Remember that one article I wrote now almost 4 years ago about how different I am to most people around me? Yeah, this is another one of those stories, but I promise you: it’s worth it. In this article I will tell the story of how (and why) I became a professional beekeeper despite the fact that this has absolutely nothing to do with my skills as a freelance PHP web developer and how it has helped me to grow financially, physically as well as mentally in ways that I could have never imagined.

As a business owner and a generally efficient person, I find it important to have an accurate sense of my current financial situation. During the first couple of years, this was largely based on assumptions and guess work, but due to some significant changes in my life, I had to come up with a more structured way of dealing with this issue and so I developed my own custom-built financial planning tool: the Proactive Revenue Dashboard (PRD). The PRD is nothing more than a "simple" Excel (or in my case Numbers) spreadsheet which allows me to register an accurate account of my monthly revenue streams, both hourly, recurring and miscellaneous. Combined with data regarding planned absences from work, this information is then used to calculate the minimum amount of work that is required to achieve a predefined yearly revenue goal. In this blog post, I will outline all different aspects of the PRD. I will explain in great detail what it is (and what it isn't), how it helps me to stay on track and how it helps me to easily reach my financial goals. Finally, for those of you who are interested in using this tool for yourselves, I will also explain how you can get your hands on it and how you can change it to suit your personal needs and those of your company.

I’ve been called many, many things in my life - most of them good, some of them… not so much. I’m going to assume that this rings true to most of us, but there is one specific thing that I’ve been called over and over again, that has always stuck with me: “different”.

In my last blog post, I looked back on my first 5 years as a freelance web developer. As you may recall from the piece, I gained a lot from that transition, both on a professional level as well as in terms of my financial situation. And despite the fact that I never regretted my decision, it occurred to me that I had no idea how I was doing compared to my peers on a financial level. Was I maybe charging too much, or too little? Could I make more as an employee?

A new year is traditionally a time for retrospection and new resolutions to change things (usually for the better) in the upcoming year. This is not only true for our personal lives but also very much so for our professional lives as well. However, it’s not the last calendar year that I would like to look back and reflect on. Instead, I would like to focus on another anniversary I was lucky enough to celebrate not too long ago: the fifth anniversary of the founding of my company Ixudra, on the 7th of September 2018.

“But will it be worth it?” That was the € 2.000 question that was going through my head as I was looking at the screen of my computer after I had just received the email from the AppSumo team about SumoCon 2016 in Austin, Texas. I knew I wanted to go, that was never the problem. I love to travel, going to the US is always exciting and the idea of meeting and talking to Noah Kagan and some of the other insanely sharp and talented people on the speaker list was just too good to be true. But would it be worth it? Would I get over € 2.000 worth of value from this conference and would I ever be able to earn it all back from what I was going to learn there?

Several days ago, on Monday April 4th 2016, my ixudra/curl package made it to the 10.000 download mark and I could not be more excited about it. What started out as a small project of convenience has grown to become a healthy project that has helped out an incredible amount of people from all over the world. In this post, I take a look back at how I got to this point and a look forward as to what is yet to come.