Back • 01/01/2025
Mon année 2024
Written by Melvyn Malherbe on 01/01/2025
Life is a video game. In this article summarizing my entire year of 2024 with many details and photos, I invite you on an immersive journey through my life. While primarily meant to keep a personal record of my years, I also want to show you that it"s possible to literally be a "video game character" by doing atypical things.
The more extraordinary actions you take, the more you extend your time on earth. I feel like this year has actually been 3 years of my life.
I changed countries nearly 10 times, made huge changes in my relationships, and went through completely different life phases. Let me take you on this adventure.
January
The year started off really well. We begin by taking care of "Mochi", our roommates" dog at Villa Loa:
It"s funny to find yourself on the other side of the world with a dog.
And ironically, on January 7th, I get bitten by a dog:
I end up in the hospital getting rabies shots, just to be safe.
How did I get bitten? Well, I don"t know.
A dog was in the middle of the road, I honked at it, and it followed me to bite me.
Work
But anyway, this is also when I finish NextAI! After a pre-launch that reached 100 members in 1 week, I had to complete this course.
For that, I needed to create 2 SaaS:
- PowerPost.app
- PowerNote.app
Which I start creating.
With these 2 SaaS, I realize I"m always doing the same thing and decide to create NOW.TS, a boilerplate to create applications faster.
I find myself brainstorming marketing and decide to create a boilerplate course to differentiate from ShipFast.
February
February is the biggest period of the year.
Not only does [Thomas Pompom] arrive in Bali and I"m going to move in with him for a total of 3 months in different villas.
But I also launch my NOW.TS program:
NOW.TS
With the success of Marc Lou"s ShipFast boilerplate, I decide to also create a boilerplate but with more of a "training" aspect to combine code and training for creating your SaaS.
I create a super solid stack and work to finalize the training for this boilerplate during the first weeks.
I prepare the entire landing page for NOW.TS to create something really quality and decide to launch the project for a week at €157
I didn"t know what to expect but I can tell you I was surprised.
Within 24 hours, over 100 people had bought the boilerplate. My biggest launch in my entire career.
That represents nearly €15,000 in revenue in just one day. It was really incredible. After 7 days of launch, 200 people had joined the boilerplate.
With NOW.TS alone I generated €30,000 in 7 days. It was indeed a crazy record.
This week was insane, psychologically it was hard to see so many people joining almost every hour of the day!
NextAI
Another project I"m working on as I told you is NextAI. The goal is to create 2 SaaS for the training and so I have to work on creating and launching them to promote the training.
The thing is I have to create them twice:
- First for the real SaaS
- Second for the training
It takes me a lot of time and I work a lot.
New villa
We visit our future Villa with Thomas, we found a gem and jumped on the opportunity, here"s what it looks like:
We decide in a few days to take it for 1 month.
The thing is there are 3 bedrooms and we"re only 2 groups, so we need to find a roommate.
During February we post ads on Facebook and Thomas, who is particularly skilled, manages to find a luxury roommate named Maxime who will come live with us this month.
Vacation
After almost 1 year without really taking trips, I decide to take 3 days off in a luxury hotel in Ubud.
We take 2 days to do nothing and one day where we go quad biking and have some fun. Ubud is nice, and taking time off is sometimes nice.
I get a bit bored but I enjoy time with my girlfriend and we spend 3 good days.
March
March is the launch of NextAI. The course launch was a success, although I had hoped for more people. Over 100 people joined, which was a very good result but well... I had gotten used to more.
It was really my big focus all month and I had to finish the SaaS https://PowerPost.app and https://PowerNote.app to launch the course.
I continued living in the villa with Thomas and Maxime:
And I went to the gym every day.
It was an intense work phase of life. My days were boring for the most part, my routine was:
- 4 hours of deep work in the morning
- order food at noon
- work another 1-2 hours
- go to the gym at 3pm
- then sauna / ice bath until 6pm with reading
- restaurant in the evening
- sleep at 10pm - 11pm
I also went to Nusa Dua, to a restaurant with a luxury buffet at the Kempinski:
And yes I did this with the famous Marc Lou who is a SaaS and marketing genius.
The Villa Problem
We really loved the villa with the flamingo but... despite an arrangement with our agent to be able to rent the villa again, things didn"t go as planned.
The owners had someone who took the villa for 1 year while we were in it, some Indians, and they kicked us out.
It was quite a story and in Indonesia, it"s rather normal, people who have money and give money quickly always win.
