As we turn the page on 2025, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on everything that happened over the last 12 months. The point here is not to brag or berate myself but to be grateful for the accomplishments and failures of this year and reflect on how to best tackle the challenges ahead.

The birth of Notis

A year ago, Notis was born out of a personal frustration. My mind felt cluttered with thoughts, things to do, and worries. Every tool I tried to dump my mind felt either clunky (I remember one that kept deleting my precious voice notes because of a poor connection on the road to my coworking space), or felt like a constant arbitrage between choosing the path of least resistance or centralizing my ideas in a single place. I had just started using Notion to organize my life and, frankly, the thought of opening their app to create a quick task was already daunting. Like most people, I ended up having one system at my desk (Notion) and creating Apple Notes (that I'd never open) while on the go. I was already deep in AI projects, with a solvable pain: record voice notes and have them saved in Notion for when I'm back at my desk. That's how it all started — a quick side project.

Fast forward 12 months and Notis has become my full-time job. Actually, much more than a full-time job, since I'm now competing with startups with tens of millions in funding and a headcount 15 times higher than mine. Along the way, I realized I wanted more for Notis than to be a way to dump my mind in a single place while still offering the path of least resistance. I wanted to create the first personal assistant that would feel truly helpful and actually materialize substantial productivity gains. AI builders and AI tools, despite how shiny they present themselves, still fail to deliver anything more than a kick of adrenaline when you purchase one more license; this feels like modern consumerism. On the other hand, my north star for Notis has been to create a $200/month product that users would find cheap — similar to what I experienced being an early subscriber to Cursor's Ultra Plan.

I'm happy to report that I have succeeded — at the very least on a personal level. Notis now runs pretty much every aspect of her own company. She is at the center of all content produced, from technical specifications to blog posts, YouTube scripts, and social media planning. She is also actively attending every brainstorm about the strategy or the product lifecycle. Obviously, she is at the center of my personal productivity. In many ways, she's my cofounder. And here's a crucial insight of 2025: founders who develop the skills to lead agentic teams are about to rewrite the startup ecosystem — the others will either adapt or die.

Enough blathering — let's review the wins and fails.

Wins

• Launched Notis and grew it to 80K USD ARR

• 8% of our users are finding enough value in the product to pay $150/month and 60% trust us enough to subscribe to a yearly plan.

• Notis has delivered over 5,000 hours of time saved to our users by creating 27k Notion documents.

• Notis has turned from a simple way to dump your thoughts into a full-fledged automation platform capable of handling one-off tasks but also advanced recurring workflow triggers.

• We've released Notis on WhatsApp, Telegram, email, and iMessage. And our Advanced Voice Mode enables hundreds of founders to now call their assistant like they would any colleague (except they don't complain when you call during weekends).

• Around Notis, we've built everything you'd expect from a serious SaaS: a full-fledged help center, daily presence on all social media, a daily blog, a referral program, hundreds of testimonials, and over 50 video tutorials.

• Last but not least, Notis is no longer just a better Notion AI. It now connects with over 800 apps, effectively enabling you to delegate your busy work across your entire tool stack and fully automate your workflows with AI.

Fails

• My goal for the year was to grow the business to $120K ARR and I fell short of this.

• While paid ads have proven to be a great shortcut for early visibility, they've turned out to be less predictable than I thought. Any change in a campaign can result in HUGE performance shifts, rendering the whole process of iterating to drive CPA down very unpredictable and frustrating.

• My efforts to find a cofounder (with the same drive for agentic-driven teams) have proven fruitless. The more I work with humans and AI agents side by side, the more I realize the hidden productivity costs of managing a team in the early days of a project. The best leaders around me do just this — they lead. While I see the value of that skill set later on in the project lifecycle, it's hard to justify having a founder early on who spends most (if not all) of their time managing humans (clients, cofounders, and employees). I chose another path for now but keep an opportunistic 10% bandwidth to explore hiring talented humans.

• I applied twice to YC and got rejected twice. YC is an incredible network but getting in as a solo founder is pretty much mission impossible. Nevertheless, I'll keep applying because the exercise is worth the time in my book, even if all you get is an email saying you didn't make it.

