Hey there 😊
Housekeeping things before actually starting the post: From now on, I plan to write year-end posts (call them founder’s letters) and Beyond Tomorrow posts (the Terrabyte Anniversary in July, in case you aren’t up to snuff on the lingo) in first-person. I am so so grateful to be able to refer to Terrabyte as a team in many contexts, but I also want to be able to speak more personally about myself and the journey of the company. Terrabyte’s goal is to make environmentalism approachable – what would it be if the company and its own leadership wasn’t? Okay, on to the letter.
2024 has been a year for the books. I realize that Pixel Planet Today posts have slowed way down (more on this later) and we haven’t been super good at regularly posting on social media in general, but believe it or not, this has probably been the biggest year for our green tech company so far! We finished our first game, Wasted Space; we showed it at the Green Tech Festival in Berlin; we made our first Android app; we even doubled our site traffic!
To keep the good times going: we managed to keep with all of our New Year’s resolutions except for one. If you recall, we were hoping to source 25% of our electricity needs from renewable energy with our new solar setup.. While we fell short and only managed to hit an estimated 7-10%, I wanted to share some of the reasons why we missed the mark (in the name of reflection but also general education in case anyone else is looking to procure their own solar setup).
There are some barriers to using our solar energy from the get-go (our team works remotely, tracking energy use with specific types of work is difficult), but the biggest factor to not using it enough is, surprisingly, psychological. While I know that the energy from the Sun is practically limitless, I still found myself thinking of the renewable energy as liquid gold. It wasn’t sunny everyday, some days were colder than the minimum operating temperatures, so there has still been a level of “limited availability”. I caught myself several times thinking, “I can’t use the sweet, sweet solar energy for this! This isn’t important enough!” I looked forward to using my collected green energy, but thinking of it as “so so precious” was actually a hinderance to using it. Changing my mindset to using it whenever the battery is charged will be vital to getting those numbers up, especially as our little team grows. To help, I plan to power my tablet with only solar energy moving forward, complete any Terrabyte work I can on it, and then anything that requires a bit more processing power can be done on my laptop (powered with solar energy when there is power to spare). My tablet is more energy efficient than a large laptop anyways, so this could work well.
At risk of getting too “in the weeds”, I wanted to shed some light on the lack of Pixel posts recently. In the grand scheme of things, there is a lot to be excited about with Terrabyte. However, I started Terrabyte with the goal of becoming profitable, at least to the point I could pay myself enough to do it full time. While I think Pixel is a very important piece of the Terrabyte ecosystem (environmental education is a big part of our mission, plus social media marketing is a plus), it isn’t making revenue on its own… We still plan to post Pixel Planet Today posts regularly, its just that most of our time is getting eaten up by projects that can get us to profitability sooner. Wasted Space, on its own, isn’t likely to become a multi-million dollar game, but with associated experiences, we hope to get at least a step closer. The core of our revenue is planned to revolve around software solutions, so we’ve been putting time into development of these projects as well. I’ve also been dealing with some personal issues (eco-anxiety, burnout, and other things I won’t mention here) which definitely don’t help Pixel posts get made or even Terrabyte project progress in general.
So, what’s next in 2025? Sticking with our game plan for resolutions in 2024, we want to make attainable, measureable, growth-focused resolutions. Our ‘25% of electricity needs sourced from renewables’ still stands, but we’re much better equipped to hit it this time around. We may not be able to reach profitability this year, but we are hoping to acquire some grants or other funds before the year is over. We are also shooting to double our Internet traffic again, but hopefully that will come organically as we build our projects and continue networking.
I don’t know if they fall into the category of resolutions (I’d say they are more in the ‘goals’ category), but we also aim to make some considerable updates of Wasted Space and byteOS: Notes over 2025. Adding a working leaderboard with initials is the biggest aim for Wasted Space, then it will be on to exploring how to port the game to the other places (think App Store, Google Play Store, etc.). Our notetaking app has quite a few features that are left to be desired, so we’re aiming of adding these next year as well (accented characters, auto-save, better note management). The software solutions I wrote about above will also hopefully get a small unveiling, but we’ll see how things go (at the very least, I’m hoping to have a pre-Alpha version up by the end of the year).
Thank you so much for reading this little letter (“maybe a little LONG, don’t you think, Sammy?!”) about my little green tech company. Terrabyte is truly a harbor for my dreams, so being able to write about it and the things I’m working on is really something special. I am so proud of what we have been able to accomplish this year, but honestly, I’m even more excited about what we can do in the next one.
This blog post was wrote using 100% renewable energy from our solar array! I love highlighting this whenever a full post can be made when powered by solar, but hopefully one day, that’ll just be how every post is. ❤️🌎