April
Change of villa with a background you know very well:
It"s a bigger villa, two floors and better located and we move in with Maxime and Thomas as usual.
Again, it was an intense work phase of life. You see the desk in the photo? I wouldn"t leave it. I was a work factory.
Every noon I would order the same things, do the same things etc...
BeginReact V3
April is a big focus on updating my BeginReact course to version 3. BeginReact is the first course I launched, the one that brought me the most revenue and I needed to improve it.
It was starting to go in all directions and I wanted to bring all the quality and experience I"ve developed with other courses into BeginReact.
It took months of work to refactor all parts of this course.
Trip to Amed
I went to Amed, which is a small town in south Bali known for diving, there are usually turtles and other elements that are very nice.
We took a 3-hour taxi with a friend Nico who I had met in Bali.
We did 3 days and during this trip, there was a Stephen, who had recently interviewed me who was in Amed too.
So both evenings we were there, we went to eat with him.
That"s when I made a new friend who would come back later in my life.
By the way, when we got back I did a podcast with Stephen about his life and entrepreneurial adventure.
First Recruitment Problem
I also had a rather traumatic story in my entrepreneurial life in May.
I had met a girl who had convinced me at first to energize my community and prepare marketing challenges, which seemed like a good way to sell my courses.
But well, the collaboration really didn"t go well.
After paying and signing the contract, the work she provided was very largely insufficient compared to what I expected and we stopped there.
A first very bad recruitment experience like this leaves marks regarding the trust I can have in someone.
May
In May, it"s my birthday for my 22nd and I decide to organize a barbecue at my place.
You should know that in Bali, barbecues are not totally easy to do:
- you need to order a grill
- you need to find charcoal
- you need to find a fire starter, etc.
All this is not easy to find.
But I get to it and end up with a magnificent grill:
Then I invite about ten friends to spend the evening at home.
It goes rather well even if, as mentioned, I"m not at all used to organizing events, even less for my birthday.
Courses
I"m preparing a new course on Tailwind and as usual, I go overboard because I decide to create a very very big course that teaches you not only TailwindCSS but also design.
And now, to launch a course, I start by:
- preparing the content
- making the presentation page
- selling the course
And the pre-launch of NexTailwind is a success, which pushes me to continue this project.
I continue on the side to advance and finish version 3 of BeginReact.
Departure from Bali to Dubai
I find myself taking the plane on May 22nd to go to Dubai.
And obviously with the Burj Khalifa:
Unfortunately, my stay in Dubai wasn"t very long. We stayed 10 days and moreover, I got sick, I had pharyngitis.
I still got to test Dubai"s services:
- a doctor at your home in 30 minutes maximum
- taken care of directly
- very quick resolution of your problems
And in general, I fell in love with the city"s services, particularly the Careem application and electric scooters that allow you to have all services at your fingertips.
Departure from Dubai to Switzerland
It"s time to return to Switzerland and come work for 1 month in Switzerland to see my family again.
In addition to my family, it"s obviously my friends that I see again, like Tim:
My friends remind me of the life I had.
2 years ago, I was telling them about my dreams, then I come back with stars in my eyes after having almost achieved them all.
June
The most fun is also finding my colleagues who, when I explained to them what I was planning to do, between going to live in Asia, making YouTube videos and content on LinkedIn, looked at me saying:
It"s not possible to do that, only others can do it.
And here I am, back to prove that everything others do is also possible to do.
The things Swiss people miss most when leaving Switzerland are the mountains, cheese and so I take advantage to do some activities:
Even if at this moment, I"m still in full focus mode.
I"m finishing the NexTailwind and BeginReact modules which are still my main focus.
I record a lot of training videos, write content, update and publish all this on my training platform.
There"s also my blog where you"re currently reading me which becomes a bit more important to me. I update the design and tell myself that I want to create more content on it.
Indeed, I realize that all the content I make on Twitter and LinkedIn disappears very quickly.
I want to create more content on my blog to ensure the content stays much longer.
So this is one of my focuses.
July
1 month in Switzerland, not a day more, it"s time to leave for Nîmes:
I join Celofat who organizes coliving in Nîmes and I came for 1 month.
The thing is... it"s the first time I find myself alone, without my girlfriend, in an old house in France. As you can see, this year, my life is constantly changing.
And strangely, with the people there, it doesn"t match. I feel a bit like in prison because I"m hardly able to leave this house which is lost in the countryside.
I spend my days in there, granted in this old and beautiful house, but well, I"m dependent on others to go to the gym or whatever.
