How did Spacegoods perform in 2025? What are my goals for 2026? - Ep 109

Yo. So it's January 4th, I believe, down on on the beach for once, getting away from my desk, reflecting on the year, thinking about 2026. I don't know if this is too loud, but we're going to roll with it, get a bunch of content out. Not made a video in a while, which many people have noticed and messaged me about, which tends to be my pretty consistent pattern. Although now there's someone else holding the camera, so that might help going into this year, like a lot of people have spent the last two weeks reflecting on the year as you do, you know, setting resolutions, all this. I'm not a massive fan of that, to be honest, because I think you need to set more specific goals you're actually going to do, which is what I've done. But I think the theme for me this year really is just simplifying and trusting myself again. Because I think the biggest lesson a lot of people want to know how did the brand go in 2025? I'm not going to make a video talking about specific numbers. I need to probably be semi careful what I say about the main learnings because a lot of them involve sort of people, opinions, creative styles, etc. We've got a brand refresh coming up in about four weeks time, the third of Feb, which I'm very excited about, which is kind of like Space Goods 2.0. The initial plan was for that to be in January, which obviously would have made more sense, but it's delayed like a lot of things and that will mark coming up to four years of the brand at that point. Well, three and a half and a bit like 3.7 years or something, which is crazy quick how quick that's gone by. I think the main lesson in 2025 for me was over complicated things. We. I say we. Well, the business over complicated things. But I'm talking about my main lessons. I over complicated things. I stopped relying on my gut feel, feel on things. Didn't listen to that enough. I let other different creative opinions take precedent over mine, which sometimes can be fine. But ultimately when you're the founder and creator of a brand and product, I think you should always lead that. And I definitely stepped too far back on that and too far back in a lot of areas, to be honest. I've definitely built a good team and systemized a lot of things and the business is far, far less reliant on me structurally than it used to be. But the problem was I also stepped back from doing the things that I should do and I'M good at like the product creative, general growth side. Not entirely. And I kind of questioned like where the fuck my time was going in a lot of, a lot of areas this month. So this year, to be honest, so, yeah, it's all been a very big learning curve. I'd probably say 2025, certainly the last five years was probably the biggest learning curve I've ever had and probably ever, to be honest, because so many variables I hadn't dealt with came in, you know, managing people more for the first time, dealing with shareholders in good and bad ways, getting certain products wrong, losing sight of where the brand was going, you know, learning about retail a lot. I mean, the business still grew a lot. Probably not as well, not as much as I would like and that we intended to originally, if I'm completely honest. So, yeah, I guess one of the biggest learnings was I stepped back too much. I stopped doing what I was meant to be fucking doing in the first place, which is doing the founder stuff and leading the vision. I kind of got to the point where I was like, didn't think I knew what I was doing. Don't know if that's a lack of confidence or assuming other people knew better. And don't get me wrong, in certain areas they absolutely do. But they don't always know better in every area, especially not the key things that are what got the brand going in the first place. So all that to say like 2025 is overall a good year. I would not say it was a great year for the business, but maybe, you know, maybe in a year or two's time it'll prove to be the greatest year in terms of teaching me a lot that then, you know, affected the years after that. And I think 2026, to come back to that, more importantly, brand refresh coming, going back to our roots in terms of like product focus, brand focus, me getting closer to a lot of things that A, I enjoy and B, and therefore better at and doing far less of the things I just don't fucking enjoy because I'd probably say 70% of 2025 I didn't enjoy business work wise, if I'm completely honest, I think that was mainly because I've stepped back from the things I should have been doing and I stepped into stuff I didn't enjoy and don't want to be doing, even though we've got a team to do that stuff. So yeah, maybe that's like a classic middle stage scale arc for founders. Certainly was for me, or I'm just coping. But either way, that's my reflection. And yeah, I think another thing going into next year is I need to spend less time at my desk and more time trying to be creative again. And also just sounds cringe and stuff, actually just trying to enjoy it a bit more because that probably helps results as well. In fact, it definitely does. And I found a lot of 2025. I just was kind of felt like I was grinding far too much and probably more than 2023 or 2024. Weirdly, the business is bigger, but also the team is bigger. So like in many ways I should have been grinding less, but I kind of got into this toxic habit of thinking if I'm not on my desk almost like fucking hating my life, then the business can't be moving forward. But it's just very not true. So yeah, trying to focus more on focus doing a few things right, enjoying stuff more, having higher leverage in a few things as a result. I mean, like, that doesn't mean I'm not ambitious. It just means like to get to the stage, I want to get the business to. I need to get closer to the details and it needs to fucking be enjoyable again because otherwise it's very hard to keep doing something you don't like. So yeah, that's been a big lesson. I also think I've gone through the full arc of going from having like no team to having the team. Went from being small to being actually quite