My 10 Goals for 2025.

Happy new year, cheers to 2025, welcome to the future.

I’ll just say, 2024 was probably my favorite year so far. I learned more than ever. I had some amazing times with my favorite people and met some great new ones. I moved to a new city. Spent my first year married to my wife. Overall, grew a lot. It’s important to spend the time to stop and reminisce a bit.

Now the new year presents the opportunity to think ahead. I don’t really subscribe to “new year’s resolutions” because the act of calling them that feels like it makes them temporary and easy to justify quitting.

So instead here are 10 general life goals that I’d like to accomplish in 2025 broken into 3 groups: health, wealth, and happiness (I reserve the right to revise these later):

3 Health Goals

1) Go Slow Carb through January — this year feels like a good time to start paying attention to my diet. It’s crazy how big of an impact this has on your entire life, and how little I’ve considered it for 27 years. Slow Carb seems like the best version of a diet for me — effective energy / weight sugar management, sustainable, and more flexible than other diets. Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman (my two biggest health role models) both subscribe to it (video explaining here), so my wife and I’ve decided to give it a full go at least through January, then we’ll assess.

2) Run a Half Marathon — Running is my favorite way to exercise, I also absolutely hate it. There’s no better feeling than getting done with a good long run, especially one that you’ve earned on a cold dark morning. But I always dread the idea of a run leading up to it, especially if I don’t do it often. I’ve run two half-marathons in my life, and have found that signing up for them is really the only way I can convince myself to run consistently. A great forcing function for general health. Grandma’s Half-Marathon in Duluth is my fav.

3) Be Able to do 30-Straight Pull-Ups by EOY — This is an exercise that has eluded my for a long time, being good at pull-ups. But they are such a great litmus test of general health, and so I think getting good at them is a great, economical goal for the rest of my body. Right now I can do about 4 straight pull-ups, and even my rock climbing friends say doing 30 is really hard. So I bought a pull-up bar (which I’ve found is also great for push-ups) and plan to do at least 5 each morning, which I think will also be great for starting my days

3 Wealth Goals

4) Raise a Seed Round — In 2023 we raised roughly $500K for my startup as a friends / family round. That got us through 2024, we pivoted, and now we’ve found product-market fit licensing data to funds and large corporates. To capitalize and grow we will need to raise a bonafide seed round, which I expect will be around $1.5M, this is my number one goal for the start of the year, and I think we are already in great shape to get there.

5) Get 10 Hedge Fund Clients — since pivoting we’ve signed trial agreements with a handful of funds, and are on track to be trialing and licensing by the end of Q1. My goal is that by the end of the year we have 10 funds licensing our data, which would put us at roughly $1M ARR. This seems ambitious, but part of setting goals is aiming high enough to make even a 65% score a passing grade. The toughest part of getting there will be getting the first one.

6) Sell Uptrends Consumer App — my final wealth goal of 2025 is to sell our consumer web-app now that we’ve fully pivoted. It is still making a decent recurring revenue, with 25K+ users, and great organic traffic. But these days it’s honestly more of a distraction to keep running than anything, so I’d rather part with it and sell to a buyer who can benefit more from it than we can. So far we have a few prospects that we are in talks with, but like any ‘large’ deal these things can take time.

4 Happiness Goals

7) Camp in the Boundary Waters or Appalachia — I love camping, it’s one of my absolute favorite things, and now that I’m in Chicago it’s already something I really miss. So one goal is to do a very solid camping trip this year, though I’m not sure where quite yet. One of my favorite places is the Boundary Waters (BWCA) in Northern MN, though it’s a bit of a commitment going up there. On the flip side I’ve never really been to Appalachia, and so I think it might be nice to visit and explore something new now that I’m a bit closer geographically (would love any recommendations :-)

8) Write 100 Blog Posts — This may or may not surprise you, but I love writing. It’s become one of my favorite little side projects, and very rewarding at that. Over the past 14 weeks I’ve managed to write 62 personal blog posts, which I am happy with. Looking ahead I don’t think I can expect to keep up that blistering pace, so I’m setting a more conservative goal of 100 in 2025, which is about 2 per week. I think that will allow me a bit more flexibility, and perhaps enable me to make the ones I do write stronger and more compelling.

9) Host 3+ Startup Events — This is another passion project that I am excited about continuing. In 2024 a few friends and I hosted 5 startup events in the Twin Cities; happy hours, pickleball and cornhole tournaments. I love doing it, and we did a great job putting them on, but now I live in Chicago. So I am trying to figure out how to be most effective here; hosting events in MN while living in Illinois, or starting some events down here. It’s also something I only have a limited amount of time to spend on, so I am setting the more conservative goal of hosting just 3 :-)

10) Get a Cat — My last (but certainly not least) goal for 2025 is to finally get a cat. My wife and I have talked about this for quite some time, and now that we’re settling in to our new apartment and our feet are officially wet here in our new city, I think the time is right for us to get a pet. I think a dog would realistically be tough in our current place, but a cat would be right at home. Then I can have a little buddy to keep me company at home when I write these.

Overall I try to set goals that will be forcing functions for other things that will make me happier / healthier / wealthier.

I also try to set them with expectations that only achieving part of them won’t be devastating (read more on how I think about setting expectations here).

Again I am reserving the right to revise these as the year goes on, maybe I’ll incorporate some updates into my quarterly updates. For now, that’s what I plan to accomplish, let’s see how it goes. :-)

Cheers,
Ramsey