After 10 days, I rage quit and decide to do 1 week of seminar in a much more luxurious house, still in Nîmes with Celofat.
The goal is to "scale" your business, but for me it"s mostly 1 week to live with motivated people.
You should know that despite my life, I still have big FOMOs and in this case, doing seminars in France with other entrepreneurs was one of these big FOMOs that I absolutely wanted to do.
So I found myself here, for 7 days with people I really matched with like anto.albouy who does cycling training and we shared a lot throughout the seminar.
Before leaving and officially leaving Nîmes, I decide to go see a friend AlexSoYes with whom we had a bite at the restaurant.
Then I go to meet my girlfriend in Marseille.
Training
At the same time as this seminar, I"m launching BeginReact V3 with the new version, new projects, etc. A very good training launch for BeginReact which was already my "best-seller".
Marseille
In Marseille, I take the opportunity to see several friends. First, I work with Thomas whom I met in Thailand and I talk about it in my 2024 article.
Thomas lends me his offices so I can work efficiently and we do a podcast together:
Then, I do a podcast with Camille and we take the opportunity to have a restaurant:
And finally, I"m going to participate in a conference by Oussama Amar who was in Marseille:
It was great and I met really many interesting people during this event. By the way, Celofat had also come, which was funny to see him here.
The problem is that I don"t like Marseille at all, it"s really a small city, where you feel bad, etc. and we decide with my girlfriend to go to Lyon for a while, it"s close to Switzerland and it seemed much nicer to me.
Departure for Lyon
Off to Lyon with a new AirBnB for 10 days:
I tell myself that I really need to get back to work and there are 2 objectives:
- Advance as much as possible on
NexTailwind - Recruit a developer coach
During the seminar, everyone had told me to do this and I start the process by preparing a very long survey in several steps.
But I have to admit that I wasn"t very good at it.
August
August, the vacation month and this year, I"m really going to have some kind of vacation... But before that, Lyon was starting to annoy us and we went back to Switzerland for a few days.
There"s a new project, it"s to update NOW.TS with a more complete version and fix the problems I had with NOW.TS.
I work on this in Switzerland and take the opportunity to do some activities with my mother like going to Glacier 3000:
Vacation in Morocco with family
Well, a very big project or event this year is a vacation in Morocco.
So it was very very intense. Arriving in a Muslim country with a family that had never left France, it wasn"t easy at all.
We started with a day in Casablanca, then went to Marrakech with the family. There, we visited the souks obviously, did quad biking and camel riding, the standard tourists if you will.
I didn"t work much during this time but still, I advanced on NOW.TS, my training platform as well as recruitment. You should know that when you"re an entrepreneur and self-employed, it"s hard to stop doing absolutely nothing.
Boredom is not an option and we start wanting to work every time we have a little time. That"s what I did.
The vacation was pretty good on my side, but as I said, family is complicated and a lot of stress, sadness were present during this period because my family wasn"t used to living together, seeing a "poor" world and a Muslim country.
September
Early September starts with a kind of seminar with 10 entrepreneurs.
I got to see Mikael in real life and many others, it was great. It"s actually Mikael, during a business call, who tells me about this seminar, which Théo had told him about.
I immediately decide to participate and contact the organizer to go with this whole team.
I really had a crazy week but I didn"t work much. It was a seminar a bit oriented towards vacation, we worked a little in the morning but that"s it. Plus, in our villa, there was very little wifi.
I made a complete vlog because at that time, I had bought a DJI OSM Pocket 3 to be able to film my life a bit.
One of the really cool points of this seminar is that I made 2 very good friends, Théo and Mikael, whom I plan to see again. A complicated point when you"re nomadic and constantly traveling is that you lose everything all the time. You lose your friends, your home, your habits. It"s complicated to maintain relationships.
On September 10th, this seminar ends and I leave for Dubai, this time to live there for 2 months.
I have some things to do there and I"m lucky to share an apartment with someone I really like, Stephen, I met him in Bali during the podcast we did together.
It"s a very good encounter and it"s very stimulating to live with him. We go to the gym together, we cook together, we discover our crazy lifestyle.
I adopt a crazy diet where I eat the same meal every evening to the milligram:
And the same for lunch. I have a crazy schedule where I do exactly the same thing every day. It"s the most productive time of my life.