big, like quite quickly. But the business, but the team grew quicker than the business grew. That's just a fact. And in certain areas that was necessary, but in others it probably wasn't in hindsight. So that's been an important learning curve. And yeah, what else? I think I have also realized that like my health is. Needs to be more priority. Like I've always been in. In shape to some degree. I probably look like I am right now wearing a black T shirt that's accentuating my Stone of Christmas extras. But you know, I've always been in shape. I did like five hyruxes this year. Haven't done any mega marathons, but you know, I was doing some pretty decent times. I'm still like 18 minute 5k run. I'm not in bad shape. I'm more just holding too much weight and probably didn't prioritize my mental health as much as I should. And just like general health beyond my physical fitness, you know how it is, you get into the fucking grind stage. Not getting outside enough, not doing enough steps, drinking far too many caffeinated drinks. Ironically Some space goods, some not, you know, energy drinks, Diet Cokes, seven up Zeros with fucking Sucralose and all this shit. I've lost my train of thought. What was I saying before? Yeah, I'll probably do a new version. Yeah, I guess. Plan going into 2026 then obviously, like I said, brand refresh coming in about a month's time, which is a big one. So I think that kind of like physically draws a line under the next phase and correcting the mistakes have made this year. Some new people joining the team, changes in agencies we've made, etc. Really trying to focus on improving revenue and margin per head as well. Because I don't think we've had a. I said we've had a bloated team, but I more mean like too many agencies that we probably don't need on top of like core team. Something that's way more we can be doing with AI. I mean, I use AI, a fuckload myself, but Creative's the obvious one that it can do a lot more in. We haven't nailed that yet. I've been digging into that myself quite a bit, but ultimately, you know, that's on the team to really figure out. On the ad side, there's a lot of debate around, like, diversity of marketing channels that, you know, a lot of people say, oh, you can't be so reliant on meta and so on, but just. And we have diversified quite a lot. Like Influencer is a big channel for us now. I say big. It's a lot bigger than it used to be. Still nowhere near as big as meta. YouTube's decent as well, but still, most of the brands I see scaling to like insane levels are largely just Meta, like even more than we are. So I think that one's an interesting debate, but ultimately just focusing on being better at fewer things. And I think that can apply to marketing channels as well. Even if you're trying to diversify, I think beyond say Google Meta and Influencer, I don't think you need anything else, to be honest. And then the big, big, big one, if I'm honest, is, and I think it's the biggest solution to a lot of challenges that we've had and probably a lot of brands have at our scale and stage is just improving, improving the core product. We made the decision to go wider into new products this year instead of doubling down on improving the core. And 80% of our revenue still is our hero product, Rainbow Dust. We have done new versions, right? Flavors, formats, etc. We've never really improved the core formulation and the core flavors already existed, we've just added a few new ones. So doing a big project now, the packaging's been improved with the new brand. All flavours are being massively improved. They're fucking way better, to be fair. And then the next phase of that is improving the actual formulation, which I think is a huge, huge lever, because at the end of the day the markets got very crowded. We were early in the UK market and Europe in general. A lot of brands came in and basically copied what we'd done, which is fine, that's just how it works. But to stay ahead, I think you got to innovate more. And the error this year, on reflection, was not doing that with the core products and instead going into new products that have worked, don't get me wrong, but I don't think have worked as well as doubling down on core products could have worked. And then the other one is new formats again for the core product, which I'll do a video on nearer time. But there's a big, big new product for a new channel that's coming that will be potentially our biggest product ever, if we get it right. And then beyond that, scaling a bit further into Europe, still haven't touched America, which is a controversial topic. I would really like to. There's certain reasons we haven't just yet. Maybe I can get into that in another video, but I think that happens definitely at some point, maybe 20, 27, when we've got to a bigger and I guess more market dominating scale in the UK and Europe, which I think we're on the way to, but we haven't quite fully done yet in my view. And then, yeah, I guess another big change, which I mean I may as well address now, which is quite obvious, is I'm no longer living in London. As you might tell from my background. I'm in Dubai now and I think Dubai, strangely and much to my disagreement, has a bit of a taboo response, certainly from people on like LinkedIn and be careful what I say. But like a lot of people in London seem to think like Dubai is like some bad place, it's where you go and you're like a crypto fraud or like, I don't know, some people think if you've gone to Dubai, you've checked out. And the actual truth is I moved to Dubai because it is much better for my ability to do effective work. And that is genuinely the case. That's not some coke because I wanted to live in the sun. But like the main Reasons for that for me are a few things. Firstly like environment, I made a separate video on this massively affects me probably more than most people. Weather is a big part of that. I was genuinely like fucking hating my life living in the rain and cold most of the time. So I think living somewhere that's sunny all year round is like definitely net beneficial for health and therefore mindset and therefore