If you’ve been following my blog, you know that every year I choose a word that I believe will define and encompass the upcoming year. Last year my word was patience, which turned out to be an eerily prescient choice. I want to spend some time walking you through how patience played out in 2024 and then explore why I have chosen the word manifest for 2025.
Reviewing a Year of Patience
The reason I chose patience for 2024 is because 2023 taught me that the more I try to force the world to bend to my will, the more I end up making decisions that hurt myself and others. As hard as we might try, attempting to engineer the outcome of our lives is a foolhardy endeavor. When I stop fighting against the tide and forcing my way through life, I find myself often being in the right place at the right time. The less I try to control the outcome, the more I find myself enjoying synchronicity in my life. Hence, patience is the way forward.
As many of you know, I have been working on building a tech company called ProSocial. The goal of the company is to help people create community in the real world by providing opportunities and experiences in small groups of 4-6 people. However, unlike other friendship applications where you swipe through profiles, my app chooses potential friends for you. I developed an algorithm with one of the top personality psychologists in the country. The algorithm chooses people with whom your personality will resonate.
You may remember that I wrote an article (Confessions of a Naïve Optimist) about one of my first real world tests of ProSocial where my gym (Fitness 19) offered free memberships for anyone who was willing to do an outing with my application. Only about 50 people participated, but the results were eye-opening.
After the Fitness 19 trial, I needed a test with around 200 people. If I was going to prove my algorithm was viable to investors, I needed data from a large sample. Every time I explained the purpose of my company to friends, they would often say, “You know who could benefit from your application? The Arlington Heights Moms Facebook Group. There are always moms on that Facebook page who are looking for friends.”
Since there are more than 9,000 women associated with the page, I figured we could probably get 200 to participate in a trial. In May of 2024, I reached out to the admin who manages the page and pitched the idea. She agreed and I spent the last of my seed money updating my prototype in anticipation of this test, which was slated to launch in August.
In the runup to the trial, we posted several updates about my company and the opportunity to meet new friends. Many women expressed interest. However, when August came around and we posted for signups to begin, the admin kept rejecting the post saying that I was promoting a business, which was not allowed on their Facebook page. I was obviously confused. I had received permission. Why was the admin suddenly changing her tune?
What I didn’t know is that they rotate admins. The admin who approved my trial in May was not the same admin who was now approving posts in August. We contested the decision, but this new admin was obstinate. I did my best to work around the block by getting people I knew to post about the ProSocial opportunity on their personal Facebook page, but without the ability to directly post to the moms’ group, we simply could not get in front of enough eyes. In the end, only 30 women signed up and I had a few hundred dollars left in my account.
Dealing with Devastation
I’ve rarely been in a position where a single individual held so much power over my life. What was crazy is how this person was anonymous. She was shielded behind a neutral admin account. At one point, I was lamenting over my situation to a lawyer friend of mine who offered to file a lawsuit on my behalf to retrieve the lost money. He explained that, legally, I had a binding contract with the group when the original admin agreed to my proposal. I considered this option for about a millisecond. Even though I would be justified in filing a suit, it would damage my reputation beyond repair to take a bunch of moms to court who volunteer their time to manage a Facebook page.
In accordance with my word of the year, I embodied patience and let it go. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Facebook debacle wouldn’t even be my lowest point. As a result of the Facebook chatter around my app, a woman in the area who runs our local TEDx conference reached out to see if I would be interested in supporting the conference. If I gave my financial support, she agreed I could run a ProSocial test with the conference attendees (about 150 people in total). I just needed to come up with a creative method for inspiring them to sign up by including a gift for the gift bags.
I had $750 left in my bank account and I literally spent the last of my money sponsoring this TEDx conference and creating the gift inviting them to participate. In the end, can you guess how many people signed up? Zero, zilch, nada, nobody! Not a single person from the conference signed up. I was absolutely devastated. Without a larger sample size to test my algorithm, my app was worthless.
To add insult to injury, within days of this massive failure, I was scrolling through Reddit and came across an ad for app called Timeleft, a company launched in France that’s active in 60 countries around the world. When I downloaded Timeleft, I quickly realized it was a mirror image of my concept, only much further along. Before long, friends were texting me: “Alex, have you seen this app Timeleft? Seems like they’re doing what you’re trying to do!”
I had spent the year being patient. I had spent the year trying not to force anything and where did it lead me? Everything I had been working towards had crumbled to dust in my hands. Little did I know this would be the best thing that ever happened to me.
The Forest from the Trees
One of the problems we face as humans is that we can become so myopically focused on a very granular problem that we fail to gain perspective on the bigger issues surrounding us. I was so focused on obtaining results from my algorithm for investors that I failed to realize I already had the most important piece of the puzzle sitting in front of me.
One of the technical aspects of ProSocial is that you take a personality test that divulges how affable you are going to be in a group setting. As it turns out, the test I performed with Fitness 19 demonstrated that the bucketing system developed by the personality expert was extremely accurate. I could tell who was going to make a ProSocial outings fun and who was going to be difficult. This was great news as it took us a long time to get this component of the algorithm to function in the app.
After the Fitness 19 trial was complete, I went back and looked at the data. My hypothesis was the personalities would spread like a bell curve, with most of the participants falling somewhere in the middle. What surprised me was that 80% of the people who signed up for the outings had super outgoing personalities. At first, I thought our bucketing system might be broken, but the more I considered the outcome, the more I realized these statistics made sense.
What ProSocial asks of people is quite challenging: You have to be willing to meet a group of strangers in the real world for a meal. Even among people who are super outgoing, this requires overcoming a lot of social anxiety. What the Fitness 19 test revealed to me is that the basic premise of my app (meeting strangers in the real world) is fundamentally flawed.
I designed my app to help people who are lonely find friendship. Yet, because of our natural human inclination to distrust strangers, only the most outgoing people who already have robust social networks were willing to engage with the program. In other words, the people who my app is designed to help are never going use it.
At the beginning of December, I could finally see the forest from the trees: ProSocial was never going to succeed because there’s simply not enough volume to make the app profitable. Moreover, this is the same problem facing Timeleft. All of a sudden, I was incredibly thankful for my patience. Had I forced my way through, I probably could have received investor funding, but ProSocial, in its current form, is insolvent.
Manifesting a New Future
Once I could clearly see the flaws with my application, my mind was freed to pivot into new ways of thinking. I went back and reviewed some of my original notes when I envisioned the ProSocial application and I realized that I do have a winning formula to help people form meaningful relationships, but to get there, I need to approach the problem from a completely different angle—religion and spirituality.
In fact, I am so confident in my approach that I believe 2025 will be a year where I will manifest this idea into reality. I’m hoping the universe will align the pieces in such a way that I can move this from a whiteboard concept to a product because I believe this idea has the potential to impact the world in truly incredible ways. Hence, my word of the year is manifest.
If selecting a word of the year is a common practice for you, please share your word for this year and why you chose it in the comments below? I look forward to letting you know the results of manifest in January of 2026. Until then, happy New Year!
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