🐧 2024 in Review

‍Today, in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 💫 Highlights and lowlights from my portfolio career in 2024
• 🧠 Learnings from building my online education and consulting businesses

FROM OUR LABS

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🖊️ 2024 In Review

Every year, I write a personal Annual Review that I share with my inner circle.

For 2024, I’m also publishing a portfolio career review to share my journey with you.

—

If you’re a new reader, I’ve written in previous editions about why I started a portfolio career.

Leaving my 6-figure tech job to pursue an alternative, self-employed path was hard.

1.5 years later, it’s still hard.

However, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I feel energized and fulfilled with my work everyday.

The nagging sense of existential dread I used to have has entirely faded.

I’m grateful for coast FIRE, which freed me up to explore this alternative path.

Thank you for reading Money Abroad and being on this journey with me in 2024. I hope the actionable deep dives and case studies I’ve shared will serve you well.

Here’s to kicking off 2025 with clarity and momentum.

‍

Highlights

Launched three cohorts (and beta program) of Part-Time Consulting Launchpad, leading to 90 paid students.*

While this might not seem like much, I’m proud of how we went from 0-to-1, building a solid foundation in just one year.

Through several iterations, we’ve built a world-class student experience. In January, we launched an async beta program to 39 students. In May, we revamped the videos and workbook, plus introduced Live Q&A. In October, we released live fireside chats, workbook feedback, 1:1 accountability buddies, and a co-facilitator. Student feedback has guided us well every step of the way.

With each successive cohort, we’ve also boosted student outcomes. While an MIT study showed ~3% of online learners completed their course, 70% of students completed our last cohort—with over 60% of course finishers closing their first client within 6 weeks. 

As a result, we’ve garnered strong reviews and heard from new students citing these reviews as the reason they decided to enroll in the last month. Heading into 2025, I’m confident that we’ll continue to build on a stellar student experience while growing our cohort size.

_{*includes beta, May, October, Jan 2025 cohorts}

‍

Consulting continued to be the breadwinner within my portfolio.

The reality is consulting still drove ~77% of my top-line revenue this year. Courses were a much smaller income stream.

Over the past year, I’ve gotten the chance to work as a fractional and advisor for clients in Asia and Latin America. My clients included the CEO and Co-founder of a bootstrapped 8-figure fintech, CPO and Co-founder of a Series B fintech, and Head of Innovation for a national bank in LATAM.

Similar to the Launchpad, it’s all about getting client results—and fortunately, this year I’ve received positive feedback from helping leaders achieve varied goals like faster onboarding speed, clear product development process, and improved performance of product managers.

I get asked if I will continue consulting, and my answer is yes. I enjoy exercising my product muscles, helping founders and leaders, and staying involved in global startup ecosystems. It’s fun.

‍

Strengthened the brand, positioning, community, content, and resources.

• Brand: Top brands like Miro reached out to me for sponsorships for the first time (instead of me going outbound last year). It feels like the Money Abroad brand is starting to get recognized, which is incredibly exciting.
• Positioning: Repositioned the content from “money for expats” to “live on your own terms” through managing finances & building a portfolio career.
• Community/Events: Hosted popular reader meetups in Singapore and Mexico City; spoke to a full house at Fincon and UC Berkeley Club of Singapore.
• Content: Maintained industry-leading newsletter stats (57% open rate and 4% click rate), received rave feedback from readers like “Easily the best newsletter I’ve received in a long time. At the level of Justin Welsh and Codie Sanchez.”
• Resources: Relaunched my free Monetize Your Expertise email series as a video mini-course—after procrastinating for 6 months.

‍

Lowlights

Growth slowed due to other priorities.

The cohort and consulting dominated my attention in 2024. Hence, I spent less time and energy on growing my audiences:

• Linkedin impressions: 3.5M (-49% vs 6.8M in 2023)
• Linkedin followers: 24k (+20% vs 20k in 2023)
• Newsletter subscribers: 6.8k (+31% vs 5.2k in 2023)

Growing the US audience was also a bit challenging due to platform dynamics.

On the plus side, I managed to experiment with other channels:

• Threads: ~540k impressions and 911 followers in the last 90 days
• Podcasts: 8 guest podcasts published (10 recorded)

The good news is that both experiments have led to sales. So I plan to continue to invest in growing these new channels.

‍

Ran out of time. I became the bottleneck to growth.

This year, it was a constant struggle to prioritize between growth and product delivery (the latter usually won). I realized I needed to scale my time.

Behind the scenes, it’s me and 4 part-time staff who run the show: course specialist, course co-facilitator, exec assistant, and bookkeeper. Depending on the project, I also contract a handful of designers and a video animator. While the course is OK now, I need more help on content and growth.

For content, I spun up TypingMind agents in October to help me save time in my writing workflow. This seems to be effective, so I plan to keep iterating these agents. For growth, I’m looking to hire a part-time social media manager to help me schedule, manage the content calendar, and repurpose content. (email me if you know of anyone!)

Learnings

Running a world-class online education service takes a sh*t ton of time.

Delivering and marketing cohort-based courses is very, very time-intensive. Don’t be deceived by the “Make $100k in 7 days” type stories you see highlighted on social media.

If you’re getting into this line of work, make sure you truly love teaching (and marketing). Otherwise, you are going to hate it when all your friends are out on the town while you’re at home hunched over at your laptop editing lesson slides and videos.

If I told you the amount of time I have sunk into the course and newsletter, you’d laugh. But for me, it’s worth it to see the impact I have on students and readers.

‍

Do more of what’s working. Avoid getting distracted by shiny objects.

One of the recurring themes of feedback I received from 7-figure online education entrepreneurs (which I agree with) went something like this:

• Many similar businesses only needed one channel to scale to 7-figures revenue.
• You already have a working channel (Linkedin) and product (Launchpad) and you already validated how to grow your channel, so double down on scaling this.
• Youtube, paid ads, new products—these are time-consuming distractions. Experiment with these after you’ve scaled up your revenue and can afford to hire additional help.

‍

Delegate, automate, and eliminate.

This sounds so basic (like doh!), but the truth is I still struggle with resisting the urge to execute tasks myself. Delegation looks like hiring part-time staff to take over specific areas of our growth and product delivery. Automation looks like setting up AI agents to reduce time taken for operations. Elimination looks like ruthlessly prioritizing so I only end up doing the tasks that no one (or AI) can do.

‍

Final thoughts

That’s the end of my 2024 portfolio career review. Thanks for reading!

🌐 Beyond your borders

👶 Netflix ends unlimited parental leave during a child’s first year. This furthers the streak of Big Tech rolling back perks. I expect it to continue.

😰 I saw this interesting question on r/chubbyFIRE: Why are retired people are still stressed? This is why I personally chose to CoastFIRE and continue working (albeit differently).

📩 If I told you someone could close a $12,000 deal with an 8-minute proposal, would you believe me? Meet Allea Grummert, who built a $250k agency by creating the perfect email marketing playbook. → Read this on Station.

🐙What’s an Octopus career? My friend Dave Kang moved to Mexico and started an Octopus portfolio career. If you’re doing a year-end review like me, Dave launched his 80 year "Life at a Glance" calendar on Kickstarter.

🧠 Social snippets

Over the last 10 years, I negotiated my tech salary multiple times across 2 continents (and helped dozens do the same).

For daily insights, follow me on Linkedin or Threads.