My personal review of the year 2024

New Beginnings continued to be the theme for this year as we continued building the global Banana community and collecting more experiences to look back on in years to come.

In 2018, I started a new tradition of sharing my personal review of the year, covering experiences, achievements, learnings and other important parts.

Read the last editions via these links: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023.

In a word, the year 2024 has been "reviving" - seeds planted last year started bearing fruits, though in unexpected yet welcome ways.

Effectively, I've been on a set course: being married to a loving wife, enjoying seeing our two kids keep evolving, spending time with family and friends by travelling the world, playing board games, and collecting experiences while trying to build communities and products that help civilisation discover new ways to use the latest technologies.

At the same time, the struggle has remained even after last year's new beginnings, with not everything going according to plan. Perhaps, like the phoenix, things ought to sometimes burn down before emerging from the ashes, which seems to be the case this year.

Ultimately, we didn't get BananaCorp going as intended, whilst the duo of Nizzar and I still succeeded. In addition, together with another friend, Alvar and I got back into the proper startup game to build the next-gen marketing suite for building communities and growing revenues.

With all this in mind, I feel the most hopeful I've felt since a long time ago, eager to see how far we can take it all and excited for the upcoming year.

My highlights in 2024

I am most grateful to my loving wife, Lele, who keeps our family intact whilst I've been struggling to clean up after the projects that have been and working on new ventures that will hopefully secure our kids' future. To show it, I try to take her with me when I travel - visiting Paris and Lisbon this year.

That said, I am happiest when Scarlett and Alister play along or randomly start wrestling with me on the carpet. These days, I literally can't lay calmly anymore without one of them jumping on my back-and that's amazing, as it generally results in us bonding even more. I'm grateful to see them become ever wiser and more creative, and I will continue to do my best to encourage them to experience life to the fullest.

Also, I am grateful for having become friends with Nizzar in 2023, and we were lucky to come together six times this year for NFT Paris, NFT.NYC, BananaConf Tallinn, Non-Fungible Conference, The Future Fashion & ApeFest Lisbon. We'll have more chances to do it again next year!

Last but not least, I am grateful for the expanded crew we have assembled for BananaConf and the new team we have put together with Alvar for our venture around community building and marketing automation - Perxify.

Activities 2024 - Community. Loyalty. Games.

This year has been a little different, as for the first time since 2018, I have spent most of my days at the office, working alongside friends involved in the same projects as myself. More so, in February, we took over the lease for the "Community Office", to which we first invited a diverse group of friends, with whom we then started ideating what we could do next.

Together, we have continued expanding the Web3 community, started building a new startup, and played many board games.

Community & Travelling.

As previously initiated, we started the year by continuing to plan out BananaConf Tallinn 2024 while also working on additional international events under the 99Bananas and Web3x[Industry] brands.

Since our community is mostly spread out across Europe and sometimes even further, meeting up with them involves quite a bit of travelling, which got me to France, USA, Latvia, Portugal x2, Denmark and Italy via taking 23 flights this year.

I: First, Nizzar and I hosted the BananaDAO's 90s music party at NFT Paris, aka 99Bananas in Paris, along with some local Bored Apes. Together, we lured over 250 people to sign up despite the venue's capacity of just 100. Thankfully, the event was a success (but not profitable), and we had a full house with tons of our international friends showing up.

With the first event of the year done, we took the rest of the Paris trip super chill, together with Lele, who was there along with me, attending other events put up by our friends during the week, like the World of Women Gala (which was AMAZING), and enjoyed our time there wining & dining.

II: Next, we went to New York to speak at the NFT.NYC and meet up with Armin, who moved there to get a green card. The trip itself was great, with Nizzar taking me to the pizza place showcased in the first Spider-Man movie, and we got to meet up with many community members again.

We had previously planned to host the Web3xSupercars event just before or alongside this trip, but unfortunately, organising an event in any country without proper local support or a big enough budget is tricky.

This is also why we decided not to host additional Web3x[Industry] events but the Fashion one in 2024 - more on that later.

III: Next, it was time for BananaConf Tallinn and side events like ETHTallinn and DeSci Nordics. With the help of FrankNFT, we put together an excellent program for the event, branded by Garage Italia and supported by many others.

As always, when organising big events, some things go sideways, and this year, we were utterly unmanned after I needed to pull down costs after last year's budget failures. Fortunately, the Web3 Estonia team, Alvar, Hendri and some other friends, jumped on board in the weeks leading to the event, and we had lots of fun, learning and networking throughout the week - from 100 People at the Sauna and Yacht Party with Snow on the Deck to learning how Web3 technology is entering everywhere around us.

This year's edition brought together 600 Attendees from 57 Countries over 3 Days. Our top international markets were Germany, France, and the USA, and 37 brands sponsored the event, including ApeCoin, Binance and VISA.

IV: At BananaConf, our friends from AirBaltic teased the attendees about their upcoming AirBaltic Backstage Experience for the Planies holders, and in May, I got the chance to see what's happening behind the scenes.

