki & Co
- Focus on building momentum and keeping it
- Increase ad spend & marketing efforts
- Nurudev
- Double down on paying off our first property by making a lump sum contribution in February and by increasing monthly contributions
- As soon as the first property is paid off, then we have a cash cow which will greatly accelerate the momentum and allow us to buy our 2nd, 3rd, etc.
- The Daily Wine
- Continue building software to cut costs and increase the profitability of the company.
- Continue consulting for Koelenhof Wine Cellar, and growing the online sales. We have had incredible growth, but I don’t think we have reached the ceiling yet.
- Focus on making the business antifragile by making us less reliant on our couriers and our advertising platforms.
- Courier costs and advertising costs (on Facebook & Instagram) are our 2 largest expenses. If they increase their prices a lot (like our main courier partner did in 2024, by having 3 price increases and making it impossible to use them, forcing us to use other couriers, which led to massive service failures to our customers).
- We cannot afford to be exposed that much to other businesses raising their prices.
- I can lower the vulnerability with Facebook/Instagram by focusing on email marketing (SendKit) and maybe investigate some other channels.
- I think I can lower the vulnerability with couriers by doing our own local deliveries for Koelenhof Wine Cellar and The Daily Wine. About 50% of our deliveries are in the Western Cape and by delivering these orders ourselves, we can control the service customers are receiving and we can drastically cut the costs.
- The local deliveries are a very difficult problem to solve, but I am sure we can optimize the routes and deliver a great customer experience if I can build the features into Daily Sync to work out the routes, let customers know when their packages will arrive, and allow them to reschedule, etc.
- This will mean purchasing a vehicle and hiring another employee, but if after doing the calculations it makes sense, then it’s a no-brainer.
- Daily Bulk Wine
- Investment Strategy
- Continue investing in a Retirement Annuity each month (R3100 pm for now, but it might change if I pay myself more)
- Increase monthly Bitcoin investment to R1000 pm
- Increase investment in Nurudev to R2000 pm
- Continue buying/selling livestock
- Continue improving our primary residence and saving R1500 pm into home fund for maintenance etc.
And that’s my goals for 2025. Goodluck with your goals for the year and remember:
If you make 1% improvement per day, you will be 37.78 times better in a year. Learn why here.