Love, Anxiety and Startups: My Year in 50 Tweets

This year, 2014, a year in review seems appropriate with everything that has happened. It might seem that this year was 100% awesome for me. But it was actually not. It’s better described as one crazy roller coaster that brought me to extreme highs and the lowest lows. I know posts like this don’t fit the whole positive “we’re crushing it” startup mantra, but at least it’s real. I like radical honesty, so I’m going to tell exactly what happened. I tweeted a lot this year, so that’s a good outline to write this around. Without further ado, my year in tweets:

Returning home

The year started off with me returning home from Hong Kong and traveling most of 2013:

Being back in Holland, I landed back at my parents for a while. In the first week I was robbed of everything I owned, minimalism eh?

Being back home, I felt a bit confused as to what to do next with my life. I just went from daily insanity of travel to daily absolutely nothing happens at home. So I moved around Holland for a while from couch to couch staying at my friends figuring things out.

And then in Amsterdam, I met the love of my life. She was everything I wanted.

But mentally I wasn’t that stable. Two months in back home now, I started getting severe issue with anxiety and went almost insane (about which I’ll write more later). The root of it was that I couldn’t settle back in to a normal life at home anymore. I had panic attacks, waking up for months EVERY DAY short-breathed. My senses were different, as in I became hypersensitive to sound and light (a common side effect of extreme anxiety). And I had severe derealization, which is best explained as feeling that EVERYTHING is a movie and you’re in the center of it. Something like The Truman Show IRL. Scary.

Twelve startups

To try and stay sane, I decided to set a goal. I wrote a blog called “12 projects in 12 months”. For fun I backspaced projects and typed “startups”. I was going to do 12 startups in 12 months. What happened after is, well, wow. I don’t know but I think I hit the internet’s nerve. It changed everything. Without asking for it, I received crazy press coverage from WIRED to the New York Times.

It didn’t help I wasn’t wearing shoes and there was a Starbucks cup there, good luck fighting stereotypes with that, hahaha.

It changed my life instantly. I remember just after this article hit, standing in a coworking space in Manila and random people started taking photos of me from a distance. Completely insanely weird. I would walk into random coffee shops in Bangkok and local Thai would say they read an article about me. I was asked to go speak at events and help everyone with their “startups”. My best friends in Holland told me that THEIR friends asked them if they could get them in touch with me. WTF! It was fun but also made me very awkward, especially in the beginning. I had become a public persona overnight (in a niche, that is):

It gave me imposter syndrome. Suddenly people were giving me way more attention than I deserved. Suddenly people wanted to talk to me, work with me and ask me for advice. And that’s weird because a few months before nobody did. What exactly changed here?

My goal was building successful companies, not being some startup guru. I hate gurus and idols are ridiculous to have. Nobody should pretend they know anything certain. Because nobody does. And if they do, they usually have ulterior motives (e.g. selling you courses and bullshit). Fuck that shit.

Still, I had all of this attention, so what do you do with it? Well, I decided to channel it towards the startups I was building. It could help get my startups users. And sending out a more pragmatic message about startups then that was out there. As in, just build stuff and stop talking and listening to bullshit and gurus so much (I know that’s ironic):

The breakout success

One of the twelve startups, Nomad List, became a breakout success with everyone from Matt Mullenweg to Tim Ferriss talking about it. It did great on Hacker News and Product Hunt too and appeared to be the first sustainable business from the twelve.

It started as a spreadsheet:

Then became a site:

> [@photomatt](twitter.com/photomatt) [@tferriss](twitter.com/tferriss) thanks tim, this is what happened when you tweeted me [pic.twitter.com/FSfadgqlAL](t.co/FSfadgqlAL) > > — levels.io (@levelsio) [July 31, 2014](twitter.com/levelsio/status/494905950910705664)

Tied into it, a chat group made digital nomads everywhere less lonely (including me):

And a forum full of AMAs with famous nomads and remote startups to inspire people to go out there and do it too:

More startups

Apart from the nomad stuff, I did a productivity startup:

…that made somebody drop out of college, wow:

…however it failed to make people quit watching porn:

And with pride I can say, this year I also helped make GIFs go IRL:

Twelve startups saved my life

The twelve startups project made me more productive, successful and changed my life completely. I had no idea it would be like this. And I can only be very grateful that this happened. It put my life back on track, and I don’t know what I did if it wouldn’t have. As I said before this, I was pretty confused even what to do with my life before this.

That love of my life had since become my girlfriend. And while the world gave me so much positive attention for what I made, my girlfriend hated everything I made. She wanted me to settle down, stop traveling and do stuff that mattered (instead of “stupid startups” as she called it).

It reached a point where I was literally embarrassed to tell her that I got press coverage in the New York Times.

Five months back in Holland, not feeling things were going well, and still feeling like I was going insane with anxiety from not being able to settle back here, and this girlfriend thing not working out, I left to see if it’d go better if I’d be traveling again. The first place I flew to was Hubud in Bali.

Bali

The island helped me a bit because it was so mellow:

And so its people were mellow too, I met some really down-to-earth awesome neo-hippies, as I’d like to call them. They have a hippie mindset, but don’t smell and are into tech, but have the values of a hippie. So they’re friendly and make cool shit. It was definitely one of the most inspiring places I’ve been creatively.

Philippines

I was then selected to pitch GoFuckingDoIt to Dave McClure and flew to the Philippines:

It was fun but it seemed a lot more like a high school prom show then a startup event. That’s when I had the big realization:

Startup events are the only ones making money from startup events.

