2025 Failures and Successes

Fourteen months ago, I wrote a post about four things I wanted to do before turning 40. Here’s the TL;DR on those goals:

1. Start blogging weekly.
2. Create (and stick to) healthier habits around exercise, sleep, and sugar.
3. Be on a path toward profitability in our business that doesn’t require excessive work hours.
4. Ride in a hot air balloon.

It’s December 27th, and I’m writing the first blog post I’ve written since January 13th, and I’m here to say that I failed every one of those goals.

I did, in fact, turn 40 in March.

But I can’t say I accomplished any of the things I hoped to achieve before or around then.

It’s the time of year when many people write “year in review” posts, and since I’m strapped into a car, driving from Texas to Iowa to visit family for the holidays, it’s the perfect opportunity to reflect on 2025, my failed goals, and my hopes for 2026.

What Happened?

I’ll start with my last goal, riding in a hot air balloon, because it’s both the easiest and also the most aggravating to explain.

The hot air balloon vendor stole our money.

Long story short, for my birthday in March, Chris booked a hot air balloon ride with the only vendor he could find in Central Texas. I was going to celebrate with a glass of champagne up in the clouds.

This seems like it should have been the easiest goal to check off. Alas, the day before my birthday, we got a text from the vendor that it was too windy to be safe to go up, and we would need to reschedule. No problem — I want to survive the hot-air balloon ride — so we coordinated child care for a different day later in the month and rescheduled.

What ended up happening was that it was always too windy and “not safe,” even when the weather said there was no wind. The balloon’s operator repeatedly cancelled bookings, never answered his phone, and took weeks to reply to a text or email. He refused to refund the ~$600 Chris had prepaid, and in May, he even told us he was moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and that we could go there to get our ride. 😡

This is a pattern that we saw reported in other online reviews of his business around the same time. We attempted a chargeback with our credit card after we gave up on rescheduling, but by then the chargeback window had already closed. So he got our money, and I still haven’t ridden in a hot air balloon.

There aren’t any other hot air balloon companies in our area, so I had to give up on this dream for now, and it’s going to stay on my “someday” bucket list when we can fit it into a trip away. 😥

I still haven’t figured out a good balance between work and life.

The first two goals on my list were weekly blogging and better health: more sleep, more exercise, and less sugar.

First, the good:

I ran a 5k in February, pretty much without stopping, and I was really proud of myself.

It took effort to be capable of running a 5K, and Chris and I happily claimed our participation medals.

Now the reality…

I still haven’t built a good habit around exercise, but the 5k was one milestone that feels like it should count for something. Though I’ll admit I haven’t gone for a run or done any meaningful exercise since October, so I still have a ways to go toward making exercise a regular practice.

I still spend way too many hours at a desk, fueling late-night work sessions with chocolate, cookies, and brownies to stay awake, and I don’t exercise regularly.

I also didn’t meaningfully improve the amount of sleep I got. In 2025, I averaged 6 hours and 46 minutes of sleep per night, only 10 minutes more than my 2024 average of 6 hours and 36 minutes. And as the publication dates on posts show, I didn’t even manage monthly blog posts, let alone weekly ones.

The biggest blocker to these goals continued to be the number of hours I work, which brings me to goal number 3: balancing work and life was a giant fail.

Hours in 2025

As I reflected on this year, I looked back at my time reports in Toggl (our time-tracking software). Here’s what I found:

In 2025, I clocked 2,562.11 hours. That’s an average of 50.24 hours per working week and 10.63 hours per business day.

We have 16 company closure dates for holidays, but I worked about half of those days when we were closed rather than taking the time off. I took one 3-day vacation in June and a 5-day vacation in July. Generally, I “paid” for time off by working more in advance and/or after a vacation or holiday.

I considered this goal a complete failure because not only did I not work less in 2025, but I actually worked 302 hours more than I did in 2024. Here’s what my time looked like for the year:

Show/hide 2025 hours worked by week data table

Week of the Year	Hours Worked
1	18.87
2	49.39
3	49.93
4	48.25
5	39.05
6	56.53
7	48.13
8	48.42
9	52.26
10	40.96
11	40.4
12	51.94
13	44.3
14	42.75
15	45.11
16	54.05
17	78.72
18	59.95
19	39.45
20	67.16
21	44.64
22	54.12
23	55.54
24	31.36
25	19.05
26	58.01
27	53.18
28	55.95
29	63.56
30	0.22
31	64.73
32	48.48
33	74.81
34	46.45
35	53.43
36	42.27
37	50.29
38	56.91
39	45.8
40	49.92
41	52.85
42	58.39
43	57.18
44	50.98
45	61.68
46	48.92
47	68.7
48	22.02
49	74.01
50	48.16
51	58.36
52	16.52

Why I Work so Much

Over the past few years, I have intermittently looked back on my time, trying to figure out what to cut out and whether there are things I’m doing that are less efficient. I keep wondering whether I suck at time management or delegation, and if that is why I’m working so many hours.

