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Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Every month inside the Lab, I do what I call a monthly retro. It's short for retrospective. This is something that I learned when I was in product in technology, I should say. And the idea is that on a regular basis you look back at what you have just done so that you can learn from it, course correct and move forward. And so in my monthly retros, what I look at is here are the good things that happened, here's how I performed against my goals, here are some concerns that I currently have, and here's some changes that I'm going to make moving forward, along with goals for the next month. I have been doing this practice without fail since February 2022. I have a 20 to 45 minute retro in the lab for month since February 2022, which recently actually looked back and watched some of the older ones and it's really interesting to see just how far I've come. But anyway, I just posted the December Retro a couple weeks ago and it comes on the back of my annual review, which if you subscribe to the newsletter, maybe you've already received. If not, you should subscribe to the newsletter. There's a link in the show notes, but my 2025 year in review has gotten a lot of really good feedback because it was very honest, very honest, transparent as I typically am, but also just very honest about how challenging 2025 felt mentally to me. So I made my year in review, then I did my December retro, which you'll hear here, which kind of gives a fusion of those two reflection exercises. And I thought to start the year I would share that because I think you'll benefit from it. It'll also give you a peek at what it's like to be inside the lab. Retros are available to any member, basic standard or so if you enjoy this, and I really think this is the type of content more people want and need to hear. But it's uncomfortable to share all of this publicly all the time. So I don't want to share a retro publicly every month, but I will do it in the lab every month and this is what that experience is like. So this is my December retro, looking back on the month of December as well as a little bit, 2025, the year linked in the Show Notes, is my year in review. If you haven't read that already, there's also a link to learn more about the Lab, because if you enjoy this, you would probably enjoy being in the and around other folks who are sharing reflections like this. We'll get to that retro right after this. The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data Microsoft 365 copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365Copilot hello, welcome to 2026. Oh my goodness, 2026. Crazy. I gotta say, I am feeling just mentally so good on the other side of doing my year in review, and what I learned in that process is that I really should have dove into the psychological struggle that was Looking at the whole story of my year earlier. If you haven't read my year review, I'll link it here below, but the headline was I spent a lot of the year telling myself that 2025 was a step back, even a failure. And it was something I struggled with pretty much constantly because 2024 was such a strong year financially. It was such a huge step up from 2023 that as soon as it turned into 2025, January, I was just so afraid that I was not going to be able to match that or exceed that, which is something I didn't have experience with for the last five years. For the last five years it was growth, growth, growth. And I just looked at those numbers and thought, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that again with the new constraints we have in our life and the new priorities I want to take on. And so much of my internal monologue was that the success of this business is measured by revenue, and if revenue is declining, then the business is declining, the business is less successful. So I spent a lot of time looking through each of my retros for the last 12 months, looking at the numbers giving a more complete accounting for 2025. And my perspective has changed a lot. And that's also benefited by the fact that I've really taken the last almost three weeks off, almost entirely. The Bootcamp we had a call on the 29th, but before that our last live session was I think the 18th or something. So basically since the 18th, I've been pretty much offline and thinking and prioritizing my health and exercising and what do you know when you give yourself some space and you exercise, you feel better physically, you feel better mentally, and I feel so good entering this year, I'm so excited. So I'm excited to break down the Last month of 2025 December, what we learned there and I'll even give a little bit of what I'm looking forward to this year and of course January in particular. So let's dive in, head over the numbers. December ended up being our highest month of revenue all year, which is great. And actually this doesn't even tell the full story because we had a good number of folks join the lab in the last few days of the month and that'll all be captured in January's numbers. So December ended up being a really, really good month. Last December was also a great month at almost $100,000, so it didn't quite hit that, but really good month and ultimately we landed. I think there's some reconciling I still need to do on accounting for the year, but about $767,000 in revenue for the year. And so as I shared in my year in review, which again I'll link, revenue this year