2024 was my second year working full-time has a UX/UI designer and the year I launched Motion Gurus, my second agency focused on creating Rive animations for SaaS founders.

Financially it was once again a solid year. I continue to do what I most love, to design and work with startup founders, and I'm insanely lucky I can make a living doing so.

This was also the year of my longest bike trip ever: The Non Plan Plan. This trip changes my life forever and open a whole new way of traveling and adventuring.

And finally, it was the year where I exponencially improved my Dutch speaking skills and started working once a week from Startup Nijmegen, the most amazing cowork I've ever worked from in my life.

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Revenue

Total revenue in 2024 was €96k. The breakdown per income stream was:

• Product Alchemy: €89k
• Motion Gurus: €7k

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My kick-ass clients this year were:

• Product Alchemy
  • ‍Fluidstack‍
  • Wheel‍
  • Struck‍
  • CloudNC‍
  • Meal Garden‍
  • Pixyle
  • It Goes Forward
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• Motion Gurus‍
  • Colony
  • GrowthMentor
  • Stackit Digital

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What worked

10'ing my Dutch speaking skills

I've lived in the Netherlands for almost 10 years and until the beginning of 2024 I could understand Dutch effortlessly, yet speaking was still a big challenge.

The time had come to get rid of that mental block and gain speaking fluency. My learning hack: I signed up at a cowork and kindly asked everyone to please not talk to me in English.

The Dutch have two very characteristic traits: they are extremely friendly and they love to practice their English. To practice your Dutch with a Dutch person you have to be strict.

Luckily it worked and I'm proud to say I've gained full Dutch fluency. I still sometime struggle finding my words and make silly grammatical mistakes, but it doesn't matter.

After all, 90% of learning a language is exercising the subtle art of not giving a fuck.

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My marketing and sales playbook

My personal marketing playbook is at this point completely validated for me. To the point where I can take a sabbatical at any point, resume after a month and revenue quickly recovers. My top 3 sales strategies are:

1. Offering free work
2. Posting on Linkedin and adding voraciously startup founders
3. Offering a money-back guarantee.

If you are keen on reading in detail how I get clients, here is my entire playbook explained.

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What Didn't

Social media addiction

In 2024 my Linkedin addiction and screen time in general was out of control. This is a number one objective for 2025. Nothing else to me at this point is more important than loosing my dependency on my phone and screens.

My tactics to curve this:

1. No more looking a the news from my phone or computer. My only source of news is the 30 minute weekly summary which is aired every Sunday on the Dutch channel RTL. No more reloading 10 times a day CNN, BCC or any other source of news media.
2. No more opening Linkedin from my phone and when using Linkedin from my computer use an Chrome extension that blocks the timeline.
3. When I'm home no more screens from 8pm to 8am.
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Sleeping habits

I'm ok sleeper, I get between 7 and 8 hours every night yet by Friday I'm completely exhausted from the week. My hypothesis is that this has to do with my excess of screen time specially before going to sleep and right after waking up. I'll report in my 2026 summary how my new screen time habits have impacted my sleep and general wellbeing.

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What's next

2025 is lining up to be an extremely fun year. I'm kicking it off traveling to Chile and Costa Rica and launching my a new product: Userbird.

Userbird is a platform that makes it extremely easy for founder to get user feedback. User feedback is everything when it comes to building delightful products yet often we make it so tough for our clients to share their feedback. If you are a SaaS founder and want to give it a try send me a message and I'm happy to help you with an extended free trial.