My 2025 Year in Review

A Substack Repost

My year began with me searching for a home.

2025 was the year that my now wife and I were planning our wedding. We had just returned from a three week holiday / wedding shopping expedition in India and were searching for our perfect starter home to move into after we got married. On the 25th of January, we found it and began the process of buying it.

Highlight: Bought a house.

The next two months flew by. Wedding fever kept getting more and more intense. On April 19th, I got married to the love of my life and my best friend. We had way more fun during our wedding than we ever thought we would. This was by far, the highlight of my year (and my life, probably).

Highlight: Got married.

I spent the most part of May and June travelling. Our honeymoon was spent between Greece and the South of Italy and despite the weather being a tad colder than we would have liked, we had such an incredible time.

Highlight: Drove a left hand drive car for the first time ever (took the most comprehensive insurance they had) from Sorrento to Polignano a Mare.

In June, we visited London and Scotland. My wife really wanted to see Lana Del Rey live and Catfish and the Bottlemen were also performing in Glasgow within the same week. The cherry-on-top was that it was also the Silverstone GP. I loved this trip, it really had a little something for everyone. The Nintendo Switch 2 also dropped around this time, and after watching too many youtube videos, I convinced myself that I needed this but alas there seemed to be no stock in any of the stores. I did however buy one as soon we landed back home.

Highlight: Racing in the simulators at the F1 arcade in London

In June, I came to the realisation that if I wanted to push the product part of my business forward, I was going to need some help. Until this point, it was all services and consulting.

And so with that, I put out an ad for Junior software developer on both LinkedIn and Indeed. The response was overwhelming. In 48 hours, I received 634 applications across the two platforms.

That number hit me hard. On one level, I felt proud and excited that so many people wanted to work for Looped. But at the same time, it made me realise how tough it is to land even an entry level job for a startup that no one has heard of. The odds of getting this job were less than 1% (0.15% to be precise).

I had a lot of fun hiring. For the first time ever, I had collected a ton of real world data and so I started building a process. I was determined to sort through the hundreds of CVs on my desk(top) as efficiently as possible. I created a dev challenge in notion and wrote a script to automate sending personalised emails to each candidate. I came up with a ranking system to evaluate the challenge and scored each build accordingly. I also collected salary expectations and notice periods by asking candidates to submit a google form which helped to further narrow the search.

I ended up interviewing 7 candidates and had a really tough time deciding between my top two. Ultimately, on the 26th of June, I hired my first employee and just like that - I was running a real company (I knew it was real because I had to start using payroll software).

One month later, I was fortunate enough to have made a deal that allowed me to hire a second developer as well.

Highlight: Hired a small team at Looped.

We also did a few local trips. In July, my mum turned 50 and she threw an incredible party at Monte in Johannesburg which we attended. In August, we also spent a weekend in Hermanus with a group of friends. The views were amazing and so were the games - I was crushing it until the youtube guess the celebrity games were pulled out. One of our friends also introduced us to a really fun new game called Flip 7. It was a lot of fun and I really hope this turns into an annual tradition.

Highlight: Discovered a really fun game called Flip 7 which we played with our friends.

In September, I upgraded from the iPhone 16 Pro to the 17 Pro. On paper it doesn’t seem like much, but it was actually a huge improvement for me (particularly when it came to battery life). The new square front camera sensor was also a welcome addition.

In October, my wife started her first business. Inspired by an event that the hosts of one of her favorite podcasts had attended, she decided to launch a luxury photo booth company called Flash and Flare. Once the booth arrived, we spent evenings and weekends figuring out the logistics - turns out my ability to set up a printer actually came in handy. She did her first event in November, which was equal parts fun and learning curve. November also brought a plethora of black Friday deals and we got a lot of the furniture shopping for our house done (our house is still being built - hoping to move in soon).

Highlight: My wife started her first business and I helped!

I haven’t yet mentioned it, which is surprising because it’s usually all I can talk about, but we spent quite a few months working on our apps in 2025. We’ve been building Looped, an AI-first platform to help service business operate – one platform to track time, send invoices, and get paid. In December, we started doing demos and we landed our first customers. This honestly felt like such a huge win for me on a personal level. The real work starts now though. For me, building software has always been the easy part. Speaking to people, advertising and putting myself out there is much more daunting.

Highlight: Landed our first customer for Looped. I bought myself my first luxury watch to celebrate.

And that’s my year-in-review. Sometimes it’s easy to compare yourself to what you see on Social Media and feel like you’re not doing much with your life. But honestly, as I looked back whilst writing this, I realised just how proud I am of the progress I made in the past year.

And now, I’m even more excited for this one!

Ratul