December in Review

December in Review

Where I was

• Ba Bể National Park (northern Vietnam)
• Cao Bằng City + Bản Giốc Waterfalls (near the China border)
• Back through Hanoi
• Bangkok (locked in)

Main focus: home base + product clarity + setting up 2026

This month was about getting aligned for 2026 and the products where they need to be to start the next year strong. Locking in Bangkok as a base is probably the most important move over the next 6 months.

December was all over the place in a good way.

Started out in Ba Bể National Park - where I grew up as a kid for about 3 and a half years - like 50km from the China border in northern Vietnam.

It was a bit of a homecoming. A lot of mixed feelings. It was surreal going back to the house I grew up in - now basically returned to the forest. Full Jumanji setup. Big cracks down the walls, completely overgrown with jungle.

A woman who’d been working there for 8 years led us up and said she had no idea there was even a house there. And it’s less than 50 meters from the road.

It was also really fun showing my girlfriend where I grew up. We rode bikes from the Tay village across the lake (where we were staying) to the national park center area. There’s a new road now. In the past you would’ve crossed the lake on the small boats ferried by the locals - now it’s just a 10 minute moto ride (or like an hour on bikes) from one end to the other.

There’s way more tourism infrastructure now. Homestays all over the place. It was low season but still a lot of tourists.

It was all very different but also the same - anyone who goes back to their hometown knows that feeling I think. Except this wasn’t skyscrapers and business buildings popping up in your small town. It was just more roads, more people, more infrastructure, and less wilderness.

From Ba Be we took a car to Cao Bằng city - an area I’d never been - and it’s becoming another tourism hotspot. I would imagine one reason being that the rest of Vietnam is getting kind of insane with tourism, so people are searching for places that still feel a bit more raw.

We stayed in another homestay then took a bus right up near the Chinese border to see Bản Giốc waterfalls. Truly stunning and we had a really good time with all the people we met - incredible food and friendly people.

I didn’t rent a moto like I did a couple years ago when I was on the Hà Giang Loop - and I got reminded why that’s not always the best move. On our night bus back toward Hanoi a few days later, two girls we’d met were on the same bus headed to get medical treatment after wiping out on their bikes.

PSA: don’t rent a motorbike somewhere if you can’t ride, especially in SEA.

Locking in the home base

We unexpectedly locked in a 6 month lease the night before going to Bangkok. We had been planning on doing a 2-month stay - leave for a bit, then another 2 month stay, but the night before leaving Vietnam our Bangkok plans fell apart.

About four hours before taking our night bus back to Hanoi, our second Airbnb in Bangkok canceled. Then the other one we were going to check into the next day turned out to be sketchy and not legit - and I need a real, legit place for some documents and paperwork in Bangkok.

So in about 4 hours we went from two Airbnbs to eventually landing on a 6-month lease and making Bangkok a legitimate base for us this year.

What shipped (December)

• Bangkok base locked (6 month lease) - stability and routines again
• DiveJourney is solid platform-wise - shifting hard to distribution now
• PhaseDrift focus got clearer - moving from dogfooding to a real public app
• Started posting/shipping more consistently - laying the foundation for ship in public cadence

Products

I’ve fully realized now that DiveJourney is going to be a longer haul. We need more users and momentum before meaningful revenue from dive shops starts showing up. I’m fine with that - I’m still all-in - but it does shift my near-term focus toward PhaseDrift.ai (LLM visibility).

More on that soon when I take it from dogfooding phase to full app. My whole goal here is to build products that solve problems I’m actively running into.

One of those problems is visibility and market share in a world with big incumbents - massive dive maps and dive directories like PADI and SSI. I’m basically using my own product to fight the exact problem I’m dealing with on DiveJourney. It’ll be interesting to see how far I can push it.

Look for that in a couple of weeks.

I also had to pivot PhaseDrift’s original idea. I was trying to find a way to do prompt-to-conversion tracking, and right now there just isn’t a clean way to do it that LLMs will reliably pick up and use while testing. Even multi-turn chat with RAG, I’m not seeing the path yet. So I’m putting a pin in that and focusing on what I can measure and improve right now, while LLM search keeps evolving.

DiveJourney

DiveJourney is in a pretty solid spot platform-wise.

Now I’m going to hit the thing I should have been focusing on much earlier - distribution.

More outreach to users and shops. More consistency. More systems that actually pull people in. Especially as the user base grows, I want users pulling in their friends and actually using the community layers I’ve built.

To pull in more dive shops and improve the database (shops + content + images + accuracy), I’m opening up a destination partner program.

It features dive shops in the destination they’re located in (the higher-ranking destination pages I’ve been building). In return: content improvements (images + accuracy) and a social post that they’re featured on the platform.

XXXXXX Project

I have another mini project I’m working on on the side to help me manage all of this - basically a command center for the self-development stuff + business/product tasks each day.

I’m a big fan of having everything planned out and working through a checklist daily. I break the year down into 12-week sprints, then monthly, then weekly. I love the 12 Week Year approach.

But all of this plus a new push for distribution (ship in public) and the expanding requirements of actually growing products means a lot has been falling through the cracks. As a solo builder it’s just too much to keep track of.

So I rolled an internal tool that pulls together what I’m tracking across public + private + personal life, breaks it into modules/goals/initiatives, and ties it back to actual output (including pulling distribution assets from ship logs).

Where I think it gets really valuable is the intelligence layer on top - something aware of the bigger goals and long-term commitments that can check in on what’s slipping and call out patterns for improvements.

Pretty stoked about it and if it improves my output where it matters by even 10%, that’s a huge win.

Big wins

• Homecoming trip to Ba Bể and revisiting where I grew up
• Bangkok base locked for 6 months (this is massive for consistency)
• Product clarity: DJ long game + PhaseDrift near-term MRR push
• Started taking ship in public more seriously (foundation laid)

Friction and failures

• Last-minute housing chaos burned time and energy
• Travel overhead was still a lot even when it was “worth it”
• I should have pushed distribution harder earlier on DiveJourney

Breakthroughs

• Base > travel. Consistency is the real multiplier right now.
• Distribution is the game. Building is just the entry fee.

What did not go as planned

• Bangkok stay plan collapsing and forcing a fast decision
• The prompt-to-conversion angle for PhaseDrift not being viable (yet)

January focus

• Daily outreach (shops + users) and actually tracking it
• Destination partner program live + first shops featured
• PhaseDrift public v1 + real trials
• Ship in public cadence: weekly outputs + monthly review stays consistent
• Lock routines: health + Thai, now that I’m staying put

Closing note

December was the bridge month. A little chaotic, a little emotional, but it set up the next phase.

I now have 6 months of runway to get to a base sustenance level of profitability.

It's go time 💪💪💪.

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