Cant believe the year is almost over, and cant believe for the whole year I’ve neglected this personal space of mine! Traffic to this site is almost non existence too – to think that at a time I still get a decent 8 – 10k monthly readers, but i guess that’s the tradeoff for running a media site!

2015 has been good, not fantastic and not too bad either, and as a tradition, I use this space to pen down my thoughts and set goals for the me in the following year.

For Vulcan Post, I’ve set out last year to at least double the valuation of the company this year, and making sure that we survive through our second year. I think we’ve done that. in 2015, we’ve at least doubled most of our metrics across the board: we’ve grown:

• Total pageviews +120% yoy
• Unique readers +103% yoy
• Vulcan Awards total voters +197% yoy
• Vulcan Awards total votes +187% yoy
• Content marketing revenue +110% yoy

We also did 4 community meet ups, 2 each in Singapore and Malaysia, as well as organized our first ever Singapore Digital Publisher Summit which saw ~200 attendees (160+ paying delegates 30+ speakers / staffs / partners).

We moved into a larger office at Tanjong Pagar along with our investor Gushcloud (but we claim no credits on the new office), and we also redesigned the website to be a lot sexier!

While all sounds good, 2016 will be even tougher as we are faced with even smaller resources for our insurmountable targets, and not forgetting the task to replicate our growth this year and bring it to the following year. Sometimes I feel proud of all these achievements because we’ve done all of these with just an average of 5 full timers, but at the same time it’s scary too.

This year was also the year Annie left us, moving on the achieve better career growth, and personally took a substantial hit on this.

For the new year, I have even bigger things I want to achieve for the company – a personal trait that hopefully does more good than harm to me. 🙂

At the same time, we have also been working on our new SaaS product Parrot. We sort of pivoted Pollen into Parrot, a content research tool that indexes publications in Singapore and sort articles by virality. It’s a problem that we are trying to solve for ourselves, knowing what is trending at any point so we can be part of the conversation. We have one last feature that we want to build before focusing on monetization, and the pressure for Parrot to work is through the roof.

On the personal side, other than occasionally shuffling between KL, Kuching and Penang, travelled to Bangkok, Melbourne and Korea this year. Bangkok has been amazing as always – been to Songkran for the first time ever! Korea has been crazy as well  – went for a week and ended the trip with Ultra Korea, which was my first rave party! Earlier this month too, managed to drop by the much celebrated Zouk Out. Came to the understanding that rave parties are huge workout sessions only to be attended with friends. And am probably getting too old for these shenanigans.

Other than that, also shifted house from Choa Chu Kang (finally!) to a new place in Redhill! 🙂 Learnt how to cook and also manage to save up a bit this year. Still single, but that’s probably gonna change in the very near future, hopefully!

So what’s for the new year? Few things:

• Grow new lifestyle media site with Discover JB into a sustainable media platform
• Get 55 enterprise paying customers for Parrot
• Grow Vulcan Post minimally 20% across the board (with 60 – 70% less resources)
• Grow personal savings!
• Travel to more placessss (Japan set for April!)
• Seriously Jacky, grow some balls and get attached already. -.-

Here’s to a glorious 2016, and do remember to spend more quality time with your friends and family if you are reading this! 🙂

And to Jacky on the 30th of December 2016, remember what Binghan told you – when doors close, other windows open, so everything’s gonna be ok. 🙂