work and business. I just think you can't dispute that. I think secondly a lot of my network and friends call, core founder, friends group had already moved here and I think more and more people are, you know, even where I live I'm like not next door literally but like within about a kilometer of about 10 brand founders I know which is far more than London and they're all brands doing multi eight figures and beyond. So I think it's definitely becoming, has already slightly become, but is more and more becoming like a hub for consumer brand founders and just online founders in general, which I think is a good thing. London obviously has that but it's not as, not as dense in terms of the percentage of population. What else? I think time zone is a massive one. Like we're a hybrid business. I personally operate better being largely remote first and then having intense in person time either once a month or every two or three months. That's what we do now. Like I'm not anti office, I just became anti the office that we were using in London. The reason for that is I was commuting like an hour each way to come to an office that barely any of our team were in. That was, you know, just costing me time and mental energy and money but most importantly time to get to and back from to then sit in an environment which wasn't optimized for me, didn't have my proper desk, my proper screen, etc. Etc. And obviously you can optimize offices. I'm not anti office. I'm actually not. I just, I was anti the current office setup that our business had that only about a third of the team were using anyway. So for me it's like, well if you can be as productive or in my case objectively more productive remotely, then why wouldn't you be remote? I don't know. I think some people have this slightly archaic or in fact very archaic in my view opinion on office is the only way to run a real business. But I would argue that most people in offices work about 40% of the day and the rest of the time is like coffees and snacks and small talk. And that does have Some value, but I think that has some value in small, intense bursts rather than, rather than every day. So my view on how to be effective in a consumer brand business that is largely online these days is work remotely and meet up every month or every three months and actually have that as quality time rather than like sitting next to each other with earphones in. So. And then the other reasons I probably shouldn't get too much into on YouTube. But in short, like, I genuinely do not think London and the UK is what it was and that's nothing new. Yeah, it's nothing new to say that. And I'm not jumping on the bandwagon by saying that either. It's genuinely my view, I think pound for pound, like lifestyle quality, especially in London, but in the uk, obviously, in my case, London is really not good compared to honestly a lot of other places, which is why people are leaving. I think, like, objectively, the UK has become honestly quite anti entrepreneurial and, you know, there's plenty of nuance to that and a lot of details which you don't need to necessarily go into on this video, but that is just a fact. And I'm not the only person or founder that thinks that. And it was affecting, like, how I felt about the place. Yeah. And that probably there's other things as well. Right. But I just don't think London is a great deal for people and founders like myself anymore to the same degree that it was. And it doesn't make sense in the same way that customers will switch to another brand if there's a better offer. I felt like I wanted to switch to a new place, which was a much better offer that was far more aligned with, like genuinely just being more effective in life and therefore business. So, yeah, I've moved out here to Dubai. I don't know if I've actually said that yet and given it a go. I don't think anywhere on earth is perfect, but I think Dubai ticks a shitload of boxes, especially during the winter and autumn months that London just no longer does for me and probably a lot of people. So, yeah, I've actually probably worked more here than in London, to be honest, because my setup is just so optimized. I've got my founder friends around me, some of the team are here already. Anyway, I like the mindset, I like the attitude, I like the general setup. So, yeah, for some reason Dubai seems to attract a lot of negative opinions from people that either have never been here ever, or have been here once and don't and have got a Very kind of narrow, siloed view of the place. Right. So I've completely forgotten what I was saying. But, yeah, big change, 2026, location change, brand refresh coming soon. Just simplifying and focusing again, which is basically the whole theme of the brand. Anyway, you know, we're going back to being the Focus Energy brand, Fuel for daily momentum, which is basically the updated slogan we started as that three years ago. Kind of lost the way a little bit, as I said. Went broad into loads of different things, but really the brand's core has always been focus and energy. Ironically, that was me getting out of my hole in 2021, 22, and I built the brand for that. But then I probably just pursued the wrong things, you know, chase top line in certain areas, which actually, ironically, would have probably been faster growing anyway had I just stuck to the core. But, you know, I was thinking, oh, we need to get another product for this, we need to do this, etc. Etc. And actually probably should have just stuck broadly to, like, what I knew was the core anyway. So, yeah, 2026 is the refocus year. We're going to grow massively, is the plan. But we're going to do it by doing less things better instead of more things not well enough, which sounds obvious in hindsight, and there's many things I've learned this year that are obvious in hindsight, but I think you do have to go through that process to really learn it and to be etched into your brain. So, yeah, that's really the plan for this year. Might do a few more videos with some more specific reflections on last year. Bosch, catch you in the next one. Cheers for watching. Subscribe to the POD.