2024, the year I rediscovered my passion for building things.
- 5 mins2024 was a very important year for me.
I was coming from a difficult period professionally - after years of trying to scale my career in startups, I had lost the spirit that once drove me to build products on my own. I had lost faith in a future where I could be an entrepreneur, and I was slowly wearing myself down on a path that, although full of achievements, wasn’t truly mine.
In 2024, I got back up and built various projects that laid the foundation for what should become my entrepreneurial journey.
It wasn’t easy. 10 years ago, I started my entrepreneurial path building various apps because in high school, during an iOS development course, I heard the instructor say: “in the app economy, there are lots of young people who make an app and wake up the next day with sales.” He was trying to sell us on the idea that “they wake up millionaires,” but the concept was that you could aspire to a future where you didn’t depend on anyone.
Over the years, doing various jobs between freelance consulting for companies and startup work that led me to become Mobile Lead, I had lost this vision. I no longer believed it was possible, so I had stopped putting effort into building things.
Projects like Foodlist and TriviaPatente, projects of my past completely bootstrapped by myself and a few friends, were pieces of my experience that were becoming distant memories.
Until Antonio, a friend of mine, whom I deeply respect and who has always been a source of inspiration over the years, convinced me to make a switch with a simple challenge: “Build a service, anything, in a weekend.” This service was ELI5, a very simple service I’ve written about on this blog, but it came from a need I had seen in some of my friends: explaining concepts in super simple terms for studying for university exams.
So I tried it, and although it was a small and time-boxed experience, I remember it very fondly. With that project, I rediscovered my passion for building things. I learned Next.js, Tailwind, and I started building GPT wrappers for fun. It was exactly a year ago, but if I hadn’t written that small piece of software for myself and my creativity, I would never have built the other projects I made in 2024, like CardsGPT (built in collaboration with Antonio), and especially QABuddy.
Let’s say 2024 was the year I woke up. I have significant technical expertise, I’ve been living on code for 10 years and I’m still passionate. I have an important competitive advantage - I’ve developed all sorts of things in both consulting and startup contexts, always in what you might call ‘Founder mode’, in my own way. This has led me to be able to build virtually any project I can think of. And this is a huge competitive advantage that I’ve rediscovered.
This is definitely what I hold most dear from 2024.
2024 was also much more, other experiences that enriched me in their own way. It was the year when, after 2 years, I left Milan. I moved to live alone in a small town in eastern Italy, and I took home all the life experiences that changed me tremendously. When I decided, two years ago, to move to Milan, I was looking for something that was probably myself, and I came back with a much clearer purpose.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘agency,’ well I think I developed it a lot through this experience.
2024 was also the year I ended a relationship with a girl who helped me grow a lot. We often tend to talk about profession, career, success, but life also includes this. Relationships and emotions.
A relationship for which we both sacrificed a lot, but unfortunately didn’t work out. It was the year when, thanks to this relationship, I understood various things about myself. I’ve been going to therapy for 3.5 years now but I honestly think this was the most valuable year at that level. We often tend to analyze ourselves through numbers, facts, and objectives, but I discovered the importance of analyzing my emotions. Being rational, we always try to optimize to control our emotional state, but sometimes it simply escapes, does stupid things, suffers when you’d tell yourself ‘why suffer?’. Uncontrollable things. I learned to let these things happen inside me, let them vent, and note them down.
I started writing for myself, noting how I feel, how I react, to understand exactly the feelings that fill me when I don’t understand them. I’m still doing it today, writing more or less every day my thoughts on Mindsera. I believe this blog that I’m starting to build is a natural evolution of this process, where I want to share all the steps I’m overcoming in my journey to becoming an entrepreneur.
If I had to summarize this year in two things I learned, they are:
- If you have an entrepreneurial goal, even if you don’t see immediate results, build and continue building blocks, sooner or later (hopefully), the results will come. (A lot of theory suggests this every time, but it was never as clear to me as when I went through it myself)
- You are your best ally, but if you don’t manage yourself well, your fears become your worst enemies. I have a lot of fears, it’s completely normal and human. They’re not weaknesses, they’re just part of being human. Write down what you want to do when you’re feeling good, and reread those things when you’re struggling. Agency is built this way too.
We’re ready for a constructive 2025, with these two additional solid foundations. I started 2024 without them, now I have them, and I feel like a 27-year-old ready to take on the world for my future.
Luigi Donadel
Senior Software Engineer and Entrepreneur. Building stuff.