2023 Year In Review

    $ December 29, 2023

    As has been my custom for the past thirteen years, I like to spend a bit of time at the end of the year reflecting on the year that has been, looking ahead to the year that is to come, and noting down these reflections for posterity.

    Professionally

    Lemon Squeezy

    Well. What a year it’s been for Lemon Squeezy. I know I said the same thing last year. However, this year blew 2022 out of the water!

    It all started with what became known internally as “the great Gumroad migration”. Gumroad (one of our main competitors) dramatically increased their prices in January, which led a lot of merchants to look for a different solution for selling digital products. At the same time, we were hitting product-market-fit and became a serious alternative in the online payments space next to Paddle and even Stripe. Safe to say, none of us had much of a break last Christmas.

    The result was incredible growth in the first six months of the year (750%+). It was easily the most crazy, exhilarating, and intense 6-9 months of my career. Working evenings and weekends became standard practice, and it often felt like we were drowning in our success, holding on for dear life. Thankfully, things did ease up towards the end of the year, but the growth didn’t slow down. We ended up growing 2500%+ in the month to December, with our team growing from 2-12 (excluding co-founders) over the same period.

    During all of this chaos, we were constantly fielding acquisition offers and inbound interest from VCs. In March, we even went as far as raising a series A round of funding, thinking we’d need the money to keep the whole thing afloat. We secured term sheets with a $50m post-money valuation, which was a nice bit of validation for us. In the end, in a twist of what may be complete madness, we turned it down(!) and continued under our own steam, eventually reaching profitability by the end of the year. If you want to know about our raise and why we turned it down, listen to JR’s Make Lemonade podcast episode where he goes into detail about what happened.

    Amongst all this, we continued to improve the platform and build out our product features. We launched our affiliates platform in March, added teams support in April, released a Javascript SDK in July, added support for usage-based billing in August, added a customer portal in September, and added support for checkout/email/store customisation in November. Not to mention a slew of other bug fixes and improvements, expanded API, documentation, etc., we released. There is too much to mention here, so see the changelog for a complete rundown.

    I also want to note how proud I am of the team we’ve built. It’s full of talented, dedicated, and genuinely great people with whom it’s a pleasure to work every day. Without them, we couldn’t have gotten as far as we did this year.

    All-in-all, it’s been an incredible year for Lemon Squeezy and myself as a co-founder + CTO of a hyper-growth startup. I’ve learned so much about startups, funding, growing a team, leading a team, founder strategy, dealing with stress, and everything in between. Crazy but exhilarating. I honestly can’t wait to see what we achieve in 2024!

    Personal Projects

    Like last year, I didn’t have much time for side projects this year. Although, towards the end of the year, I did manage to launch CodeCompanion in September and re-built my old Cow Launcher game (originally released in 2014) in December. Cow Launcher was completely rebuilt using the Unity game engine, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

    Personally

    This year, it felt like my career took centre stage in my life, which maybe isn’t a surprise given my age and stage. However, I always try to keep a good work/life balance and remember there’s more to life than business/financial success. Some personal highlights from this year included:

    • Joshua turned 7 and Grace turned 4

    • I bought myself a new toy (Audi A5 Coupe Black-edition)

    • We had a great summer holiday in Keswick

    • We celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary

    • Joshua “signed” for our local football team

    • I started coaching for Joshua’s school football team

    Last year, I got on top of my mental health, and I continued to be thankful for the big difference and improvement this year, particularly around my IBS, which has also improved dramatically. I really noticed this during the first 6-9 months of the year when work was a bit insane. I coped much better than I expected. However, I eventually hit a bit of burnout at the start of Dec, which is unsurprising. My main focus for next year is getting fit and losing weight. Wish me luck.

    Looking ahead to 2024

    At this point, 2024 is looking pretty exciting. Lemon Squeezy seems poised to have another incredible year, and I can’t wait to see what it brings. We also have some exciting non-work things planned, including converting our garage into a new home office in January.

    As always, it is my prayer that in 2024, I will continue to walk closely with God and that he will continue to strengthen, encourage and grow me in spiritual maturity. I am so thankful to Him for how He has sustained us this past year, and I pray that he will continue to equip us for whatever 2024 might bring.

    Wishing you all a Happy New Year and best wishes for 2024 🎉🎆🎉