Vortolo is one year old!

A friend of mine in Kuwait messaged me on LinkedIn this morning to wish Vortolo a happy first anniversary.

Oops, I’d completely forgotten.

So I suppose this is where I’m expected to tell you what an incredible unimpeded journey of self-discovery and prosperity it’s been (let’s add a unicorn in there somewhere….🦄).

Well it’s been something, some parts of it have been incredible, some parts of it were very difficult.

In the first 6 months I ended up in hospital, had few clients, work I thought was coming had disappeared, I was fighting constantly with France Travail and getting nervous about the income, often ignored during outreach to new (and old) prospects and then my Mac died out of warranty……

I never once thought starting Vortolo was a mistake but I massively underestimated how difficult starting again would be.

The competition. The ghosting. The noise. And how little fifteen years of experience matters when nobody knows you exist.

I also wasted far too much time obsessing over my website, repositioning and whether I had finally found exactly the right message.

Then, around April or May, something changed.

I remember being in Barbados when several enquiries arrived almost together. Some coaching followed. Then two significant assignments.

It wasn’t an avalanche.

But it was evidence.

Since then, I’ve worked with clients I never imagined working with in my first year. I’ve travelled far more than expected. And I discovered something about myself that perhaps surprised me most:

I kept showing up for myself.

Writing. Building. Experimenting. Talking to people. Developing tools. Getting things wrong and trying something else even when many doors continued to stay shut.

Somewhere in all of that, I also built V1 of Signal, my own local AI project. Vortolo’s 2nd brain.

Nobody asked me to build it. Nobody was paying me to create it. I built it because I believe there is something worth pursuing there.

So, one year in, have I made it?

Not yet.

I now know I can build a comfortable independent business around what I do. But that isn’t quite what I’m trying to build.

I want to see how far one person can build a genuine company with AI as part of its infrastructure. Other people may eventually become part of that. I hope they do. But I’m not going to manufacture a team simply to look like a company.

There’s another resource I’ve learned to respect too: myself.

At 50, I can’t build something sustainable by spending every waking hour glued to a laptop. Health, sleep, energy and attention are capital too.

If Vortolo succeeds but I end up exhausted, unhealthy and permanently behind a screen, I haven’t succeeded.

So year two starts with more confidence, more resilience and considerably more calm.

But I still have a long way to go.

And if I could say anything to the person who started Vortolo a year ago, it would be pretty simple:

Keep building. Keep calm. Keep doing the work. And have faith.