Mid-Year Build Recap 2025: SaaS Development, Freelancing, Work and School

Professional

One of my goals for this year was to build more experience from regular tech jobs to build upon my experience from my own businesses.

So I started a part-time position as an IT consultant in January, where I have worked on a project revolving around data, data engineering, and Python. It was a steep learning curve, as the tasks and tools we used were not ones I had worked with in my web development business, but I have made a lot of progress and enjoy the process.

I also just started a summer position at another consulting company, where I work with a more familiar Next.js stack, and I look forward to the rest of the summer there.

School

University did take a lot of time this semester, and I needed to put everything else off for long periods. Usually, I try to be efficient and aim for 80% of the learning outcome with 20% of the effort so that I can spend more time on other projects where I learn more relevant skills. But I wanted to prove this semester that if I want to, I can get top grades, so I made more of an effort before exams in some subjects than I normally would.

Business

Most of the opportunities I’ve gotten since I started building my businesses have come from my network. I’ve realized after some attempts that it’s difficult to sell my services to businesses I have no connection with, but over the last few years, I haven’t really made an effort to expand my network. It has therefore relied only on former clients and grown very slowly.

So for the last two quarters, I’ve made an effort to put myself out there and reach out to people just to build connections for the future. As an introvert, it didn’t come naturally to me, but I’m proud of the progress I’ve made here as well, and I believe I’m setting myself up for success in the future by continuing this route.

My existing projects have mostly been stagnant. One reason is that I haven’t had much available time this semester, and I’ve had to prioritize. I haven’t prioritized exploring Musiconnect any further, Wildfire has had no progress, and ai-gen.meme hasn’t gained traction with my small organic efforts, so it hasn’t been prioritized either.

I did build a self-invoice application based on my knowledge from the Wildfire platform, and even though it gets some organic traffic, it’s still just a very limited MVP that I haven’t had time to start validating. I’ve reached out to some marketing firms in Norway to hear about their pain points, but not enough to get any clear data.

Seait AS has made some progress but is also moving slowly. I tried reaching out by email to many potential users to figure out their pain points with their current systems, but again, not enough to get any clear data. So our team recently shifted focus to try to upsell our already existing paying customer by expanding our system, and so far, it seems like a good path.

I also had an exciting project this spring, Kaddatreffet. I got this project as a result of my efforts in reaching out to my existing network. I created both a landing page and many graphic design elements for the festival. This also introduced new contacts to my network and was very successful for me.

My latest project, which I built in a couple of days last week, is PuppetGenerator. It already had a signup without any promotion, so I’m excited to try running some paid ads to see if they will convert.

Next Steps for 2025

Hopefully, I’ll be better at managing my time by building consistent routines. Then I’ll continue trying to balance school, my part-time job, and all my business plans.

I specifically want to leverage this time, where it’s super simple and quick for developers to create new apps with AI, but where AI is still not good enough that anyone can do it. Therefore, I’ll likely focus on building many micro SaaS apps and making marketing efforts to see if they can grow.

I’ll also continue building my personal brand in public by writing about what I’m doing. I already believe I’m at a point where I have valuable insight and some success, but hopefully, there will be even more interesting things to document moving forward.

I’ll also continue making efforts in networking and stay open to the opportunities it may bring.