At the event, AirBaltic's CEO was sharing the airline's future plans for NFT use cases, we got to see planes taken apart for maintenance, sit inside their new training plane and go through both flight attendant and pilot training - including fly with two plane simulators.

It was indeed an incredible experience, showcasing how brands can connect with their community and build stronger relationships by letting customers behind the generally closed doors.

V: We met again at the Non-Fungible Conference, where we combined our forces with Lars and the Tiny Vikings community to host a TinyBananas House Lisbon: Pool Party & BBQ Brunch.

Those two events brought together around 100-150 people, resulting in further hype and new friendships. With the help of some locals, we brought together fire dancers & great DJs and cooked around 100 burgers.

On that trip, we also got back together with the excellent Fidel, who hosts the best brunch events across the Web3 Ecosystem and relished throughout the overall conference put together by John Karp and his team.

VI: The crew came back together at the Nordic Blockchain Conference, where we co-hosted an event with the ETHTallinn team and started making plans for future Nordic expansion.

The Nordic-Baltic ecosystem is clearly different from the rest of Europe. Here, Web3 adoption is happening much more on the corporate and government side, mainly in the back end, with fewer consumer-focused activities. These include identity, privacy, and more.

VII: The last event we hosted this year was The Future Fashion in Milan, aka successor to last year's Web3xFashion - this time as a collaboration between us and IZY Studios, who used it to showcase their services and upcoming collections.

Again, we brought together 150 attendees during the Milan Fashion Week and had a good time together with the Banana DAOquiri community, who travelled to Milan for the event.

That said, compared to the first edition, we failed to meet our KPIs, which led us to reconsider the strategy we set out for events in 2023.

As mentioned before, we have learned how challenging it is to organise events in foreign places without experienced local teams. Even when you think you have found the right people, they usually expect more handholding than makes sense unless the events are super profitable, which most community-focused events are not.

Regardless, we still believe in the power of events, yet we have decided to host them out of our home turf only with partners that have enough budget so we can hire the best local teams to handle everything out of our power.

VIII: Our last trip this year was to Lisbon, this time for ApeFest, the exclusive event for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT owners. For the fourth time since 2021, around 3000 community members gathered there.

This year, we attended it again with Lele. Since Lisbon is where we got engaged 7 years ago, it was a magical experience - especially when attending a city tour and delving deep into the city's history.

The honourable mention goes to Dim, who organised the ApeCoin Creators Day - bringing together all the Bored Ape startup builders who showcased their products and gave a glimpse into the future of ApeChain.

PS! Thanks, Dim, for letting me share about Perxify there!

In addition to travelling and attending conferences outside Estonia, we hosted 11 brunches, three company meetups, and various other events on the upcoming MiCA regulation with the Estonian Web3 Chamber. We also attended the W3N Conference in Narva, a great initiative our dear friend Alex set up.

Throughout all these events, we've been bringing together builders & creators across the Web3 ecosystem, getting many of them to visit Estonia and helping a few companies find new partners and set out to succeed. All while also being able to travel the world. AKA, living la dolce vita.

So, although it is not always fruitful, we plan to continue hosting both BananaConf Tallinn and smaller events worldwide in 2025 as well.

Loyalty & New Startup.

Outside the community building and travelling, we started the year by taking over the lease for the "Community Office" in February together with Alvar and Marek - initially to have a place outside the home to have calls from, with the hope that we might come up with some joint venture ideas.

Eventually, this led Alvar and I to focus 100% on building Perxify.

The story behind Perxify started in 2023, when we had AirBaltic and MetaBrewSociety present their loyalty and membership use cases built on NFTs at the NFT Tallinn. Afterwards, multiple brands reached out to me, asking how they could duplicate similar concepts for themselves-ideally using an off-the-shelf platform.

At that time, I helped them by researching and introducing them to various vertical solution providers. But a few months later, a few brands returned to me after their chosen platforms had either pivoted or turned out not to be as optimal as expected.

By that moment, we were already working from the "Community Office", and started ideating whether there could be a scalable business around this concept - coming up with the original pitch: Modular Loyalty Platform.

After hosting BananaConf Tallinn, we figured there was enough data to start designing the whole experience, expecting that the early concept would take 1-2 months of building (heh). So that is when we got started.

But as always, once you start building something, you will learn the actual status quo-and for us, this meant that most of the existing tech stack did not work as intended.

We expected to release the initial version by integrating a few tools. However, only one works as intended, and even this needs tweaking. Thus, we missed the June launch date, and by August, we had started everything from scratch.

Fortunately, Alvar and I were able to attract our brothers and another friend, Jaan, who are all engineers, to work alongside us, bringing our team to five engineers and myself.

Over the following months, we developed the early demo, recruited two more engineering interns, continued collecting customer interest, and developed a working product we will launch in early 2025.

However, the overall scope has kept increasing, and by now, we have built a full Marketing Suite with CRM, an E-commerce platform, a Landing Page editor, a Loyalty Program editor and Analytics + building a white label Marketplace and Marketing Assistant AI.