Between two similar meals, I celebrate my girlfriend"s birthday by skydiving in Dubai:
Work
During this time in Dubai, where everything is optimized for my productivity, I lose my mind with my work:
- I complete the entire update of NOW.TS
- I add a project, Healthburger to BeginReact, final project done as in a company
- I launch the
NexTailwindtraining that I finish - I complete the HTML / CSS module of
BeginWeb - I test creating a SaaS https://flexinstallments.com
Well, I also advanced a lot on this project during October.
October
In October, I advance enormously on work, it"s my big focus.
But October was disrupted by an event that had to happen: the separation from my girlfriend.
Since I was 17, I"ve been living with her, I took her with me during all my year 2022 and 2023.
She lived the same life as me and at 22, I wanted something new, I wanted to flirt, to rediscover new people and experiences and unconsciously, because of this desire, I became increasingly mean to my girlfriend.
She felt it and after an event at MAJ Dubai:
We talked and discussed this separation. It was very complicated because she was security for me, the person who knows me best in the world, who helped me the most and to whom I owe the most.
It"s thanks to her that I had this success because she allowed me to live a nomadic life while being ultra productive and focused on my work without feminine distractions.
She especially offered me the support during moments of doubt that I needed. Breaking up with her means stopping having all this support, this energy of a woman by your side who knows you and loves you sincerely.
Especially since she was a person who loves me so much, this love was carrying for me and really allowed me to live a crazy life.
But 5 years is a lot and you have to know how to accept change. Making a separation when both people still love each other is very strange because you separate while still being in love and sad to see the person leave. That"s why for 1 week, we did lots of activities like jet skiing:
October 23rd is the day I accompanied her to take the taxi to return to Switzerland while I stay alone in Dubai.
Life alone in Dubai
And a few days later, I go to a Yacht party!
With friends I made at MAJ, Dubai is fantastic because there are plenty of events, people are open, you can often see them again. So we do this event followed by the Halloween party at Oussama Amar"s, I"m going to end up being friends with him, remember this phrase.
However, I start feeling sick and for the second time, I find myself with pharyngitis in Dubai. I obviously have a very weak immune system.
Once again, I call the doctor who comes directly to my home and treats me very quickly. In Dubai, when the doctor comes, you have to negotiate everything because you have to pay for everything and I get the bill from 800 euros down to about 400 euros.
I decide the evening after being sick that I want to meet people and get out of my comfort zone. That"s why I take a ticket to go to Bali and I film myself doing all this in this vlog:
November in Bali
In November, I take the plane and leave for Bali. And here, my life goes totally crazy. I promised you this article was going to be a bit strange.
I had an "easy" separation, certainly emotionally complicated but it wasn"t a fight, it was a separation that had been preparing for more than a year if you will where I was starting to be distant.
When I arrived in Bali, I told myself that I needed to work to become truly free.
And geographical and financial freedom, I found it during these last years.
But relational and sexual freedom, I didn"t have it.
So I challenged myself to learn how to flirt.
We can learn everything! With my entrepreneur vision, I know I can learn everything. Flirting with girls and having relationships is something I could learn. So I started from 0, after having been 5 years with a girlfriend I had met at school with the goal of having relationships.
The first days, I go to events and meet a girl, Marie, who is a seduction coach. I try to hit on her at first then give up, we stay friends. But she gives me good advice like going to the sunset to talk to girls:
So I do everything fully in my life and decide to go every day to the sunset to talk to girls. At first, I take between 10-15 minutes to dare talk to a girl.
Then, I become a police inspector who asks her lots of questions. Needless to say it wasn"t working well.
But I continue and every day, I go back. Besides that, I adopt the "yes life" mode where I accept all events with my Bali friends.
And with time, at sunset, I end up succeeding with a first girl, with whom I have 1 then 2 and 3 dates:
This is the first validation. If you do the same thing long enough, regardless of your past, even if you"re bad, you have to be crazy not to succeed. I don"t have luck, I just have work that pays off and I manage to get with this girl.
Now, we need to move to step 2. Improve. Because I know it"s possible. I get a bit coached by Sol who really got interested in this subject.
I thank you Sol for all this because he really made me pass a step. Having a person who has succeeded with you, who has really built up skills on this subject, allows you to learn much faster.
He gives me advice that just explodes the results, notably not just doing sunset but also approaching in the street.
So I go from 1-2 girls approached per day, to sessions of 3-7 girls that I approach.
And quantity is the key. Because you just need one receptive person to completely change the course of your day, regardless of the number of rejections you may have.
Work
On the side, I still work with two huge focuses:
- content creation and blog: I continue the most important, that is personal branding, etc.