was down 8% and expenses were up 5%. Revenue was down 8% because of a drop in digital products and sponsorship expenses were up 5% because of the eight month experiment to change our approach to YouTube, which unfortunately was not successful but expensive nonetheless. So very pleased with how the year ended here and from the rest of the numbers started getting some some growth in email. Again, not much to write home about on the podcast front or really any of this. You know. A big story for the year was affiliate revenue increased quite a bit year over year, revenue was up in memberships quite a bit and sponsorship was down because I chose to have less sponsorship now. Big growth in members in the lab. In December we had 30 new members total, 20 of which are on the basic plan, nine on standard, one on VIP. And a lot of the folks who joined the basic tier in December actually rolled their Bootcamp purchase into the Basic tier. So the strategy of does a live cohort introduce folks to what a community experience is like and will they want to continue in the lab? That proved to be successful in a pretty big way, especially in the Basic tier. We had a couple folks upgrade to Standard and VIP as well. So all in all, my Black Friday strategy in retrospect, much stronger than initially thought. Still way more effort than last year when I simply ran a discount strategy on Black Friday and didn't have delivery on the back end. But now we have the signature product Bootcamp in the lab. You'll see that in the study. We have signature product here and it's now viewable as a course experience. So anyone that comes in a lab can work through this and develop their own signature product and then start posting in the lab to get feedback on their next steps. I also closed out our behind the scenes experience that I started in, I think March, where I started thinking about the signature product program that is now also a course experience inside the study. So I'm starting to clean up a little bit. What was a growth of new spaces in the lab? It was starting to get a little bit messy. We had space groups for the bootcamp. We had space groups for this behind the scenes area. And I basically flushed these areas of folks who weren't specifically in those groups. And now we're back to the study. The basic lounge for folks in basic small groups. If you're in one of these, our offline events, if you've attended those platforms, lounge and lobby. Still some cleanup that I want to do this month, but we'll talk about more of that in our town hall. So that's the numbers. The other thing I am proud of is I got back on the strength workout train in December. I've been working with Claude. Claude has been giving me a fitness program week by week, which is really great because I record my numbers in the spreadsheet which it gave me, which candidly was a better spreadsheet than the physical trainer that I hired earlier in the year. And I just copy and paste these results and I say, hey, here is my results from today's workout. That analyzes it. It tells me how I'm doing it. You know, AI wants to make you feel good. So especially when you have created an AI personal trainer, it wants to make you feel good. But it's giving me specific recommendations of here's where you should start as far as weights and reps. So it's been really positive. Then I can ask questions like last night we were ordering dinner in. It was a long day and so I said, is it better for me to order Taco Bell or raising canes from a macros perspective? And it broke it down and it told me and I could just do that instantly. So another example of AI being pretty transformational. Anyway, let's look at our goals. So I hit my revenue goal. I made the bootcamp so compelling. People wanted to upgrade. The feedback on that has been fantastic. I put out a survey for feedback. 31 responses so far. A lot of 8, nines and tens in the ratings and some really useful feedback here as well. And look at this. How likely are you to join the lab? 10, 10, 10, 10 ten, 10, 10, 10, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10, ten, 10, 10. So live teaching is probably going to be more of a strategy this year because it was fun, I enjoyed it, people liked it, and the results were good. Hit all of my goals otherwise, except for did not publish Paul's episode. Got to record that intro today, but that should be ready to go by next Tuesday. And calendar planning is not fully complete yet. I just keep putting this off, but it's something Mal and I need to sit down and discuss. And we'll bring that into the town hall as well. But what we did put on the calendar, if you're in standard and vip, you'll see that we have our Lab Q and A. I renamed the ALAs Ask the Lab Anything to Lab Q and A because I just think it's more intuitive and I want new folks coming in to know what this session is. It's a Q and A. And it's not just me, it's the lab. So we have two times, one that's more west coast friendly, one that's more Europe friendly. I also added our co working sessions back through the end of the year and we added our town hall, which will be on the 23rd. If you have not attended a town hall before, or even if you have, this is the most important event for you to attend every year in the lab. So I really, really encourage you to attend that if you can. Of course it'll be recorded, but this is a discussion, so I want to hear your opinions. I want to get your feedback on our ideas. I want to hear your ideas. It's really, really