Our goal is still to build a platform for brands to increase revenues by helping them convert transactions into loyal customers and build a community around them. But we have understood that to do this the best, we must do more than help launch tokenised loyalty programs.

The best part is that we have over 40 brands in the pipeline waiting to start using Perxify once we let them, without any proper marketing - so the plan now is to get it live in January, onboard the first and see what happens.

All the while, we have agreed to build some cool pilots and have ongoing hot discussions with a few enterprises with 20M and 50M+ annual revenue. (the latest meetings happened just before and after Christmas)

Quite a nice outcome in my book, considering that the first line of code got committed only in August, and we have been bootstrapping the whole way.

Playing Games.

With all this constant travelling and building, stress levels have been relatively high throughout the year, which is why I have tried to attend or organise at least one game session every week.

In my experience, playing a board or video game for at least two hours straight (often four hours or more) without any disturbance is the best way to de-stress and recharge my internal batteries.

This year, we played at least 34 board games throughout 49 game nights, aka one every 7.2 Days.

My favourites after this year are:

• A Game of Thrones: The Board Game
• Tapestry
• Terraforming Mars (old favourite back at the top)
• Twilight Imperium

Other than these three, I truly enjoyed the following ones: Concordia, Dune: Imperium (original & Uprising), Great Western Trail (original & Argentina), Kanban EV, Railways of the Lost Atlas, Robinson Crusoe and Viticulture.

As for the video games, I played more games this year on my Nintendo than in 2023 - in total, 275 hours and 16 games, with the top 3 being:

• Civilisation 6 - 165 hours
• Borderlands 2 - 26 hours
• Don't Starve Together - 18 hours

PS! The best part is that Scarlett has started requesting that we play Mario Kart together, which might lead to many more games in 2025!

In other numbers, this year, the amount of work-related meetings & video calls lowered by a third, assumably because we were at the office together. In total, I had 487 Calls & Meetings (according to the calendar), divided into 189 Team Calls, 264 External Calls and 34 Meetings.

In addition, I attended 111 conferences and events and was interviewed or spoke on the stage 17 times.

Personal fitness continues to be vital for me, and this year, I had 93 gym sessions, AKA 1.79x per week. (again more than in 2022 or 2023)

Last, my portfolio kept falling this year, dropping 7.6% from 198k to 184k, primarily standing on the Bored Ape NFT & our apartment.

Yes, I still hold on to my Bored Ape NFT, which saw some value gain in December and has generally been fueling our activities these last few years.

Overall, it has continued to be a financial struggle, but at least I'm mostly healthy (tho apparently, I have moderate sleep apnea), surrounded by family & friends and get to travel & play games.

Defeats & setbacks

There have been fewer major defeats and setbacks compared to 2022 and 2023, which is a positive outcome-yet there have been some hiccups.

Ongoing (yet smaller) loan balance - The effects of NFT Tallinn 2023 failing miserably from the finance perspective have continued to haunt this year's progress. Fortunately, I've managed to pay back almost 60% of the initial 35,000

EUR loan with interest.

Yet, this means we have not been able to take our kids travelling or furnish our home-both of which make me feel more under pressure than anything else. Meanwhile, the constant "cash burn" has made me say no to more opportunities, and unlike in the past, all unexpected costs make me nervous. Fortunately, I should be able to get this cleared within 2025, after which it should be up only again.

The Future Fashion kind of failed - Although we had an event in Milan, its level and scale were different than the one in 2023, mainly because we did not have Armin on the ground (with him still stuck in the USA) and lacked support from the industry (as one of our biggest fans got super sick). As a result, we combined forces with another friend, but the end result was not what we had expected, causing us to rethink the whole strategy.

Perxify fundraising has not closed, yet - Until now, we have been lucky that Alvar and I were able to put together a team that has the means to self-finance their costs for the moment, tho it's getting tighter every day. Fortunately, we are close to launching the product and expect to get revenue incoming, yet ideally, we need some outside financing.

Therefore, we started fundraising in September and found a lead investor who indicated interest in closing the round by the end of November. Yet, sometimes life happens; in this case, we have not heard back from them since their trip to ETHGlobal. And since investors are generally not actively looking at new deals in December, our plans have slowed down a bit.

However, some intriguing developments have occurred in the last two weeks, so we are sure everything will be fine shortly.

Plans for 2025

Although I planned for things to change in 2024 regarding finances, travelling with family, and taking more time for thinking and reading, it did not entirely go as planned.

That said, with the seeds planted throughout this year, I am confident that, regardless of global happenings, we will grow our new venture and, with this, get our family finances back on track.

…and with that pressure removed, we will finally be able to furnish our home and start planning to take the kids out of the country! At least Scarlett is already getting quite ambitious with her dreams, so I need to deliver.

Perhaps around all this, I shall again be able to return to my long-form writing - the great thing is that these last few months, I have been writing more short-form posts around Perxify, so it is starting to come back to me!

Besides that, I plan to continue travelling, going to the gym, playing more games, and being the best example for the little ones.

So yeah, I feel great about wrapping up the year and am eager to see what we can achieve in 2025!