Annual report number 8: My Success

Back in December of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing.

That is now 8 years ago and each year I publish an annual report. Earlier reports are linked from the history section in my about page.

Main highlights from 2012

My wife was granted Swedish citizenship and received her Swedish passport.
69 000 websites in N.nu (goal was 85 000). More than 100 000 unique visitors per day.
Moving to Malta and then moving to Bolivia.
New company with 4 new employers: TodaysWeb Ltda.

3 months in Malta

In the beginning of June we sold our car and lots of other stuff, rented out our apartment, packed almost all we owned in suitcases and moved from Sweden to Malta. Malta offers the lowest tax rates in EU (with a correct structure) and there are other many other internet entrepreneurs living there. Kind of a small Silicon Valley for EU.

But we didn't like it. It was just too warm and people were driving like crazy - a danger for our children. Also it was not so cheap/easy to hire developers. But the beach was fantastic.

Moving to Bolivia instead

So we packed our stuff again and with our two small children moved to the other side of the planet in South America. (my wife is from Bolivia)

We have the wonderful big family from my wife there.
I started a new company, TodaysWeb Ltda., and hired 4 web developers with the fraction of the cost compared to Sweden/Malta.
Perfect climate 10 months per year.
Here we are living very cheap and can save money.
We are saving to build a house here.

I lived in Bolivia during 2008, here are my best photos.

New features with N.nu during 2012

The blog function which is now a big part of N.nu.
The Swedish website Dagens N.nu hemsida in which we everyday 8 AM select and present an excellent N.nu website.
The possibility to use slides in N.nu, see in Swedish.
Administration account for those that have several websites.
61 new professional templates, list here and here.
Spanish and Norwegian translation finished
A kind of directory with pages for each N.nu website, example.
Automatic formating and syntax highlighting for displaying code. See here.
The first premium template
New codes when working with custom template, see list in swedish here.
New Terms of Service & Privacy Policy.
I setup some stat tracking with actionable metrics for myself.
Main static content of N.nu now hosted by a separate Nginx server and distributed by a Content Delivery Network.
Many SQL queries are now cached using Redis. SQL queries per seconds lowered to less than half.
Added 4 more multiple c-class IPs for N.nu.
Moved several websites and blogs to my own N.nu platform, for example www.egenhemsida.nu.

Other things worth to mention

Major article: How to load WordPress in a few milliseconds using Redis
New website about full movies in YouTube which my new employees created: Fullmovies.cc
One of my essays was quoted in the back of a new book. Really cool. The essay is Life as a Game of Chess (scroll to end to see an image of the back cover of the book)
New website for my new company: TodaysWeb.com
Income increased
At the end of 2012 we started a charity organization for Bolivia. Website will be located at charity.todaysweb.com
I spent a few week to study a few hundred pages on the internet in regards to tax planning (Sweden, Malta, USA, Bolivia)
New Swedish article about SEO and N.nu

Goals for 2013

We are building a new web analytics system and want to get to open beta and sign up at least 200 users during 2013.
Doubling the profit for N.nu.
Get coverage on at least 2 major tech news sites about N.nu: Front page of Hacker News, Techcrunch and so forth.