We are closing the books on 2024, sharing a look back on how it went and a preview of things to come in 2025.

We’ve been writing these reviews publicly for years, and you can read the others if you like: 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020. 

We have a full photo dump from 2024 at the bottom of this post. Feel free to scroll down immediately if you just can’t wait, or keep reading and save the photos for dessert 😉🍪📸👋. 

👍 What Went Well in 2024

🇵🇹 A great life continues in Portugal

In our 2023 review, we mentioned that 2023 was probably our happiest year ever. So much of that happiness was due to our new home in Europe: Portugal. 

2024 had a few life + business roadblocks, so it doesn’t rank as highly (which you’ll read more about in a moment), but we still absolutely love living here!

As I’m writing this update to you (Jason here 👨🏻‍🦲), we have 4-5 more months in our current home and then we have to make a big move… three doors down 😂. Not kidding. We are literally moving down the street. We’re excited to sign another rental agreement and plan to be in this exact neighborhood/community for 2-3 more years.

While we (still) didn’t travel much in Portugal, we did feel like our small coastal village became even more our “home.” We may not speak Portuguese fluently (yet), but no longer is it scary to go into town and have a conversation with someone at restaurant, café, or shop almost completely in Portuguese. 

💓 WAIM continues to be one of our best biz decisions

We started WAIM allll the way back in 2018, with one starting statement: We are better together. 

WAIM has proven to be such an amazing decision and while it wasn’t an overnight success, we’ve absolutely enjoyed the community we’ve created, the work we do, and it’s been profitable without a ton of stress. 

Last year (2023) was a banner year for WAIM, revenue-wise, and we had a hunch that would happen as we retired our $2,000 price point. This year, we introduced our new $2,800 price for WAIM Unlimited, and while overall sales went down, our YoY revenue was still fairly close (⬇️ 8.6%). We still consider that a huge win—especially given some of the hurdles we encountered this year. This is why we continue to be passionate about teaching people how to build Calm Creator Businesses, because if you can still earn a comfortable living without burning the candle at both ends, that is a recipe for a great life.

Blue line = 2024 revenue trend (Pink = 2023)

🛍️ New course, Calm Launch Formula, and our First Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) deal in 7 years

In our 2023 review, we mentioned that we were thinking about doing a BFCM deal but it didn’t happen (we had made “enough” money and were okay not adding in extra work especially around travel time).

To start 2024, we still had no plans of doing a BFCM deal, but then we created and released our Calm Launch Formula ✌️🚀 course over the summer to our WAIM Members…. and they RAVED ABOUT IT! It’s the most positive feedback we’ve had on a product in a long time, and that was a clear signal to us to get the course in front of more people. 

So, we spent a week putting together a sales page, sales emails, and doing all the checkout/automation stuff. After promoting the deal to our email list (11,200 subs) for 5 days, we passed our low goal (40 sales) and almost hit our high goal (100 sales). The total sales ended at 89, bringing in $7,120 in extra revenue 👏👏. 

⚙️ Teachery Lifetime Plan experiment 

You’ll read more about what didn’t go well with Teachery in a moment, but in the summer I had an experiment I was keen to run. 

For the past two years, we’ve slowly watched Teachery’s MRR decline:

• Jan 2023 - $11,061 😊

• Jan 2024 - $10,332 📉

• June 2024 - $9,337 🙈

(Queue the Fall Out Boy, “We’re Going Down, Down” 🎶 track!) But, instead of rest on our laurels, we listened to why people were canceling and saw the writing was on the wall that customers wanted to have less monthly subscriptions in their businesses (we don’t disagree!) 

Starting in June, we decided to offer a Lifetime Plan again for Teachery (we had one from 2015 - 2017). We tested price points, starting at $600, moving down $50 every two weeks until $400 (at the end of July). We didn’t promote the Lifetime Plan at all, we simply let people find it when they visited Teachery’s homepage. During that time:

• We netted 25 total Lifetime Plan sales

• An extra $13,750 in revenue was generated

• The final price we landed on was $550*

*And funny enough, when doing research of the average customer lifetime value (LTV) from Jan 2020 to Jan 2024, the average revenue per customer was $557! 