important that if you can make it, you do join us. And if you are on the basic tier, I also added our monthly office hours as well as coworking to the calendar through the end of the year. So RSVP to these events if you have not already. Some of the best ways for you to not only get your questions answered, but to meet other people, have some serendipity in your lab experience. Okay, so good things that happen in December. Highest month of revenue for the year. That's great. Bootcamp was a major success. I turned in the second version of the book proposal. It's 67 pages. It looks great. You know, when I turned in the first version, I was like, this is awesome. I turned in the second version and it's much better than the first. So I am awaiting feedback from my agent and her assistant on that. I hope they have minimal edits, but whatever it is, I'm going to tackle it because there's so much leverage in your proposal being as good as it can be. Because a better proposal means more interest. More interest means a better deal. A better deal means better terms. A higher advance. A higher advance means that the publisher is going to put more effort into that book being a success. So as much as this project has been pretty prolonged to this point, it's one of those things where I really want to embrace the last 5 to 10% and make it as great as possible because this is a point of leverage. So I turned it in the week before Christmas. I did not expect to get feedback until the new year. I'm sure this is the first week back for them. I hope to hear in the next two weeks and move forward. I love this chair, this Herman Miller embody office chair. I've had back pain all year and it just doesn't exist between this office chair and doing more exercise on my posterior chain, my posterior leg muscles. My lower back has felt so much better and I just love sitting in it. It's. It's firm. It's like a hug. Big recommend. I don't know if that means this chair is amazing or if my past chair was not great, but I'm gonna keep spreading the gospel because I feel like a whole new person after a day of sitting in this chair. Took a lot of time off and, you know, a week and a half into my three weeks off for December, I was refreshed. I already felt good, and it was a great reminder that it takes less time than you think to take a break or refresh. I was redlining so hard from October 28th through December 18th, because October 28th I posted a retro and said, hey, for Black Friday, I'm going to host the signature product Bootcamp. At that time, I had very little developed and so to prepare, sell it, design the decks, deliver the decks. That whole experience was so intense for a month and a half that I was just so drained by the end of the month. And taking this time off, I feel just so much better. I'm reading a lot more. Mallory got me a Kindle for Christmas and the idea that I have is just to lay books and reading devices in areas of the house that I often sit. So instead of scrolling on my phone, I pick up a book and read it. Or I have several audiobooks now. I haven't listened to nearly as many podcasts, but rarely do I listen to podcasts these days because I'm swapping that for audiobooks in my information diet. And it's just it's just great. I feel more nourished, all things considered. Love that I'm back to strength training because December, really November, December was so stressful. I have now realized over the course of my life that stress shows up as a skin condition for me. And it's embarrassing because it's visible. For our wedding, I got shingles in December, I got some type of, like, dermatitis that is basically just my skin barrier. Having problems and taking some time off has overcome some of that. By the way, I shaved my head. This is the new me. Of course, if I want to wear a hat, I can just easily become a hat guy again. And I've been transitioning that way for a long time. But, yeah, stress shows up in my skin and that's such a bummer that it's good that I identified what it was because it's different areas of my body and it's all related. So I'm glad I identified that and now I have a better protocol for dealing with it. But ultimately I need to lower my stress. We had three Christmases this year. Mal's mom, my parents, and of course our nuclear family. And it's just awesome. Every one of them was such a joy. Obviously, Nora was born last summer, so she had a Christmas last year, but she was so young, she was, you know, five months old, that she didn't really experience Christmas. I felt like she experienced Christmas this year and it was just amazing. I feel like I was a better gift giver this year than last year. So Christmas was a fantastic experience this year. We just hired a part time nanny. We were pretty picky about this and we looked for a long time and we had gotten to the point where Mal was a little bit frustrated with me because she's like, you know what you're looking for? It's going to be really hard to find. To find a really good nanny. They're going to want full time hours and you want to give part time hours. But we found someone who's a perfect fit. We think she's upstairs now. She's starting today. And the idea is she's going to be here five hours a day, three days a week in the morning. So I'm going to get 15 hours in the week of my morning back, which I can do some damage in 15 hours a week in my mornings. And Mal's gonna have more time for herself. We're gonna be able to go out of the house, get breakfast, have our