Hey everyone, hope you’re enjoying the holiday break! I started this Substack six years ago, which makes it as old as a first grader. Can you tell I’m seeing the world through the lens of a dad almost everywhere I look now?
I started this newsletter to replace an annual-ish life update I used to send to friends, family and people who helped me along the way. This was never meant to be my main platform for sharing thoughts about product, work, etc. I saw it more as a public journal of sorts.
As I look back at my activity here in 2025 (or lack thereof), it’s clear I completely neglected this part of my life. I only published one post all year. I did spend a lot of time on Substack this year, but for a different publication: Supra Insider (the podcast I co-host with my good friend Marc Baselga).
Instead, my writing took place mainly in DMs, group chats, on LinkedIn and in emails to my Maven list.
I would like to get back into writing here in 2026. Let’s see how it goes.
Wishing you all a happy new year 🥳
Ben
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Writing this post gave me an excuse to look back at what I did this year and man… it’s a lot!
This post is written for future Ben to look back and appreciate this moment. When you’re going fast, things blur and I don’t want my life to be blurry.
It’s not a comprehensive reflection on everything that happened in 2025 or a detailed roadmap for what’s coming up in 2026. But I’ll touch on both, and I’ll do so bucket by bucket:
Family & Personal Life
Content
Coaching, Advising and Consulting
Side Projects / Community
Income
My proudest achievement is that I spent 2-3 hours a day with my daughter Gaia and my wife Carole while achieving all of my professional goals. Most weekends were entirely offline with family. This is my core, and I’ve gotten better at defending it.
I also carved out dedicated time for non-work stuff that matters to me:
Carole, Gaia and I spent a week in Belize, a week in Costa Rica, and a full month in France.
I took my dog George for three separate full-day Friday hiking trips in Hariman State Park outside of NYC. Excellent thinking time while getting him exercise.
I played pickup 7x7 soccer twenty times.
I hosted my sister and her kids in NYC. I hosted my mom too.
I traveled to Florida twice to visit my mom and grandma.
I flew out to SF for the first time since we left ~4 years ago and made it to Tahoe for my friend Laser’s bachelor party. I crashed for a couple nights with my friend Connor.
I got closer with more dads in my neighborhood as the line between socializing and family time continues to get murky (which is hard to appreciate without kids).
I read a few pages of a physical book almost every night before bed. Lots of epic fantasy (I’m now on book 4 of the Malazan series after taking a detour to the latest Stormlight Archive book).
I started using a monthly blood collection service to track my health on a tighter basis and am more informed (while I’m not optimal everywhere, as of this month nothing is in the red).
I rarely have a hard time falling asleep and get 7+ hours of sleep most nights.
There’s more but I’ll leave it at that for now. The personal highlights come first because they’re the foundation for everything else. Without a healthy personal life, none of the rest matters. I love my girls and George 😍
I’m going to continue prioritizing family above all else and continuing to be extremely active as a dad and carrying my weight at home. We will continue to travel, especially when we need a break from the cold and/or heat in NYC. A month in Europe in the summer will ideally continue to be a thing we do.
One area where I fell short in 2025 is my personal fitness. I just bought a 24-pack of 1:1 sessions with a personal trainer here in Brooklyn and I’ll go Mondays and Wednesdays at 10am for the first three months of the year, with a plan to transition to 4-person group sessions afterwards. My main goals are to gain functional strength, trim the waist line, and feel better / more energized.
I’d love to play pickup soccer at least once every month, but ideally closer to 2-3 times. Taking 10 days this year to hike outside the city with George feels like a good goal too.
I’ll keep reading paper books every night before bed, probably getting through 3-4 more Malazan books because they’re thick (but so good).
Two of my best friends (Laser and Sam) are getting married next year, so I’m excited for those two weddings. Laser is the one who got me tangled up in the Malazan series. And yes, his real name is Laser.
It’s not clear yet whether I’ll be able to make it to Israel to visit my dad and family this year but I’ll do my best to make that happen.
I ran eight live cohorts of my Maven course this year, serving almost 200 students.
After running the tenth and final live cohort in October, I decided to overhaul the course to better fit the schedule of busy PMs getting ready for interviews. I received emails all summer from people who wanted to take the course while I was in France but the next cohort didn’t line up with their interview schedule and availability.
So I decided to take my own availability out of the equation and re-launched the course in a fully self-paced format.
My first self-paced cohort ran in December and it worked great for students and for me. I’m getting less students than I used to but students can now access the full course content on their own schedule which feels like a big win. Once they complete the syllabus, they get access to my AI Copilot for practice. In addition to benefitting students, this also allows me to re-allocate the time I used to spend teaching live cohorts into other priorities I’m excited about (more on that below).