I’m writing this review before December 31, but we’re on pace to generate an EXTRA $100,000 in revenue with the Lifetime Plan being active. Which is AMAZING 😍😍😍 and that’s on top of the $100,000 in annual revenue Teachery will still earn from monthly/yearly subscribed customers. 

For the time being, we’ll continue to offer the Lifetime Plan, and we’ve even started working with a PPC Ads company to see if we can automate new leads which convert to new paying customers. There will probably be an entire other post on our blog to share more on this in 2025.

💪 Stayed consistent with exercise

Okay, okay, enough business chat for this section. In 2023, we both got back into a consistent habit of exercise each week. That continued in 2024, and Caroline even added a personal trainer to the mix for the first time ever. 

Her trainer (Hi, Nuno! 👋) is a lovely human being and creates accountability but also makes thinking about working out a no-brainer. Just show up, do what he says, enjoy the results of your effort. Less willpower and more consistency is always a good plan with fitness and health.

I also collaborated with some folks from our neighborhood to design a small glow-up for our community gym, taking it from a perfectly acceptable workout room, to more of a gym with personality (and some fun additional equipment — I’m a big fan of sled pulls and pushes!)

🌟The best purchases we made in 2024

I liked this section from last year, so I’m bringing it back! 

👩🏻‍🦰 Caroline’s best life purchase: Personal training! (Caroline, here. Seriously, I wish I had started paying for this MANY years ago. It has freed up so much mental discipline I don't have to muster each day, and that is worth its weight in gold when it's a habit that's contributing to my overall physical and mental well-being. 10/10, would recommend finding ANY way to incorporate accountability if you're looking to start a health journey.)

👩🏻‍🦰 Caroline’s best biz purchase: It's a tie for me between upgrading to ChatGPT Pro (I use it daily) or Canva Pro, which I also use daily and for EVERYTHING.

👨🏻‍🦲 Jason’s best life purchase: Ninja Creami for sure!

👨🏻‍🦲 Jason’s best biz purchase: Switching back to ConvertKit/Kit.com for our email marketing needs

👎 What Didn’t Go Well in 2024

🥴 Our fertility journey has been bumpy

Okay, Caroline here taking over this little section 👩🏻‍🦰. We planned for 2024 to be the year we got pregnant, and that journey has not exactly panned out the way we imagine. We did actually get pregnant for the first time in May, but unfortunately, it was a biochemical pregnancy ending in a very early miscarriage, and it was followed by a second biochemical pregnancy just two months later. (If you're interested in diving deeper on our journey, you can check out this podcast episode.)

The emotional whiplash of those few months was a lot for us to traverse, and it was hard to navigate the highs and lows both physically and emotionally. We did our best to stay optimistic and ride the wave together, and luckily, we have great doctors here in Portugal who were willing to get to the bottom of why this might be happening. 

A few tests later and we discovered that I have two conditions that affect blood clotting (Factor V Leiden and Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome aka APS) which can prevent me from carrying a healthy pregnancy to term. The good news is that these issues are treatable with blood thinner medication and we’re working on a protocol that will hopefully prevent future miscarriages from happening.

It’s been a wild ride, and we have no idea what's ahead for us, but we have our eye on 2025 as the year we get to know for sure that we’ll be welcoming a little Zook into the family. 

🤷Still didn’t travel much in Europe

It’s not a terrible thing that we didn’t travel this year, but it does seem kinda silly that another year went by without seeing other parts of this lovely continent that’s new to us.

Since we have a somewhat-complicated fertility plan, I doubt Europe travel will make our to-do list much in 2025. But then again, all these old countries aren’t going anywhere anytime soon anyway!