- creation of BeginWeb, JS / NodeJS / GIT module
I also work with a community manager, a person who will take care of DMing people on LinkedIn and Twitter in order to increase visibility and training sales a bit automatically by human.
It advances at "average" speed if you will because I work about 3-5 hours per day.
Sport and health
I also get coached by MHD Coaching physically at the Obsidian gym in Bali to be able to have better health and physique.
The goal of coaching is to ensure that the movements we do are correct, to be able to improve my workouts and remind me what it is to surpass myself. I notably do a leg session where I was unable to walk after, it was... hmm.... interesting.
December
In December with my seduction methods, with the confidence I was starting to have I have the most impressive result, I"m on a scooter, I see a magnificent girl, I stop and go talk to her.
There she is immediately receptive and after 10 minutes, we find ourselves at sunset drinking a ginger drink.
2 hours later we"re at the restaurant and we"re kissing.
There my brain breaks in two and I tell myself, we can learn everything and life can give us incredible things. You just need to work.
Life also wants to teach me to manage my emotions, because we only see each other once. Then she leaves for Uluwatu which makes me quite sad and I take some time to recover.
But you always have to trust life and only 4 days later, I see a magnificent woman posing at sunset, we go back and I go talk to her.
Here it"s once again a very quick match and after 15 minutes, I take her Telegram, she"s Ukrainian, and I go see friends.
I send her a message and suggest meeting the next evening.
Here it"s a crazy match, we kiss and afterwards we see each other almost every day.
And personally I had an underlying objective with this encounter, it"s not only to meet a girl but also to have a real experience with her. Notably by going for several days somewhere with her.
That"s why only 4 days after meeting we met I invite her to spend 1 night with me in Uluwatu:
It"s an incredible day and this woman is crazy. We have a very strong connection and we see each other almost every day.
But it was just the first trip, because afterwards I organize 3 days in Nusa Penida, island that houses this famous beach:
It"s an unforgettable moment and experience. Going to live a strong experience with a girl I had approached a few days later, what a crazy life. Once again I have a huge unblocking.
What I hadn"t planned was that I was going to get very attached to this girl and that, on December 19th when I was going to spend Christmas with my family, well I was going to be rather sad and destabilized to leave her.
It"s once again an interesting lesson from life, leaving with the hope of seeing her again without being able to be sure of it.
Work
Concerning December work, we stayed on the possible minimum because of all these events. Because in addition to seeing this girl I also saw several of my friends.
I mainly continued my content and ensured my blog, my LinkedIn and Twitter posts and my YouTube videos. While checking that everything works correctly.
Return to Switzerland
The return to Switzerland starts with a makeover:
This style suits me better and I pay for these clothes for the 10 days during which I would be in Switzerland and France.
For 3 days I just go see friends and then I leave for France to do New Year"s Eve and Christmas with the family:
Last year I couldn"t be present, this year I decided to offer the meal to everyone, to bring together the whole family regardless of differences. That"s also what financial freedom allows you to do, to be able to please your loved ones and avoid money conflicts.
New Year
Well as we like to do things big, I took the plane on December 30th to go to Marrakech to do Noé Perret"s New Year"s Eve. He organized 3 nights in a palace in Marrakech in June.
I directly joined because I knew I was going to go to France and it"s clearly more fun to do New Year"s Eve in the sun than in France!
It was dantesque as Noé says, there were 30 other "entrepreneurs", motivated people who do projects and who come to celebrate New Year"s Eve lost in Marrakech, without alcohol. Needless to say it was an atmosphere!
In any case, it was a very good experience. I"m not a fan of being with lots of people, but for a short period, it can only be a good experience.
We had a crazy meal on a giant table, we were 33!
All this allowed to end the year with lots of people, change of air.
Thank you to all the people present for having done all this.
Conclusion and objectives
The year 2024 ends for me with a taste of change. Like every year, I"ve completely changed. Whether in my way of thinking but also in my habits etc... I want to continue in this direction.
The objectives for the year 2025:
- continue to grow my training business
- have a SaaS that makes 5,000 € MRR
- be even more awake about my emotions and desires
I express a lot of gratitude for this year, for the friends I made during my different seminars in France, Crete and Marrakech.
I express gratitude for my ex-girlfriend who allowed me to have a great half of the year, filled with focus, efficiency, attention and sharing.
I express gratitude for Bali, Dubai, Marrakech or even France who hosted me for a certain time this year.
I also express gratitude for my family who even if they don"t always understand me, support me.
And may 2025 be an even crazier year.