family business meeting. And I think it's gonna be a huge a Big deal for us because she'll also help babysit from time to time. So we'll be able to plan a monthly date night, which we haven't been able to do because we don't have a consistent or trusted babysitter. So I feel like these are all very, very good things. Concerns My annual goals this year were way off. I'll go briefly to my goals dashboard here. If I look at 2025, post 30 YouTube videos, I don't think that was an unreasonable goal. But we posted, I want to say like 14 or 15, like underperformed by a factor of 50% here. This is another good idea that I just didn't align my activities to do this. I think I'm probably gonna roll this forward into 2026 because I think cross promotions are actually a proven effective way to grow your podcast. I'm gonna move that forward. But I didn't action it. I didn't put it into play to do cross promotions with other podcasts that were a good fit. Improve retention for Standard and vip. I actually haven't looked at this to see if that was true. My gut says it was pretty much on par with the year before. So I don't know. Guests on six reputable shows I'll have to count. But I'm pretty sure that also did happen. I mean I didn't do a lot of guesting by design, top line revenue of a million dollars did not hit that. I also wasn't really like inspired by that goal. Six hundred thousand. ARR. We hit five hundred thousand. So we'll roll this forward to 2026. I'm actually setting a goal of seven hundred thousand for 2026. Average 7,500 steps per day. Actually let's look right now. Boom. Eight thousand and seventy eight. So that one happened. Move every day. Pretty close. Not quite there. I did read 12 books. I did update my personal brand. I did not cook 24 meals, I did not plan a trip with friends, I did not plan 12 date nights and I did not start a thousand conversations. So my annual goals. Not great all things considered. Unfortunately, I have been slacking on the podcast. So the tension I had this year with the podcast was there were several times when we posted video episodes on Spotify that performed really well. The typical video episode on Spotify performs two to three times better than an audio only episode. But I had some episodes that were performing up to 10 times better than an audio only episode. So my thought was every episode we publish the podcast should be video. But that boost of just Visibility. Two things are true. One is that's a window opportunity. As more video podcasts come online, the typical video performance is going to shrink for discovery. And two, if you open your Spotify app, you can see some of the areas where video podcasts are getting organic discovery. But those videos autoplay and those autoplays are counted as views. So I'm questioning how valuable some of those view counts on Spotify truly are because they're probably 10 seconds of not real viewership if we look at a video episode. So let's find one that got a lot of views. Okay. Colin and Samir, 2,400 views. Let's look at the retention. Looks like a YouTube video, right? Because a ton of these views are dropping off after 60 seconds, we'll call it. Which means that a lot of this is autoplaying, this is a new audience, but they're not sticky, so that's not great. So all this to say I did not treat the audio podcast as well as I should last year and I can see that in the numbers and I think that was a sacrifice that I regret making and should not make this year. Magic Pages hosting mid year my website, which is a ghost website, it was hosted by an indie hacker named Dan Rowden and he sold his Ghost hosting service to a group called MagicPages co. The guy who runs this, Giannis, is actually a fantastic operator. And what he's done in Ghost to make it like I can communicate with him directly in the platform, it's really great. But there were so many quirks that I built into Ghost to work the way that I wanted to. And switching this over into his system broke a bunch of that. He uses a different cdn. I use Cloudflare. He uses something called Bunny cdn. So I had to disable Cloudflare to enable Bunny cdn. But it's caused so many problems. Like yesterday when I published the year in review, for the first 10 minutes it was out, the CDN couldn't handle the load or something like it just wouldn't resolve. And so the people who are most excited to read the year interview couldn't get to it. And so I am not confident in delivering an email to say, go to my website to read this page because it breaks and I can't do that. That's not acceptable. So I have to figure this out because it's driving me nuts that this is a problem. On the life front, I'm still questioning like, how do I define success? Because it's clear to me from last year's experience that revenue is not a good enough, rich enough, full enough metric to define success for me. So how do I do it? How do I measure it? How do I give myself the experience of feeling successful if I want to decouple it from revenue alone? And I haven't figured that out quite yet. Do I actually want to make more friends? One of the holes that I felt last year was in close personal relationships. As I've grown, our life has been more complex. Our family has grown. My inner circle has actually gotten smaller. My closest friends moved away a couple years ago, one moved to Austin, one moved to Colorado. And so I have like a little bit of a hole in my life for close personal friends. And yet I'm not doing much about that. So why is