We did get back to the U.S. in 2024 for our annual trip to see friends and family. Aside from 👩🏻‍🦰 having some sort of cold-like viral infection she couldn’t kick for a month, it was good to see our people. 

😒 Working on Teachery isn’t right for Caroline

(Hi, it’s Caroline again, popping in for this section 👩🏻‍🦰!) If you’ve been following us since the start of 2024, you know our big goal for the year was to go all-in on Teachery. I was excited to take everything I’d learned about growing WAIM and apply it to being way more strategic with Teachery’s marketing (which we hadn’t focused on at all since it had always been a side project).

At first, I dove headfirst into the world of SaaS (software as a service) marketing, and I really loved the challenge. But after about three months of prioritizing Teachery, a few things became crystal clear.

First, I simply don’t enjoy running a software business. The challenges and day-to-day puzzles aren’t quite the same as those in a digital products and content-driven business like WAIM. It felt like a mismatch for my skillset and what truly lights me up.

Second, I realized that running TWO businesses is just too much work for the life I want to live. Sometimes, you have to push up against the edges of your capacity to really understand your limits. Especially as I prepare for motherhood, it became obvious that this workload wasn’t sustainable.

Around the halfway point of the year, Jason and I decided to fully hand Teachery’s reins back to him and let him take charge of its marketing, entirely in his own way. I’m so glad we made that choice because it led to the creation of the Lifetime Deal, which has been a fantastic success.

In this season of life, I’m learning a LOT about letting go of control. While it’s definitely hard, it’s also brought me a newfound sense of peace that I know I’ll carry into the future.

In a way, I’m really grateful we chose to go all-in with Teachery this year. It helped me make peace with the decision to direct my full attention back to WAIM, with no regrets.

🤳 Spent 3 months creating content with not much to show for it

Speaking of things not being right… We went into summer with a plan to ramp back up on social media (specifically, Instagram, but maybe dabble in TikTok too). 

We created a podcast series about it, we started recording and publishing weekly YouTube videos about it, and then after many weeks of trying to build a plan and style of content we were happy with, we quit. 

What you know now is that we were also dealing with the early miscarriages at the time, so that obviously derailed us, but a content plan that can’t withstand life’s curveballs probably isn’t very sustainable to begin with.

The good news is, we learned a lot about what we don’t want to be doing when it comes to content. The style of content, the tone of the content, etc. If you see us pop up on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube in 2025, it will be very relaxed and content with a lot less hardcore strategy around it. 

🔮 2025 Preview (What’s Next?)

🐣 Continue trying to bring a tiny Zook into the world

This is priority numero um in our lives. We’re not exactly sure how this will unfold for us as it was challenging in 2024.

But, we will support each other and there are many options ahead of us. We actually did preemptive embryo freezing in the summer of 2023, so we always have that as a backup plan (thanks, previous us, and thanks Portugal, for having an affordable healthcare system). 

🗣️ Continue learning Portuguese

At this very moment, we’re at the place where we can read most things in Portuguese. We can listen to someone speak to us in Portuguese and we can get the gist. But, saying coherent sentences back to other people is still HARD (especially for me, 👨🏻‍🦲).

We are absolutely committed to becoming fluent in Portuguese, but we also aren’t in a rush. We have an AMAZING professora and we’ll continue our weekly lesson with her, as well as using ChatGPT to help us learn new words and review previous homework. 

By the end of 2025, we still won’t be fluent, but we should be able to form better sentences and hold a decent conversation… we hope 🤞🤞. 

🙋‍♂️ Jason will focus on Teachery

In the latter half of 2024, Teachery returned to me being fully in charge with the day-to-day and decision making. I’ll be 100% honest, the Lifetime Plan sales reinvigorated me to work on Teachery (money isn’t always a motivator, but it certainly was for a 10-year side project!)

