The other day I logged into TrustMRR, recreating my account there, and added all of my businesses into the dashboard there.
You get to see in your profile how much you and your startups have earned over three years. Here’s what my chart looks like at the moment…
As you can see, we’re three years in, and we’ve not moved anywhere significant. I can point to the spikes in revenue coming from the five launches of my product, which I retired completely in the final spike that you can see in the chart, across the end of May and the start of June this year.
We had some other revenue covering the middle of 2025, from the community that we launched over this time, enough to make sure that this period stood up to scratch as well, but no more…
So this begs the question, seeing as I’ve come off the back of six months of travel and shut down my only truly profitable product – what now?
Well fear not, because even though you’ve heard nothing on my part for a fair while, I have a plan, and I’m here to outline it to you today. There’s a roadmap, income streams and a make-or-break target date at the end of things as well.
Let me tell you about said date first…
One of my closest friends and friendships, that started and continued pretty much in tandem with the timeline of the business you can see at the top, is engaged now and getting married in Northern India at the end of March next year.
Of course I’m thrilled for them and excited for the experience, but I want to be out and gone from my childhood home, where I’ve returned to after the prior winter’s travel by then as well.
That leaves me with roughly seven months to get prepared so that I have a real stab at independence this time, rather than just travelling and trying to keep the fragments of a business that hasn’t truly developed itself running at the same time.
However things need to change, because I haven’t got a hope of doing so on £6000/year from the single business.
Fear not, though, let me break down my current income streams and why I’m optimistic that they’re going to develop well enough and robustly enough to support me next time around.
First, PARAZETTEL’s not going anywhere as a brand and force for education in the personal knowledge management space. Even though I shut down the paid template because moving more and more towards being fundamentally opposed to this as good education, we’ve got alternatives launching right around the corner…
This includes first the book Minimal Note-Taking, which I’ve been working on for about a year now (I know this because I got billed for the minimalnotetaking.com domain renewal the other day), as well as a brand-new program called PARAZETTEL Foundations, designed to teach people the things that I talk about in the book in a little more of a hands-on, community-focused way.
Right now, these two, and especially getting the book off my plate, are my priority. And then, as soon as this is done, I’ve got quite a swathe of time opening up to try and scale a few other things I’ve been wanting to for a while.
This includes ProseLab - the writing training platform I started in Vietnam with my friend Luca, and a new venture closely related to PARAZETTEL called Obssistant. ProseLab already has paying customers and loads of potential, we only need to dial in the funnel and distribution and we’ll be off to the races.
Obssistant is much more closely related to the existing PARAZETTEL business - but it’s going to be oriented around tying AI into work, business and personal knowledge to create personal apps and make better use of the data that I have, at a fundamental level, been teaching people to collect and organise well for the last three years.
It seems like a natural progression - you teach the people a few steps behind you, and it’s been a long time since I’ve made any kind of real revolutionary progress with my note-taking systems. On the other hand, AI and especially agentic harnesses for LLMs have taken off since the start of the year, and seem to hold genuine potential.
I talk about this in the first few articles that I wrote on the topic - I was very AI-averse for a long time to do with note-taking, because after all AI can’t really substitute the understanding and note-use, and definitely couldn’t back then, but things have changed heavily, and I want to have premier positioning in this space of education when the practice of having a personal server with an AI agent wired up on it becomes more widely adopted. A gamble, if you will.
Aside from this there are a few other things on my plate (as if it wasn’t enough already) – I’ve been shooting photos for people, continuing with RALY with the intention to freelance as another source of income…
I’ve got a new portfolio up and running, so that I’ve got somewhere deliberate to send prospects and others. Again, photography is a true love of mine, so I don’t want to dilute it by taking on a lot of stress in the field, running a full freelance business, but if I can pick up some work for clients that I like and make it profitable enough to buy myself some better kit then that’s even more than I could have hoped for.
Even this weekend, at the time of writing I’m heading out to London to shoot a mastermind for Sol Hyde, an online business figure I’ve admired for almost a year now. If I can put myself into the right rooms whilst building my portfolio, even if I’m not paid right now (except for clothes and accessories like I am with RALY), then it’ll be completely worth it, building a network of people who I respect and want to stay in touch with.
There’s also one more, that might secretly be the most important one - I’ve picked up some tasking for an online platform. The work is with frontier AI labs (I’m not under NDA officially, but I’m not really made to think I’m to talk about it in that much detail), helping them develop their products.
Having a degree and some level of professional knowledge of writing and marketing helped me with getting into the platform and getting selected, and the pay’s great, when you can get hold of the tasks.
This means that even when we’re in a (dare I say) quiet period of business then I can head and do some tasking to bring a little more money in. It’s paid out quickly and into Stripe, a platform I’m already set up on, so the admin was pretty easy.
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So that’s the rundown of all the ways that I’m either already earning or planning to earn over the winter. However I can’t get too lost down the path of just chasing whatever’s going to pay the most during that split second. I need sustainable income, which means pivoting to focus on monthly recurring revenue amongst all of the projects.
I’ve done that with the PARAZETTEL discontinuation, favouring PARAZETTEL Foundations instead, and ProseLab by nature is a monthly subscription price – add that to the royalties I get every month for writing articles, as well as other payments through tasking and
I’m still not sure yet what I’m going to spend my life doing, if I do dedicate it completely to one cause – dependent upon how successful we are with these current endeavours in seven months time I might pursue a job in London (or somewhere else in the world), working for another business.
(in fact, this is probably worth another update some days down the line)
Right now, though, I still look favourably on building a personal legacy and portfolio. It’s something that will stay with me and continue paying me throughout my entire life, as the input that I’m required to provide from my end decreases as I share more and more videos and articles, and the compounding effect is best started as early as possible.
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I intend to continue to update you on this list, because I’ve realised more recently that my brain is melting again because I’m pushing so hard into getting the book done. I’m scrolling more and have made less space for personal writing like this that provides a nice break.
As well as this I’ve not made a video talking to camera in a long time, which is one of the best habits to come from being a presence on the internet, so I need to forget trying to make things perfect and get back to that too.
Sorry, it’s a long one. But thank you for reading!