I have always wanted to write annual letters but never managed to do it until now. This is the first year I am doing it. You can't simply do things because you want to do them. You have to be willing to pay the price of doing something. The first price is the hours you must sit down and dedicate to the task. Everything demands a certain dedication. The second price is the pain of thinking, worries, and self-doubt that come with doing anything of mild importance. Thinking is hard work, and everyone doubts themselves. The third cost is the willingness to take the risk of sharing your work or gift with the world and thus opening yourself up to potential failures, rejections, and negative reactions.
The most important cost is, of course, leaving your current self behind—the self that is used to not rocking the boat much—and entering into a new and unknown world, which can be terrifying. But as the saying goes, "To become who you want to be, you must sacrifice who you are." So here I am, writing my first annual letter.
The only logical way to see life and the world is that it is miraculous. Seeing from a certain perspective, it is possible to see everything around you as miraculous. This is why trying earnestly is so important. It opens the door for the miracle to happen.
If you truly try and are willing to pay the price, it is possible to succeed and reach your ambition. It is not easy. It is not effortless. It takes hard work. It can be painful. It may take a long time. But if you do the work, things are more likely to happen. As Dwarkesh Patel writes in a review of Robert Caro’s extraordinary LBJ biographies, if you do everything, you win. Dawrkesh quotes Caro from Means of Ascent:
“From As an NYA director to whom “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference”; as an unknown twenty-eight-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better-known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, “I never knew a man could work that hard”; at every stage in his adult life—as Congressman’s secretary, Congressman, senatorial candidate—he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge, and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics but of himself. In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue and the rashes on his hands grew raw and angry, and whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly.
His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit, and ruthlessness, but it had also been a story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing; he would sacrifice himself to his ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others.
If you did “everything, you’ll win.” To Lyndon Johnson, “everything” meant literally that: absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be.” — Robert Caro, Means of Ascent
I tasted what true efforts can deliver in 2024, albeit a small bit. I didn’t do everything. I didn’t drive myself to pure physical and mental exhaustion. I tried a little bit because you can’t will yourself to work hard. Working hard and work ethic—these things are habits, and take life-long training, which I clearly lack. I tried to ruffle my usual sense of comfort just by a little and results followed as much.
2024 has been a blessed year for me personally and for Future Startup.
In January, we welcomed our daughter Rahmah, a miracle and an incredible little bundle of joy. I am a believer. I believe in Allah (GOD) and that we are here for a reason. The birth of our daughter increased that certainty. Seeing a little human being who was nonexistent come into existence, it is the ultimate miracle at work.
Since Rahmah came into our life, every moment has been wonderful. We have been very busy with her. It is equally incredible to see a human being grow up. In the first few weeks, she did literally nothing. She didn’t stay awake for long. Most days she would wake up, eat, and go back to sleep. But our days revolved around her. We would spend hours looking at her, tracking little movements, and trying to elicit small responses. When she finally started to make some tiny interactions after her first month, it became all-consuming emotions. The joy of parenting can’t be described. It is a pure otherworldly experience.
I started my leave from work in December 2023. It continued till April/May 2024. While I worked a bit here and there, I wasn’t looking after the regular operation. As we are a tiny operation, it meant we operated in a very limited manner during this period. When I finally returned to work around April, it took me a while to get back up to speed.
Naturally, my initial assumption was that 2024 would be a difficult year. I lost a few good months. So business was already down. Moreover, the Bangladesh economy was already suffering from widespread corruption, mismanagement, and a dictatorial and dysfunctional rule of the now ousted regime and the startup ecosystem was reeling from a global funding slump.
As I mentioned at the onset of this letter, the thing about the world is that it is mysterious. Although we lose our ability to see mystery and enchantment as we grow older, the world never loses its ability to surprise us. 2024 ended up being one of the best years for Future Startup in terms of business. I just tried about 10% harder than in previous years. Projects came to us that we didn’t pursue. New businesses happened with little effort on our part.
That said, I also made several minor changes to how I operate myself as well as how I run Future Startup.
One major change in 2024 was my willingness and desire to do well. Compared to past years, when I worked only when I felt like working, I tried to establish some routine and discipline in my life. I tried to attend to work every day. I established a system to track my work weekly. I also pruned some of my terrible habits and addictions.
I have struggled with melancholy, negativity, and a serious problem functioning depression for many years now, which I discovered a few years back. I have tried to find solutions to some of these personal challenges. I am not out of the woods yet but I largely managed to tackle these challenges quite successfully most of 2024. When you have internal calm, it is much easier to be forceful externally. When you are not busy fighting your own demons, you have more resources to fight the world.