I’m very happy with our development roadmap and I look forward to running a couple of growth experiments this year:

• 🤖 A secret AI-generated blog to generate organic traffic and sales

• 💸 Continuing our PPC Ads if they convert well enough (at least 2x)

• 🤳 Outsourcing social content to promote Teachery

• 💰 Sponsoring podcasts, email newsletters, and industry-specific events to promote Teachery

The big features I want to get done in 2025:

1. A new course template

2. A new checkout system (much more modern)

3. A marketplace to sell Themes/Designs 

4. A way to sell digital products quickly/simply

   
   

🙋‍♀️ Caroline (and Jason) will focus on WAIM

(Back to me, Caroline 👩🏻‍🦰!) Now that Jason is handling Teachery 100%, I'm excited to be back in the drivers' seat for WAIM! There are a few new initiatives I want to bring to WAIM in 2025, including:

• Expanding our offer suite to include lower-priced offers (like selling Calm Launch Formula as an evergreen offer!)

• Having FUN with content again, with a focus on YouTube

• Maybe sharing on Instagram again after we get a good flow with YouTube

• Experimenting with more free events as a marketing vehicle to give subscribers a peak at WAIM Unlimited

The biggest things with WAIM that I want to emphasize in the coming year are: FUN and experimentation. We've built such a great foundation, and I'm just excited to continue helping entrepreneurs who don't want to hustle or burnout in order to grow their businesses.

🇵🇹 Try to see more of Portugal

It is on our January to-do list to map out a bunch of spots we want to see in this beautiful country we call home. It’s only a 3-hour drive to get to the North or the South of Portugal from where we live, so we have no excuses!

There are tons of unique cities/towns/areas that we already have on our list and we hope to have a nice, big section in 2025 review post where share a few of those with you.

📊 Work towards our “enough number” and investments

In 2018 we set an initial enough number of $33k/month. We hit that goal in 2021 and then reevaluated that number in late 2022 (upping it to $56k/month to save for a house, save for taking care of parents, invest more, donate more, etc). 

This year, we got about halfway to our new number (~$44k/mo) which is AMAZING! There are two ways we seeing making the next leap towards our goal:

1. Creating smaller, evergreen products for WAIM

2. Continuing Teachery’s promotion/marketing plans

It will not be a failure if we don’t get to $56k/month by the end of 2025, but it would be really cool to hit that 🎯. 

The other change for us in 2025 will be to start putting a lot more effort into our long-term investment portfolio. We’re not financial experts, so don’t look to us for advice, but what feels right to us is the balance shown below in our (not) fancy pie chart.

🖼️ Wrap-Up: Framing 2025

👩🏻‍🦰 Word: Flow

In 2025, I want to remember to embrace ease, softness, and trust in the process (whatever that process is—creating content, our fertility journey, business plans, etc).

For me, FLOW means letting go of the need to control every outcome and instead ALLOWING things to unfold naturally, without forcing or overthinking. It’s about giving my creativity the freedom to explore and experiment without rigid expectations, softening my approach to both life and business. I want to let go of being so analytical and structured when it comes to work and focus more on enjoying the journey of it all, appreciating the twists and turns along the way.

FLOW is my way of leaning into alignment, finding peace in the present, and trusting that things will come together as they’re meant to.

👨🏻‍🦲 Jason’s word for 2025: Experimentation

Last year my word was “Revenuns,” a made-up term where I wanted to focus on increasing revenue while having fun. I’d say with a few hiccups, that WAS accomplished! ✅

This next year, I’m going to reuse a word I used wayyy back in 2014/2015; experimentation. I’ve already started this with Teachery’s secret AI blog, PPC ads experiment, and another personal (no-code) project. 

I might venture into posting on Bluesky. I might update my Threads feed. Who knows, I might even use IG, YouTube, and have my own Substack. I don’t have set plans, all I know is I want to try some stuff in 2025 and have fun while doing it!