It’s been a full year already!

This is the last newsletter of 2024, so I figured it’s a good time to reflect back and look forward to 2025.

Topics for this week:

• divs

• AI Automation Agency

• Marketing Problems

• The Dev Sync

• Wrapping Up

divs

Divs Design is still alive and it’s been alive for nearly 12 months now.

I forgot that I found the domain in January of this year, then founded the company 2 months later.

I haven’t talked about it much recently, but I’m still working with my current client and also picked up a new one!

The new client / partner wants to develop a mobile app so it’s a slight departure from the original intent of divs.design, but not that long ago I was considering pivoting anyway, so this a great opportunity.

At some point, I got my wires crossed, falling for the hype of productized design agencies because I was seeking easy.

According to my X.com feed, everyone was making $5k or $10k per month and that seemed like the fastest way to catch up.

But I quickly realized, like anything, design agencies are more difficult than anticipated.

Better to stick with what I know, which is development, and which can fetch those 4 and 5 figure prices right out the gate without having to also establish my design chops.

All that to say, Divs Design will have a roll to play in 2025.

Only a few paragraphs below where I wrote about finding divs.design back in January, I referenced the video that convinced me to get started, which talked about a development agency, not a design agency.

It was all there from the beginning.

So in 2025, divs will be more focused on development and less on design.

AI Automation Agency

I have the new direction figured out for divs, but I’m still working out the full strategy.

I talk about AI all the time so naturally that needs to be part of my workflow.

GPT and Claude are daily uses for whatever I’m working on but I’m considering helping others use it as well.

Automating business processes was the original idea I had before I did too much “research” on the internet and decided to create a design agency instead.

Lasthalf.tech was my first idea for a business involving clients, before divs, but I’m planning to repurpose that soon, possibly with a future-proofing, quantum flair.

I might be taking branding too seriously while making things way more complicated than they need to be of course, but I think it’s easier to have different brands and pages for different focuses while also doing some experimenting at the same time.

If a potential client lands on a page and sees these options:

• design

• development

• automating business processes

• implementing AI into workflows

there’s a good chance they’ll get confused or overwhelmed with which is the right option.

Not knowing which one they need, they’ll just go find a simpler solution.

Having different pages for different solutions should make it easier for clients to decide, and give me more data into what works and what doesn’t.

Plus I like the variety for now.

I have a bunch of interests so I like to jump around.

But I don’t want to take on a bunch of full-time development projects with divs because that would quickly become unmanageable.

Divs could serve one, possibly 2 full-time development clients at a time.

The automation agency could serve much smaller and faster one-off work items, like super short contracts, or maybe a productized service model.

And the beauty of an automation agency is that it compounds at a much faster rate than full-time development.

Developing full apps is more expensive and takes more time.

Developing automation flows is much cheaper and takes much less time.

The two different businesses compliment each other well and also overlap, writing scripts for automation flows, and automation flows for development processes.

Plus I’d like to try both of them out and see which I like more, then decide to optimize one over the other.

So that’s my rationale for 2025, two agencies for two different purposes, but one big picture.

Marketing Problems

Finding clients will still be the main problem with running one agency, let alone two.

People need to know that you are out there and that you can fix their problems.

I still really like the idea of organic content for marketing, specifically YouTube, but other channels as well.

And a good place to start may be automation tutorials on YouTube.

They make sense as high value content for a number of reasons:

• others can now learn how to build the automation

• planning the video thoroughly maps out the process of building the automation

• the process for the automation is documented for future reference

• it establishes the creator as an authority on the topic

• it can serve as source for a lead magnet by providing followers with blueprints to download to make building the automation faster

• it can serve as an ad for the automation agency

Automation tutorials will be a little more time intensive to create but they are a compounding asset much like programming: create the video once and it can potentially serve millions for no scaling cost.

And I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunity to automate the YouTube video process itself so more chances to overlap business value.

On top of that, I still plan to build out the personal brand, turning this newsletter into videos of me rambling about these topics in case you’d like to hear it rather than read it, but I’m still working on making that a habit.

More YouTube to come in 2025.

The Dev Sync

Speaking of which, can’t forget about podcasting of course!

Regular episodes of the Dev Sync are in the works for 2025 as well, with guests or not.

Can’t help but recognize it could serve as an indirect marketing effort for the business, but that’s not the intent, more just a fun thing to do that isn’t a huge effort.

It may overlap with personal brand content in terms of topics and format though, so I haven’t quite figured out that part yet, but it still has a role to play.

Clearly podcasting has proven a valuable platform and I enjoy the format so it’s something I’d like to stay involved in.

Add that to the list of strategies for 2025.

Wrapping Up

There’s one final piece to all of this.

After writing this newsletter for more than a year now, I’ve learned a lot.

I learned about things I like, things I don’t like, and more things I’d like to try.

Overall I have a better sense of direction than when I started this year.

I settled on a solid answer to the question of “where do you see yourself in 10 years?”

“Tech something” was the best I could come up with for a while because I could only picture the lifestyle but couldn’t picture what I was doing or how I got there.

But recently I realized “investor” best fits what I was picturing.

Making long, slow, overanalyzed decisions after hours and hours of research, while also being involved in too many different projects, but not always needing to see those projects through to completion, and also not needing to micro-manage those projects either.

All of those elements makes sense to me, so that will serve as my guide going forward.

Luckily there are a number of ways to reach the end result of “investor lifestyle” which is partly why I have way too many plans for 2025, but it also gives me plenty more data to work with on what works for me and what doesn’t.

It’s a wild plan so we’ll see what happens.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for sticking with me in 2024.

I really do appreciate it.

If you have any feedback or better ideas for me in 2025, or if you want to share your own wild plans, let me know!

Happy New Year!

And that’s it for this year! A look back on where I started and where 2025 may lead. Thanks again for reading!

Those are my links that stuck with me throughout the year and a crazy plan for next year.

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