Now the real work begins

When I'm deep in the daily grind, juggling literally every aspect of (what I think is, at least) a pretty fast-growing business, I sometimes lose sight of the big picture. Not strategy, where we're going, what needs to be done, and so on. But more like how much we've improved our product, business and ourselves over the past year.

Speed blind, I think it's called...

Especially on the days when things don't work out the way I want. We lost 33 customers this year. There are always different reasons why. Not an ICP match after all. Can't live without some specific feature. Think the grass is greener on the other side. I fucking hate it every time it happens... Although I love it when those "I think the grass is greener"-types realise it isn't and come back. 

So when there's a ton of work and never enough time (like any other entrepreneur, right?) and I feel like shit because of a churned customer (I know I shouldn't and all that, but let's leave that for another blog), I've found a cheat code that works pretty well: Zoom out.

Next to all the high-tech tools we've developed to automate everything and draw fancy graphs for the rest, I have a Google Sheet named "MRR". Every time there's a change in our MRR, I manually update to keep track (and get that small dopamine kick from seeing it increase - admitted). 

And when I look at that, it's clear to see that, even though there are off-days, things are looking pretty good, and 2025 has been amazing:

And when you zoom out even further and look at what we've accomplished this year, it only gets better:

• >275 development tasks have been completed and put into production.
• We scaled the product and infrastructure to handle 10x the load (almost) without issues.
• We designed, built and released our very own Herodesk AI Agents. More than 30 are live and have already solved thousands of customer questions.
• The number of paying customers has more than doubled to >220, adding almost 3 new customers every week on average, with close to 650 users.
• Between them, more than 1,5 million messages were sent from Herodesk to their customers. 16,5% were Social Media DMs, 5% were Live Chats, and the rest were e-mails.
• 33% of new signups were referred by existing customers.
• Our MRR grew by 280% to almost €20k, averaging 11,5% month-over-month growth.

And finally, I grew the team from just me to include 3.5 (3 FTE, 1 PTE) fantastic, fully remote colleagues, and I have enjoyed amazing support from my advisory board and network of other SaaS entrepreneurs throughout the year!

We found and validated our product-market fit. Systematised most processes and operations. We have built routines for how we work and disciplined KPI and metric follow-up weekly and monthly. We've built the foundation for a business to grow.

2025 was the year we went from zero to one.

As I wrote the other week, I've invested a(nother) million in Herodesk, dedicated to three growth projects in 2026: A new sales team, new inbound marketing projects and product development.

I've hired four more people. Jakob joined us on Dec 1st, and on Jan 5th, two new sales executives and a full-stack developer will join us as well. Contracts are signed and sealed - all is ready to go!

We're ready to go from one to ten. So now the real work begins!