that? Do I want to make more friends and do I want friends that I'm going to be a good friend to and not just have around when it's convenient? Savings compound and I've done a really good job of creating good savings habits and building a future purely financially that is good for the family. But relationships compound too. And so, you know, I saw that, I showed you that goal of last year. I wanted to start a thousand conversations. That means that every day I should be sending three messages to people to check in, say, hi, I'm thinking about you, how are you doing? And that's a great idea, that's a great goal. And I just don't do it. And if I don't do it on some level, it's because I don't want to do it right. And why is that I should figure that out? Because I think relationships are one of the most important aspects of life. Why don't I want to do more to get beyond fairly surface level relationships of which I have many, many, many, many, many. Why don't I dig deeper than that more often? I don't know the answer, but I want to figure it out. Oops. I gained 12 pounds. That's a function of the boot camp and prioritizing, running that over everything else. Our dog is also overweight. So the obvious solution is that I need to go on more walks with my dog. The youngest one. She weighs more than her brother, who is a much larger dog. She's just very dense. We actually thought she had a thyroid issue, but they checked that and she does not. So she simply needs a better diet and exercise and that is going to fall on me to do so. Changes and decisions I'm making because of all of this. One thing I'm really excited about, I Learned this last year, unfortunately, because I got sick before Justin sponsor games. I blocked off the whole week to go to sponsor games. Got sick, didn't make the trip. Suddenly I had a whole week in front of me with nothing on the calendar. I got so much done. So I just went through this morning and I blocked off the second week of the month all year for no calls all week. There's a couple standing things like I'm in a mastermind that meets during that and that's okay, but I'm not going to accept new calls on the second week of the month. And I expect that's probably going to be the week of the month that I get the most done on the business type of things. Or maybe I'll batch create some content. I don't know why I don't do that more often. Why I kind of leave my own time and priorities to the spots that magically stay open. But being proactive in doing that, I feel really good about it. This morning I removed social media apps from my phone. Not to say I'm not going to use social or post on social, but when I'm on my computer, I'm making things. When I'm on my phone, I'm consuming things and I'm comparing myself to people. So I'm trying an experiment of, okay, what happens if I just remove social from my phone? Will I continue to publish and find benefit from social without spending as much time consuming? I think yes. So a lot of the start of this year, the end of December or the beginning of January here is I'm creating a different environment for myself to try to make success in the ways that I want easier and to avoid some of the things that I want less. I'm renewing my vows to the podcast. We have an episode coming out tomorrow that's an audio only episode that is well done and I'm excited about and you know, the reason that we didn't publish more audio only episodes last year was I got to the point where I'm like, okay, I'm just going to schedule interviews that I think will perform well on video. I'll make them all video. But the video process slows everything down so much. Whereas I can record and publish an audio only episode within two weeks. So I'm renewing the vows to the podcast. I want to care about that more. I saw a decline in listenership on Apple podcasts in particular. I think that's a huge miss. You know, when somebody applies to join the lab, it's always because they listen to the podcast. So why am I disrespecting the podcast and longtime listeners? For first time viewers on YouTube, I just don't think it's right. I want to be more thoughtful about how I do YouTube. We will continue to post interviews there, but I want to play with the format even more. I'm thinking that one of the next videos I want to create is a long, long form video that's essentially a free course on something in the creator realm. And I think that in any arena there are a few pieces of content that far outperform everything else. Like, yes, consistency is important. Consistent publishing leads to consistent growth. But there's always going to be a couple things that really, really hit and drive a huge amount of growth. And sometimes you can't predict that. But I do think that the more effort you put into something, the more care you put into something, the better the odds are. So I want to put more effort and care into a couple super long form videos because I think that will end up having a much bigger impact on the channel, on the business as a whole, than putting out an interview. Because that's just what we do. I've reopened the door in my mind to hiring because I'm starting to frame this as okay. I'm resistant to team building because it feels like responsibility. It feels harder. But also so did adding a child to our family. It was more responsibility, it was harder. It's also more fulfilling and we want to have more. So I think the same might be true of hiring full time. I'm not going to pull the trigger on it just