I spoke with a female founder I admire earlier this summer, sharing my frustration about time. She told me she doubted that time management was the issue. It’s not an inability to manage time or a lack of delegation; I’m in a phase of business where I’m simply doing a lot with few resources.

Looking back at a few years’ worth of clocked hours, this is clearly the case. I keep adding more to my plate without taking anything else off to make room.

The Trajectory of My Work Hours

Here’s a look at how my yearly work hours have changed since I started tracking time in 2014.

Show/hide hours worked by year data table

Year	Hours Worked
2014	837
2015	1098
2016	1411
2017	1600
2018	1817.04
2019	1744.7
2020	2031.42
2021	1984.73
2022	2127.74
2023	2340.65
2024	2260.03
2025	2562.14

Key milestones from this timeline:

• In 2016, Chris joined me in the business, and I started working “full-time.” Prior to that, I was working part-time while primarily raising the girls, and he supported us as a chef.
• In 2017, our third daughter was born, and I didn’t take maternity leave because we couldn’t afford for me to take leave. We also moved cross-country to Texas that year.
• 2018 was the first year we had full-time childcare, making it easier to take on more hours.
• In 2019, our fourth daughter was born, and by then we had a larger team, so I took a short 6-week maternity leave (meaning I worked fewer hours in 2019 than in 2018).
• In December 2020, we launched Accessibility Checker. That year was the first year I clocked around 2000 hours (the truest equivalent to full-time work: 40 hours x 50 weeks).
• 2021-2022 Accessibility Checker was one of our offerings, but our business was primarily funded by new website development projects, not software revenue, and we let Accessibility Checker take a back seat. We didn’t release new features regularly and weren’t aggressively marketing, so I didn’t work much more than a full-time job’s worth of hours.
• In March 2023, we raised a pre-seed investment from Emilia Capital to grow the product side of our business, and I began working more aggressively to market it. This is when you see my work hours jump considerably over 40 hours per week.

Growing scalable, recurring revenue is hard.

We built Accessibility Checker because we wanted scalable, recurring revenue that didn’t require a human to deliver it. Services are more expensive to deliver, and team members have long been the largest line item on our P&L. Chris and I realized early on that our best retirement plan is to build a business we can sell, and service businesses are far less sellable, with far lower multiples.

With that in mind, we teamed up with our lead developer, Steve, to create a new business with a greater emphasis on product.

The initial development of Accessibility Checker, branding, and website development for Equalize Digital was funded by a small-business loan. The loan allowed us to turn down client work for a few months while we kept paying our team to work on this internal project. The initial build also coincided with COVID, and we received PPP funds that helped pay the team when client work didn’t resume as expected.

This initial funding allowed us to launch the product and brand that was central to our plan to build more scalable, recurring revenue; however, as anyone who has launched a WordPress plugin will tell you, it’s not “if you build it, they will come.”

Growing brand recognition and gaining a user base for a software product takes a lot of hard work. And here’s the catch: if you don’t have piles of money to pay yourself and your team while you’re growing the product, you have to do double the work — service work to keep the lights on and work to grow the product.

Taking an investment was incredibly helpful. It allowed us to hire a full-time developer for the product (not client work), so we could release new features faster and invest more heavily in marketing. But it wasn’t large enough to fund the entire company for the number of years it might take the product to get to that point. Which means we’ve been able to reduce service work, but not eliminate it entirely.

Which brings me back to why I’ve been working so many hours the past few years:

I’m working two jobs: delivering services for clients and trying to grow a product company.

This year was particularly intense because we decided to increase revenue opportunities by adding courses and another WordPress plugin. I created and launched two courses this year:

• Screen Reader Testing with VoiceOver in May
• Screen Reader Testing with NVDA in August

I also supported Chris as he created a course on selling accessibility services and worked with the team to develop our ArchiveWP plugin, both of which launched in November.

We added all these things without eliminating anything else, which meant adding more hours to our work weeks to get them done.

Successes

All this effort is not for naught on the business side. We have seen incredible growth, particularly on the product side. Accessibility Checker has become an ever-larger share of our revenue.

Here’s a graph showing the growth in Accessibility Checker’s active install count, as reported by WordPress.org. This is the user base for our free plugin:

Show/Hide Accessibility Checker active installs data table

Date	Active Installs
2021-01-20	20
2021-01-24	34
2021-01-31	60
2021-02-07	69
2021-02-14	72
2021-02-21	85
2021-02-28	98
2021-03-07	119
2021-03-14	128
2021-03-21	134
2021-03-28	151
2021-04-04	160
2021-04-11	166
2021-04-18	169
2021-04-25	173
2021-05-02	191
2021-05-09	209
2021-05-16	223
2021-05-23	233
2021-05-30	253
2021-06-06	264
2021-06-13	276
2021-06-20	294
2021-06-27	309
2021-07-04	321
2021-07-11	333
2021-07-18	345
2021-07-25	361
2021-08-01	373
2021-08-08	373
2021-08-15	379
2021-08-22	386
2021-08-29	395
2021-09-05	407
2021-09-12	414
2021-09-19	422
2021-09-26	445
2021-10-03	454
2021-10-10	464
2021-10-17	476
2021-10-24	495
2021-10-31	513
2021-11-07	525
2021-11-14	524
2021-11-21	536
2021-11-28	548
2021-12-05	543
2021-12-12	544
2021-12-19	554
2021-12-26	560
2022-01-02	567
2022-01-09	585
2022-01-16	588
2022-01-23	600
2022-01-30	606
2022-02-06	611
2022-02-13	618
2022-02-20	636
2022-02-27	691
2022-03-06	729
2022-03-13	754
2022-03-20	772
2022-03-27	782
2022-04-03	805
2022-04-10	825
2022-04-17	848
2022-04-24	856
2022-05-01	864
2022-05-08	885
2022-05-15	916
2022-05-22	952
2022-05-29	970
2022-06-05	995
2022-06-12	1015
2022-06-19	1038
2022-06-26	1066
2022-07-03	1088
2022-07-10	1114
2022-07-17	1121
2022-07-24	1132
2022-07-31	1142
2022-08-07	1153
2022-08-14	1168
2022-08-21	1198
2022-08-28	1232
2022-09-04	1275
2022-09-11	1316
2022-09-18	1355
2022-09-25	1377
2023-03-12	2000
2023-11-12	3000
2024-06-30	4000
2025-04-27	5000
2025-06-27	6000
2025-08-28	7000
2025-10-11	8000
2025-11-27	9000

Noteworthy details from the chart above:

• We had slow but steady growth in the plugin’s first three years, when we did less marketing.
• We had reached 2,000 active installs around the time we closed our investment and were already seeing faster growth before then.
• I haven’t dug into this deeply, but in 2024, I worked fewer hours than in 2023, and you can see the growth that year was slower. It took 70 extra days to get from 4,000 to 5,000 than it did to get from 3,000 to 4,000 (in the prior year when I was working more). This could be a coincidence, but it’s an interesting note.
• There was rapid growth in installations from April 2025 onward, going up 4,000 installs this year alone.

We more than doubled our active installs this year, rising from 4,000+ to over 9,000. At our current growth rate, we expect to hit 10,000 installs in a few days. We also grew Accessibility Checker revenue by 44.3%.

This growth is fantastic and shows the results of a lot of hard work by our entire team, not just this year, but in prior years, which set the foundation for this year’s growth.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note how great this is — obviously, all those work hours have been delivering something meaningful. So while I may have failed at my personal goals, I met or exceeded my business goals.

Which brings me to 2026…

What Does 2026 Look Like?

I’ll be frank: this year was exhausting. To work the hours I do and be present for the girls, I usually take an evening break around dinner or to drive them to activities, then sit back down for a second shift late at night. But more often than not, I barely feel present, and Chris is doing the bulk of the parenting and household management.

More than once this year, I’ve had people remind me to put my own oxygen mask on first. I was less engaged with WP Accessibility Day, the conference I co-lead, for the first time not running an organizing team, and stopped co-hosting the WP Product Talk podcast. That bought me some time, but not much, and it certainly didn’t leave time for personal goals. (Also, it sucks to stop doing something you enjoy.)

Every December, our team gathers to plan next year’s goals and budget. This year, I put a lot of effort into reflecting on our marketing initiatives and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. (More on this in a future post.) I told the team I want to work less in 2026, but I’ll admit I struggle to figure out what that looks like.

Do I stop creating the long-form content that brings people to the website, but that takes many hours to produce? Do we stop the podcast? Do we increase our marketing budget so more of that can be delegated? If so, where does that money come from?

We experimented with reducing our virtual meetups from two to one per month at the end of this year, which cut our workload but also reduced the number of new people added to our email list each month. It’s a bit scary to think about cutting marketing efforts, because I worry that it could limit growth.

I finally finished reading Thrive by Arianna Huffington this year.

I started it when it first came out, but gave up on it a few chapters in. Last spring, I found myself wondering if there might be some helpful advice hidden in there and picked it back up. But I ended it with the same impression I originally had, however many years ago: it’s easy for a billionaire who already has a booming business to tell us to work less and sleep more. It also doesn’t offer any practical guidance on how to bootstrap a business in a 36- or 40-hour workweek. Would HuffPost be what it is today if Arianna hadn’t worked all those late nights?

I’m starting to wonder whether I need to choose between pushing hard to rapidly scale the product side of the business and having a normal work life. Perhaps it would be better to focus on the service work that pays and let the product grow at whatever rate it grows organically?

I don’t know yet what 2026 looks like. I started this section with a question that I can’t fully answer, which may make this blog post anticlimactic and incredibly aggravating to read, but this is my truth today.

I still have the same goals that I wrote at the end of 2024. I want to be more present for the girls and more intentional about my own well-being. I’m just not sure how to get there yet.