Personal life

I'll be honest here: work-life balance is a myth. It sure is. But that's only when you consider that those two things are opposed to each other. I wake up every day excited to get to work and I am immensely grateful for this. Working from home has been the way I managed to combine 12-14 hours of work 6-7 days a week while still not missing a moment with my 3-year-old son. I know this is not for everyone, but I think it's the biggest reason I never felt I was choosing between my family and my ambitions. Without it, I'm sure I'd be full of regrets by the time he turns 5.

Another way I want to highlight the synergies between work and life is the lifestyle our family has chosen — we do have a somewhat unconventional setup. In winter, we reside on the lovely island of Ibiza in the Balearics, and in summer, when the temperature and crowds are unbearable, we migrate to the Swiss mountains (my wife and I are both originally Swiss). For some, this sounds like a dream setup, but for most, it would be practically impossible. Just take a minute to imagine: only short-term rentals, constantly moving between houses, all the challenges introduced by school and daycare. All of this is precious energy not spent in other areas of your life. For me though, Ibiza gave me sun — lots of sun and beautiful light to regulate my mood. For my son, it gave an education mostly done outside close to nature. And for us as a family, it gave us endless walks on the beach, mountain bike rides, and some of the best parties in the world.

But what's the result of all the hard work to make this work?

Wins

• Our son runs into his classroom every morning; that's priceless.

• I tought my son to bike and swim (at 3 years old!)

• We covered our bases by buying a little chalet in the Swiss mountains at 1,300m. Airbnb helps us cover our mortgage and other costs, and we get to enjoy it every summer. Owning a place not only got rid of the feeling of being homeless every time we had to leave a house, but it also gave us the security needed to be bold with our careers, knowing that at worst, we would have a place to call home.

• 2025 was also the year my wife and I deepened our marriage. Living in Ibiza has changed us both for the better, but this didn't come without friction. When we shed some of our deepest traumas, we also lost defense mechanisms that brought us together in the first place (you know what they say — you attract the person that perfectly matches your traumas). Couples therapy and personal therapy (namely Compassionate Inquiry by the extraordinary Gabor Maté and psychedelic-assisted therapy) brought us closer than we've ever been and helped us reinvent our relationship as our new selves and in our new roles as parents.

Fails

• I completely stopped exercising. Well, I mean it started well in the first half of the year: 1km/week open water swimming with my dog, mountain biking, and 3x a week weight lifting. But along the way, I threw everything out the window to focus on building. And at 38, let me tell you, that's not good.

• I also stopped playing piano. I started piano a few years back and managed to keep practicing nearly every day until this year, when again, I completely stopped. As mentioned, you can't do it all. Sure, you can berate yourself all you want, but if you really want to do it all (being a father, exercising, doing yoga, eating healthy, getting your 8 hours of sleep — you name it) you're going to quickly face a hard truth: there are only 24 hours in a day to do all those things.

• I got back to nicotine — my old mistress. First with electronic cigarettes and now with nicotine pouches. Hear me out, I don't have anything against nicotine itself; it's kind of a great molecule if you look into it. I do have an issue with the addiction though.

• Socially, I closed up and focused on my work, putting friends and social activities far behind in my list of priorities.

• We massively overspent! Investing in yourself has a cost, especially when you have a family. We were fortunate enough to have the flexibility to take the risk to bet on ourselves, but there is no free lunch as they say. Finances will have to balance out at some point — preferably before we're broke!

It's been a long time since I've not delegated my writing to AI; some things shouldn't be. Anyway, what a year! Before I let you get to your own introspections, here are my objectives for 2026:

1. Grow Notis to $500K ARR through any means necessary — even if I have to become a content creator 🤣

2. Achieve financial freedom for our future, and that means balancing our finances by the end of the year.

3. Get back to exercising (at least 3x a week) and maintain my other healthy habits (eating well and sleeping plenty).

4. Feel blessed every day for the health of my family, living on a paradise island, and working on something I truly love.

If anyone made it this far — thank you, my friend, for your curiosity. I hope you'll take something useful from this. Maybe some inspiration and maybe some "eh, I'm not alone."

Wishing you all a wonderful 2026 ✨