Establishing a working rhythm and finding a way to manage my internal chaos were the two most effective strategies that I found helpful in 2024.
Working independently has many perks. The freedom, potential unlimited upsides, and opportunity to do so much more. It also has many downsides. You misuse the freedom and control that you have. Since I have been working for myself for many years now, I always struggled with developing positive working habits. I took advantage of my freedom and misused it. I intuitively knew the cost of not having a consistent working rhythm. It meant I was often inconsistent. I had problems with discipline and self-control. I gave up easily when things got difficult. It means I was not making meaningful progress on my most important goals. Because making progress demands that you keep going regardless of challenges and difficulties and how you feel. I knew I was making these mistakes. However, I was not taking any action to overcome these limitations.
I finally managed to overcome some of these limitations in 2024. As I said, I started with establishing a working schedule. While I failed to follow it every single day, I tried and it helped me create a momentum that continued for much of 2024.
The same with my internal chaos such as functioning depression, gloom, and constant feeling of pessimism and negativity. In the past, I would give in to these feelings too easily without trying to fight them. When I felt a bit melancholic and depressed I did things that made it worse. Not in 2024. In 2024, I felt that I must not give in to these feelings and negativities without a fight. I didn’t win all the time but I did win most of the time.
Most of the time we underestimate our agency and our ability to affect change. However, when we believe we can make a difference and act on that belief, it can help us make real progress.
Having said that, I don’t think it is possible to make these changes without the support of many supporters and well-wishers and many of the writers whose books have made a tremendous impact on my life.
The other consequential change I made was regarding how I run Future Startup. I have always advocated for establishing systems and processes. While we have developed some systems and processes at FS concerning how we run the operation, I never took the idea of weekly or monthly reviews seriously. 100% of transactions happen through formal channels which have established a certain discipline to our finances. However, since I run the business more like a lifestyle business, I never applied a rigorous business review process. And when I finally started to run a weekly business review in mid-2024, I came to realize what I was missing.
I started doing a weekly business review in August 2024. I used a simplified version of Amazon WBR customized to the needs of Future Startup. This process completely transformed our business. I could see the progress or the lack thereof at the end of each week and feel terrible when I missed my targets. It allowed me to see my mistakes and lack of progress more clearly and pushed me every week to try harder.
In 2025, I plan to double down on this practice, further refine the metrics, and be more accountable when tracking them.
One constant challenge I face being a solo founder is a lack of accountability. I feel that a weekly review system taken with sincere commitment can be a potent solution to this challenge.
Future Startup Updates
As I noted above, we started 2024 at a rather slower pace. Moreover, our work was negatively affected by a slowdown in global startup funding, economic hardship in Bangladesh, and subsequent political change that ousted Bangladesh's longest-running unelected dictatorial rule. Our sudden and unexpected tech change requirement also added additional challenges to our operation.
Despite the challenge, the year ended very well for Future Startup, partly because we got lucky and received help from the Almighty and partly because I tried a little harder to make things work this year than any other year before. Often a bit more effort can take you quite far. If you want to go really far, do ten times as much as Bryan Caplan recommends.
That was an important lesson for me because while I knew it intellectually, 2024 was the year when I saw the result of doing so in practice.
The second thing that made a difference was what I mentioned earlier doing a WBR (weekly business review). I put together a list of 10 metrics across revenue, user, sales, opportunities, and so on. I established targets for each of these metrics. And every Saturday I allocate an hour, and two to do the review.
Along with the WBR, I also started a weekly review and planning practice. When doing the review, I also planned for the business the following week. Merely writing down the targets and then reviewing them the next week helped me establish some momentum in no time. I have a few observations regarding this practice.
Most weeks I didn’t feel like doing it. It felt like it was a waste of time. Some weeks I made zero progress on almost all the goals and had little motivation or incentive to do it. Moreover, planning and reviewing usually take longer than expected. So I would often feel discouraged to attend this self-scrutiny. However, I always attended to this self-scrutinization reluctantly and it saved Future Startup in 2024. Our business development work gained renewed momentum. We closed more deals than any year before. Again, I put in just the minimum possible effort I could put in.
In 2024, we published 184 articles across our 8 major categories. We made some significant changes. We have streamlined our publishing/content strategy focusing more on publishing substantial, high-quality, and intellectually rigorous content. The goal is to build a platform that is known for quality and depth.
We have renamed our "Face to Face" interview series to "The Art of Enterprise”, and introduced a new interview series called "The Generalist”, and a new content series called "Business Deep Dive" with the ambition to publish long-form and in-depth profiles of companies.
For the first time, we have published several long-form profiles of Bangladeshi public companies. Read our profile on Square Pharma here and Renata Pharma here. In 2025, we plan to go further deeper into writing about public companies and a few more industries outside of startups.