Stuck in the Philippines now, I decided to do a lot of coding, eat Filipino chicken and see jeepneys:

I went partying and entered the hospital due to some misplaced high heels:

A pit stop in Taiwan

And after a month, I had to leave the Philippines again. Since a month later I had to be in Japan to meet my Dutch friends who would come over, I had no other choice then do a pit stop in Taiwan (physically located between the Japan and the Philippines):

…where I visited temples:

…had street food:

…looked at the crazy signs:

Why am I feeling so “lost”

Meanwhile, the travel had helped reduce my anxiety slightly. But now I started feeling incredibly “lost”. Where last year I went on a 9-month “long holiday” with every intention to come back home, this year that home just didn’t feel like home anymore. And that caused the great deal of distress (and anxiety) in my mind. If you lose your sense of home, you also lose a lot of sense of who you are, and even what life is. So now I felt confused and “lost”. I had no clue as to what I was doing with my life:

I felt lost and even though my ex-girlfriend had broken up, I missed her like crazy. After she unblocked me on Telegram and sent me a message, I booked a 1,500 EUR (!) direct flight from Taipei to Amsterdam to see go see her and tried to make it work again:

We built a robot together:

Meanwhile, I hung out with the Dutch startup kids, including Product Hunt‘s awesome Dutch designer (and nomad) Jonno) and BetaList‘s founder Marc. Even though I don’t put much value to national identity anymore, it was awesome to finally meet people making cool startuppy products AND also being Dutch. I guess there’s a little Dutch left in my heart still 🙂

And I saw my friends in Amsterdam:

Japan with my best friends

I then left Holland again after 2 weeks and traveled all throughout Japan with my best friends from Holland:

Back in Thailand, after a year

….before returning back to where I started my nomad journey last year, in Bangkok:

…where I met Amarit from HUBBA and Yury from #nomads:

After a year without, I had Bangkok’s amazing street food again:

My brother came to visit

And I finally welcomed my bigger brother to Asia and nomadism. It was awesome cause having him with me helped me feel more familiar and rooted:

Back to Bali

And then I returned to Bali to become a neo-hippie:

And I ended up in more hot springs:

I coached at Startup Weekend and we hit the Wall Street Journal!

At Hubud, I pushed ergonomics forward:

Worked with monkeys:

Had lots of Indonesian food:

I led the first Nomad List meetup in Bali myself:

I went surfing for the first time:

My startups did matter

My ex-girlfriend’s words that what I made “didn’t matter” had hurt me a lot. I was in love and that made me believe every word she said. But it’s a bit hard to keep believing in what she said when I was meeting people daily that had moved to the other side of the world because of my blog and sites. More and more I felt convinced I was on to something here:

There was now Nomad List meetups everywhere in the world:

And Nomad List was reaching a lot of people:

My ex-girlfriend’s words that my startups “didn’t matter” was literally being proven wrong. They were changing hundreds of people’s lives every month now. They were being mentioned in arguments between Paul Graham (Y Combinator), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails).

When I met even more people through #nomads, that were thanking me for what I created and were also traveling and working, it supported me in realizing that this is what I want to do. I didn’t want to settle at home. I wanted to see the world. I was not insane, after all.

Then, the bubble popped

Suddenly, everything became clear. I was in love with a person who was intrinsically bad for me. And blind love made me believe in her false doctrine about what people (and I) should do with my life; a doctrine drenched in negativity:

I decided to break up with her definitively. Those weeks after felt like walking away while you’ve got sticky bubble gum stuck to your back that just keeps pulling you back. Love is sticky.

If you’ve ever loved somebody so much that you wanted to be with them the rest of your life, you probably know how deep that love goes. Even if you hate what they did to you, even if they hurt you on a daily basis, you’ll still love them. And trying to get away from them, well…

But I left.

The end

It’s now months later, and by sheer magic, just before the end of the year, I met someone who taught me it’s not normal for your partner to bring you down, ever, and it’s not normal to be embarrassed to talk about the stuff you love, your work, ever. She’s been the most supportive person I could ever wish for. And best of all, she doesn’t think I’m insane for wanting to fly everywhere and see the world. She’s doing it herself:

All of these transient places, they had become my real home now:

Maybe this shows a bit how personal startups can be. We’re not just making sites here, this HTML, CSS and JS we write affects people’s lives. It affects our own lives. For me, it helped me to steer my personal life from total fucking disaster, just at the right time.

I don’t feel lost anymore. I feel confident that what I’m doing is the right thing. And that feels great.

The roller coaster’s track has ended now and I can get off again. I hope next year I can replace the loud, unstable and fast roller coaster with a silent, stable but still fast Tesla instead.

And if this year shows me anything, it’s that good and bad can go hand in hand.

I’m ending the year in the same location as where I started, at my parent’s. It’s good to have a place to go back to, as a constant, as a point of reference. It gives me a perspective to see how everything changed so radically this year, while right here, nothing changed at all.

It was all in my mind.

And that love of my life? That wasn’t love at all, and that wasn’t the love of my life (which is a silly concept to begin with). That was a troubled person preying on my unstable mind. Instead, love is when you care about someone and they truly care about you. And you celebrate each other’s successes, not hate on them. It seems so obvious now.

And luckily, just in time, I found real love which made me realize that.

Oh, life.

And maybe I shouldn't move back to Europe »