👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to experiMENTAL where I share B2C marketing frameworks, how-to guides, and stories from 5 years of early Marketing at Uber and 15+ years at B2Cs.

This was my 2nd year as “The Naked Solopreneur” (hence the unwrapped 😉 ) and it was full of good, bad, and ugly. While I’m going to be retiring that moniker in 2025, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on 2024.

Across most parts of my life, 2024 was a terrible and challenging year. I know that’s not a great way to start a newsletter, but that’s the reality. Here we go.

Finance

In 2023, I had the best financial year I’ve ever had. I 2xed my 2022 salary. This year was the exact opposite. I made the LOWEST amount I’ve ever made in my career. It was 25% of my 2022 salary and 12.5% of my 2023 salary. That’s a pretty big drop.

There are multiple reasons for this:

1. Personal reasons

2. Slower economy

3. Unclear positioning

4. Saturated consulting market

I’ll talk about 1 and 3 later. 2 is obvious. 4 is one I can’t control, but it’s important.

I just read this stat today that 145K people on LinkedIn identify as Fractional. Part of this growth is that the term is relatively new but the bigger part is that more people are choosing to go the fractional, part time, interim consulting route. It’s a way to supplement income but also have more flexibility than as FTE. Also all the tech layoffs are not helping. An increase in supply (more fractionals) coupled with a decrease in demand (tighter budgets) puts downward pressure on the prices and the market.

For me, unclear positioning is what hurt me. Here’s the journey I went on as a consultant this year:

1. Product experimentation consultant

2. Fractional Chief Growth Officer for startups

3. Fractional Head of Data Science for scaleups

4. Growth Analytics consultant for scaleups

5. Marketing Analytics consultant for scaleups

Every time I thought I knew what I wanted to do, I didn’t. This forced me to reset the clock and reach out to my network but it’s also mentally draining.

I just could never find traction and candidly I kept pivoting because nothing gave me energy. I didn’t enjoy the consulting work at all. So, as of December, I decided to drop it completely. I’m no longer going to be consulting. I’ll share more of what I’m doing later.

Content

My content has been my favorite part of my solopreneur journey over the past 2 years. It’s where I have the most fun, get the most energy, and build the deepest relationships.

While I haven’t put much stock in numbers like followers and impressions, it’s nice to see it grow. There’s still a lot I have left to share so I’ll continue to create content, but I have even bigger plans for next year.

Life

Life is weird because it coexists side by side with death. We experienced an overwhelming amount of both and it’s what contributed to 2024 being such a challenging year. I’ve spoken about this before so I won’t get into too much detail but my wife and I lost 3 close people within 3 weeks.

The whole “things happen in 3” was extremely creepy because it was true for us. All 3 deaths were sad but the range of severity was heartbreaking. One was 99 and lived a full life. One was 67 and happened unexpectedly. One was 33 after a 2 year battle with cancer and left behind a 1 year old daughter. The last one has been the hardest to process and talk about. She was basically my sister. If you want to learn more about my beautiful friend’s heroic battle and want to donate to get rid of cancer, click here.

On the other side, 7 of our cousins and friends had babies. Babies are the most beautiful thing in the world because they represent innocence and potential. These parents brought new life into this world and were overjoyed with happiness, but it happened in parallel with death.

Again, life is weird.

What’s next in 2025

I am so excited to share that I’m going to be going ALL IN on my content.

No consulting. No other distractions. Here’s what that looks like:

• My newsletter

• A new podcast

• Linkedin + Bluesky 

• Being a podcast guest

I’m also going to be experimenting with a few more things:

• More video content on LinkedIn

• Video versions of my newsletter on Youtube

• A new paid newsletter tier. Everyone that’s subscribed now won’t pay for the first year. I couldn’t have taken this leap without your support.

Anyway, be on the lookout for all of this and keep sharing my articles with your friends and colleagues!

Thank you and I wish you and your families a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Missed my last newsletter?

Don’t be sad. Here it is: How to define churn