Still Early: 2025 in review

I've just finished my yearly reflection in the journal. While I have it as a fresh stream of thoughts in my head, let me now share where things are for me at the moment without any filter. I am already looking forward to the challenges ahead that 2026 has in store for me. Every new paper journal for me symbolizes new opportunities for personal and professional growth. Let's dive in.

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If I recall correctly from 2024 in review article, professionally, that year had an unhappy ending for me. Just when I started enjoying my first ever vacation, and the nicest autumn I had ever experienced at that point, I received a message about the sudden layoff of the whole team. Moreover, it was just a couple of weeks since my signature of a full-time contract. Just when I was ready to commit fully, everything had fallen apart in the front of my eyes.

This event invited me to rethink my approach to career again. In January, I thought I want to get a new job so I had sent my CV to a few companies. I also received an offer for a well-recognized company in Czech Republic. However, it did not feel right. Until that point in time, I had been working with passion, on things that I cared about. This opportunity did not feel the same way so I turned it down, and with it my relocation to Prague.

Instead, with a decent runway at my disposal and all my willpower to pursue my goals, I had decided to say yes to my ideas once again after I failed edi a year before. I posted the first blog post at the end of January and kept posting every week. After the first month, I had recorded my first YouTube video ever to accompany weekly blog posts.

The weekly content habit was just the beginning. I continued with a local meetup, podcast, and an official branding which was still just a warmup when considering the bigger picture. But outlining my actions is not the point of this yearly reflection so feel free to revisit my journey at any time on the official website or see Creator Dashboard that I created specifically for the project.

The point of doing all of this was to sustain myself as a solopreneur by productizing myself. I've identified a significant transformation in my life that I've gone through and I haven't seen it being documented elsewhere by someone else. Since I've walked that path, I thought I could contribute to this world by helping others make similar decisions that would bring the same outcomes I received.

Benefits of the transformation from digital slavery to freedom are noticeable in my life. My quality of life has improved significantly after adopting self-awareness, digital minimalism and tech independence as my core values for digital living. Through free with tech philosophy and specific implementations into a daily life, I want others to experience the same kind of digital freedom that I now live. I want others to live #freewithtech too.

The big milestone for me was that thanks to this motivation, I made my first bucks online as an indie dev with a programming language that is not the primary one for me. Despite fwt. axis being ranked as #8 on Product Hunt among hundreds of app launches on the 1st of September, I couldn't make my solo business sustainable just yet. What was I expecting, really? I had a small YouTube audience and I still have but despite this, I thought I could make it organically.

Not yet, Samuel.

And so I've spent the rest of the year vacationing in France, gathering inspiration directly from Yan Zoritchak. After 2 weeks in Annecy, the Alps and Grenoble, I came back to my lovely Tatra Mountains region. The resistance was real, but I managed to kick off another 2 smaller projects at the end of the year: Journal Companions & PersoGPT. It seems like the fruits of my experimentation during the year with apps and content are even faster experimentation.

I want to mention something interesting as I end this reflection. The reality of my projects is that they really were in my head for a much longer time before I finally committed to their implementation to close the loop. Positive side to this seems to be the fact that I keep iterating, but faster the more project I do. For example, my latest indie project PersoGPT was implemented in 1 day since the idea came into my head as a thought.

There are multiple lessons but I think there is one that stands out the most: Keep making tiny experiments. I would like to stress out the importance of word "tiny" in this sentence. I fell like something is not going right if the solo experiment takes more than 3 months to validate. Validation is another important word that I have to add to the original sentence. Don't keep the experiment for yourself, but share it with the world and see what happens.

In 2026, I plan on posting more YouTube videos on both of my channels: free with tech about digital freedom and Samuel Pitonak about my next tiny experiments as an indie dev. My objective is to take it with a bit more playfulness. This is another valuable lesson I've learned from building my first startup and my latest project. It is that the all-in mindset can become a big bottleneck for progression. Too often it can feel like it has to be all or nothing but I guess it is not the way life works, not even mentioning the business.

To be honest with you, I don't think I need to revise the words above. I feel like this is the most honest reflection I could give. This is the state I can achieve only for a limited time right after reflecting on the whole year. I wrote these words while all the lessons from 2025 were present in my head. During the whole year, I manually tracked my mindful minutes via fwt. joex, moods and streaks via fwt. axis, time spent in projects, and also expenses. Let me end this by sharing with you some portion of this data that could be interesting to see:

• journaling: 16 minutes per day tracked via fwt. axis & joex
• projects: 63% of my time in projects spent as a solopreneur; 14,5% as an employee; 13,5% as an entrepreneur and I also spent 9% of my time investing into my personal brand
• streaks: I managed to achieve a streak via fwt. axis in 226 days of the year which represents 62% success rate (streak = I woke up in the morning at a reasonable time, I had a physical activity, I did the hardest task first thing in the morning, I worked on what matters to me, I socialized with people I care about, and I also reflected on the given day while planning for next)

FAFO means "fuck around, figure out". This year, I fucked around hard. And I think I might have just figured something out.