Q1 Recap: expectations vs results
Revenue, products, personal life
What’s good my friend
At the end of last year, I published a little recap of my first full year as an entrepreneur
Revenues
Lessons
Goals for the year to come: both on business and personal fronts
How did Q1 go [Jan, Feb, Mar]
Compared to Q1 2025: +18.9%.
My yearly business goal is to make 20% more of last year, so that 18.9% looks close enough.
But, if I take the avg monthly business income of Q1, it’s actually 14% more than avg 2025.
This means that if I want to reach my +20% goal, future quarters will have to be a bit better than the past one.
Only time will if I’ll make it :)
Now I will review the goods and the bads of the first quarter of 2026
Goods
1. Happy and returning customers
Several Euro Top Tech yearly subscribers renew their subscription and continue using the product beyond a period of a job search. Which is nice because it aligns with my vision of ETT as a career platform rather than a job board, i.e. a place to:
Learn (from guides, jobs selection, salary data, AI tools, etc)
Connect with people (through the Discord community)
Discover companies
This also aligns with churn levels going down from last year, and being now quite good for a job board/platform.
Returning customers isn’t just for ETT, but also within the coaching program:
2. Crazy coaching results
The year started well with some heavy offers:
A $200k remote role, another $140k (+ another ~$30k of bonus, so more like $170k) remote, just in a couple of months.
Last week: a big tech Zurich $250k offer.
And another customer in the final stages for a few six figure remote roles.
You can go here to see a few testimonials.
The tier of the results has raised compared to Q1 of last year: even last year it was good, but so far Q1 has delivered remarkable results.
Another cool thing is that previous customers stay in the network or even join the program again.
For instance, the below guy last year exited the program after landing 2 big tech offers, and has joined again a couple of months ago to target remote roles (he’s the one I mentioned earlier, who’s at the final stages of some remote companies):
3. Launching new products
Remote GOATs, started this year, has also grown to be contributing some monthly revenue as well.
It’s a very packed product, in terms of substance, and it is a bit undersold for now, but happy that it’s making something, and looking forward to iterating on it in Q2.
4. Expanding content
I’ve grown LinkedIn to over 60k, YouTube to over 2k, and bootstrapped X from 0 to 1500+ in a few months.
It’s all great results! Didn’t really have any real goal regarding content, but I liked how it’s nicely expanding.
Also almost 15k of you here reading this newsletter :)
5. Learnings
Last but not least: lot’s of good learnings, and progress made on the quality of what I do: from content, to software products, to coaching.
This is just as valuable to me as a result, since I value expanding my horizons and learning new things a lot.
The bads
Now, not everything is perfect of course. This is real life after all :D
1. Did some launches that kinda failed
Remote Compass:
Got some early traction but then somehow didn’t work as a standalone product
Now part of Remote GOATs as the AI Relocation Advisor
This one got ZERO sales 😂
I’ve had a few people reaching out, “interested in posting some jobs”
But this is the experience I had with B2B so far: people reach out, they’re interested, then somehow (I guess) you need to convince them to buy, or something. I don’t know. I guess I’m not good at “B2B sales”.
I’m keeping it alive though: basically if some company wants to sponsor some jobs in front of my audience, they post them there, and then I can reshare them on this newsletter and on LinkedIn. We’ll see if someone will buy in 2026 lol
2. I expanded the jobs on Euro Top Tech and Remote GOATs to non-engineering roles, but failed to market it
There’s way more jobs now than last year, also because I basically doubled all the jobs by adding non-engineering roles (sales, HR, design, PM, etc).
But I haven’t done much to advertise these roles to these people, since my audience and brand core is in engineering.
I expanded because in the end what I talk about is true for all “tech workers”, not just for software engineers or data scientists or engineering managers.
Let’s see if in Q2 I manage to improve on this.
3. Business is doing “just well enough”
The reason I make content like this Don't Start a Business article is that IMO there’s soooooo much misinformation out there about how “easy” it is to make money online / with a business.
It’s really not that easy. Even making 2k a month with an online business is difficult.
Which is also why my financial goal last year was: increase by 20% (and not: “2x the business”).
‘Cause it’s hard. And it takes time to learn the ropes.
So, where does my small business leave me, financially, at the moment?
All in all, it’s good money. After all, I started it as a:
CoastFIRE job
Or a semi-retirement
So I can’t really complain.
Also it’s stable, pays the bills, and mostly doesn’t feel like work (even though I still work hard).
But tbf it’s not a lot of money, yet.
Especially considering that I’m still based in Switzerland.
I do have a flexible arrangement with regards to Switzerland, which allows me to save some money here and there, but I’m still based there.
Mandatory health insurance alone costs me over 500 euro per month, the months I spend in Switzerland easily go over 4000/5000 euros in living costs, then I still have to pay taxes and so on. It adds up.
Which is why I also spend a lot of time researching other countries to move to.
I think I will continue this year without changing much - continuing working on the business and researching other countries/cities - and then based on the various results, steer the direction at the end of the year taking everything into account.
This article is already quite long, so I’ll leave the consideration on “goals within personal life” for the next quarter update 😄
But, tl;dr: can’t complain!
Lots of time with gf having fun, eating good food and travelling:
If you’re curious about these things, you can follow me on ig. I usually post my travel and food pics there:
Let me know if you like these kinds of articles!
If you don’t care, I’ll just do similar logs privately, and avoid spamming y’all with it 😁
But if you find it interesting or valuable, I can keep sharing them.
Lmk by replying to this email!
And have a great rest of the week ✌️
Cheers
Nic
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