yet because again, I'm kind of in a holding pattern on the book and I want to see where that goes. But I reopened in my mind the idea that, you know what, I can do hard things. I can at least do a better job of delegating to the contractors that we already have in the business. And so I'm being more open minded about that. My content creation strategy this year. I spent a lot of time last year because I wasn't in a good headspace asking myself, what will work? What will work? What will work? What has worked for other people? Why don't I just do that? It wasn't very inspiring and it also felt like I was just creating content to create content. So this year I want to lead with the stuff I want to do. For example, one of my next projects that you'll see in my goals for the month is taking the advice Brendan gave me in our Write Message webinar that we did last Month, I think it was November. I did a write message workshop with Brennan and we went through My Right Message and he pointed out a bunch of stuff that he would do differently. And so I want to go through and implement those things. That's one of the first projects I'm going to do this year. So I'm going to do that, learn from it, share the results of that. I don't care if it performs hugely or not. I want to be useful. I want to make content that's based in being a creator and then sharing my success and not just creating content. I want to do stuff like I think the most interesting creators are the ones that are doing things and then sharing the process and results of doing it and not just teaching you. You know, I've had. I've had this experience over the last 12 months where folks come into the lab. I feel like they're a step or two behind where I am at the time and so I can be really helpful. And then I watched them just like take massive action and now I'm a step or two behind them. And what that's shown me is I'm not progressing as fast as I once was because I am spending more time servicing and maintaining than pushing the envelope and doing things. So I want to get back into doing and my content being a result of that. Doing that will mean publishing more things that I'm proud of. I'm far less concerned about keeping a schedule right now, and I do feel like I need to go out and share that fact in my content to say, hey, I am going to be less beholden to specific dates that I'm going to publish in the pursuit of publishing things that are more worthwhile and more rooted in what I'm doing. I'm not going to be able to finish this write message project in a week. Probably it's probably going to take multiple weeks. And so I could publish something in the meantime and maybe I will, but I don't want to feel the pressure like to publish on schedule takes some of the precious hours that I have. That would mean slower progress on the right message thing. Whereas I just want to dive in, do the thing, and then publish on the back end of that however long it takes. I just want to be a better cheerleader this year for folks like you that I see on social media. When I am on social media, I'm mostly posting and a little bit ghosting on like LinkedIn, for example. And I want to do a better job of being supportive in the comments. I also think that being in comments and replies is a great low lift visibility strategy, especially when you have a little bit of a profile. And I'm just not doing that at all. I comment and reply to virtually nobody, which is mostly a function of time, but I want to do a better job of that this year. So goals for the coming month. I want to keep my $60,000 revenue goal. I want to address the feedback on my book proposal, which again, hopefully I receive in the next week or two. I want to implement my new write message strategy. I'm midway through a new sales page for the lab and it's on me to improve some of the sales copy there. And actually the bootcamp that we did, I was dogfooding that process and came up with a lot of useful sales copy. So this project is gonna be a lot easier. Now that I worked through the messaging and positioning steps of the boot camp. I need to organize my projects, which I've actually already done. Finish the lab calendar for real this time. Prepare for our town hall on January 23rd, which again, please prioritize if you can, and keep up with my fitness program. That's it. That is our update for December, our December retro. Looking ahead at the year, you may have also noticed, by the way, this creator science hoodie that I'm wearing. We produced a hoodie for our in person event in Boise in 2025 and Mallory has been hard at work building a merch store. And so what you're seeing here is a test sample garment from our designs and we're getting test garments of all the designs that we have. So once we receive those and if we sign off on them, we are going to push the merch store live. You guys will know about it first. I love this. Super comfy. Love the color. And we have several other options for colors as well. So excited about that. That's been like a little secret project she's been working on and it's pretty much ready to flip alive. But we want to test all the garments before asking you to test the garments. And so more on that to come. I hope your end of year was great. If you want to share your own retro, please feel free to do so. We would love to hear how your year went and I think this reflection has been a really useful exercise. So thanks for being here. Here's to a big year ahead. Excited to hear from you and talk to you.