We’ve also relaunched our case library and published several interesting cases. The goal for 2025 is to turn this into a proper case library that people at universities across Bangladesh will be able to use and refer to.
We launched Future Research in 2023. Our research work picked up a bit in 2024. We worked with several universities, a UN agency, and a few private sector companies. We published several whitepapers. You can find our white paper on agri-tech here, online medicine delivery here, and a new white paper published last week on ecommerce here.
Our stated ambition at Future Research is to help private and public organizations in their important work of building a better world. In 2025, the goal is to expand this work.
Our weekly newsletter has seen some small growth. We have redesigned the newsletter for the first time in a while and started running ads in the newsletter. We sent the 100th edition of our FS Weekly email newsletter towards the end of December. We have also launched a new newsletter called Reading List.
On the business side of things, our content marketing service has evolved into a more comprehensive narrative-building service. We have worked with a long list of companies and hope to work with many more in 2025.
All in all, 2024 was a good year for Future Startup. We have taken several new initiatives that we hope to double down on this year. We see an excellent opportunity to expand our work and impact in 2025, and we are super excited about that.
We take our responsibility to study and write about Bangladesh's entrepreneurship, business, and technology scene seriously. I can say that we aim to take this responsibility even more seriously in 2025.
I intend to drive myself mentally and physically to exhaustion in 2025. I want to do almost everything that I can possibly do. I don’t know what this will feel like because I have never tried hard enough. Things have always come easily to me. I have always been lucky and blessed. I didn’t have to face much competition for many things in life. Moreover, I didn’t want many things in life. My ambition has always been limited. And in areas where I have ambitions, I have shielded my lack of progress and achievement with a fake sense of contentment and idealism. I tried to avoid a sense of relative failure with a hint of self-aggrandizement, telling myself that I am better than pursuing such “worldly matters”.
I think I have had enough of these escapisms. I now want to test myself and see whether I am any good when I truly try. I have started reading Caro’s LBJ biography series. I am at about 33% through book one: The Path to Power. It is a brilliantly written book, as good as a book written by a human can be.
I feel that if we can regulate ourselves and put ourselves to work, it is possible to do consequential work that will survive in the long run. That has always been my ambition. In 2025, I finally want to put my efforts into pursuing it.
In more concrete terms, we aim to turn Future Startup into a true home for business and entrepreneurship knowledge in Bangladesh. To that end, the main goal is to publish high-quality articles, analyses, and reports that can truly help entrepreneurs and operators do their job better—to become the ultimate business and entrepreneurship knowledge platform.
There are a few aspects to this goal.
One, we will publish long-form in-depth profiles of fascinating and important companies and organizations. Two, we will publish case studies across business skills and disciplines. Three, we will publish interviews as our pursuit to share more experiential knowledge. Fourth, we will publish more guides on various aspects of starting, running, and building lasting organizations. And finally, we will continue publishing our news analyses that offer unique insights.
On the Future Research side, we aim to publish at least 10 white papers on important industries, business verticals, and trends.
We also aim to build out our advisory service working with at least 5-10 companies on strategy, narrative building, and organizational development.
Our brand narrative-building service has improved significantly from our experience of working with hundreds of companies over the last several years. This year, we aim to truly scale the service to help more organizations tell their brand stories in a more impactful manner.
Finally, I have struggled with building an organization. Future Startup still operates more like a lifestyle business. I don’t want to reduce my freedom and the lean approach to our operation, which has helped us to survive these past few years. However, I also see a lot of value in building an organization that will allow me to pursue my creative ambition in terms of writing and research work and allow us to amplify our impact as an organization.
The key lesson for me from 2024 is that if you understand what it means to work hard and work hard on your goals, you will make progress. Your efforts will bear fruit. In order to do that, you have to start with working on yourself—organizing your inner world. You have to learn to manage your lows. You have to learn to deal with your pessimism and negativity and fear and neurosis if you are someone like me. You have to learn to push yourself, lift yourself up when you are down, and find ways to stop self-sabotage. You have to learn to deal with anxiety and stress. You have to learn to deal with any addiction you might have and the temptation to give in to any negative behavior when you are down. You have to find ways to reduce the time you spend in moods that are not productive for your ambition.
All in all, you have to develop your negative capability where you are skilled at dealing with rejections, pain, sadness, and other negative feelings and situations and still function.
Once you have sorted out your internal landscape, it gets much easier to put effort into things that matter. And as you direct your efforts to whatever goal you are trying to achieve, it will happen. I learned this firsthand in 2024. In 2025, I want to put this lesson to work.
I wish you a wonderful 2025.