My Maven mailing list grew to over 13,000 emails this year, fueled by eight live Lightning Lessons, which are free workshops that funnel signups into my course waitlist. The sessions had 2,800 live attendees which is a full small-scale sports arena. You can see all my lightning lessons from this year here.
My biggest lightning lesson of the year, How top companies evaluate PM candidates in 2025, has 7.8k signups. I believe it’s a top 5 LL all-time on Maven. People loved what the panelists - Nickey Skarstad , Chantal Cox and Stephanie J Neill had to say.
Another big win I’m celebrating is the inclusion of my course in Lenny’s List, a hand-selected lists of Maven courses curated by Lenny Rachitsky. This has helped me with both discoverability and credibility.
Thanks to both Lenny and Maven for helping me grow my course this year 🙏
I’m planning to continue offering the self-paced version of the course and running frequent cohorts. Since there are no longer any live sessions, this is easy. I want to ensure PMs can always get the course on a tight interview timeline.
I’m planning on doing more Lightning Lessons in 2026 than I did in 2025, because it’s been such an effective way for me to share content with my audience that is valuable, and also help me grow my list. Maven has crafted a genuinely effective win-win platform with these Lightning Lessons and I’m excited to keep investing. The other cool thing about the Lightning Lessons is that I can also take the recordings and publish them on my YouTube channel (more on that below).
I’ve contemplated launching an entirely new course on Maven, but I’m holding off on that for now. It’s exciting but likely a distraction. It doesn’t feel like a primary goal, but maybe something that will come up organically this year if the timing is right, and I get really excited about a new topic.
My AI Copilot was my least expected win of the year. I’m happy I leaned into it and found ways to make it better while also getting a feel for how to market it.
A few months ago I published an episode with Marc on our podcast sharing the whole story around my AI Copilot and we covered all the bases so I won’t repeat them here but if you’re interested, just check out the episode:
With zero paid advertising, I sold over 200 units with only one refund request. I get regular emails from people telling me it’s the best $500 they’ve spent given the comp packages they’re targeting are often $500k/year or more.
I wanted to showcase more of these testimonials so I vibe-coded a website for the Copilot that has allowed me to tell the story in a way I’m proud of. The website has real demos, videos, FAQs, and more.
Building the website also gave me an excuse to spend a lot of time in Cursor and staying on top of the latest capabilities with AI prototyping tools powered by LLMs. I use Stripe, Zapier, and Apps Script to automate delivery. It felt really good to get my hands dirty and take control of the full stack.
I’m keeping a very close tab on how interviews are evolving (especially the interviews that I cover in my course and with the copilot). I’ll need to keep the Copilot relevant otherwise it’ll become obsolete. I imagine it’ll be good for another 3-6 months before another major update will be needed.
As for the website goes, I think it’s in good shape. I plan to publish more content in 2026 to market the copilot and show it in action because I continue to get feedback that people want to try it before they buy it but that’s fundamentally hard because once you have it, you have it (it’s a one-time purchase).
My co-host Marc Baselga and I published over fifty episodes of the Supra Insider podcast this year. We published every single week. The show drove 64k downloads and 120k Substack views across 85k people. Our YouTube hit 1k subscribers (up 5x from last year) with 116k views and over 3k hours of watch time.
Our Spotify follower count grew 3.5x to 750 followers. Spotify delivered 10k plays and 2k consumption hours. Our total Spotify audience was 2.2k people. We have over 3k Substack subscribers.
Based on our most recent Spotify Wrapped, we’re the top podcast for 71 people. Those are our true fans.
Zooming out, the real value of the podcast isn’t in the numbers. It’s the conversations and the ritual.
The podcast helps me stay close to what’s shifting in how products get built and how work gets done in the age of AI. Everything I do requires me to be extremely plugged in and the podcast is an excellent forcing function for it.
The podcast has also allowed me to maintain a consistent habit where I talk with other people about topics that are interesting to me and publish something. Shipping on a regular cadence has been amazing for regulating my mood.
We’re going to keep publishing at least one episode per week, experimenting as we go with ways to make the podcast more fun for us and improving the guest experience. As long as we’re learning, having fun, and talking to interesting people, this podcast has staying power.
We’ll likely experiment with monetization this year, exploring partners/sponsors who want to reach out premium audience. I truly think we have one of the best podcasts for product leaders in the world. The key to growth will be consistency and quality above all else. The score will take care of itself.
I launched Insider Loops with Marc (same one I co-host my podcast with) in September to help PMs prepare for interviews with Uber, Figma, Stripe. We added DoorDash in October and are working on the next guide now at a very hot company almost every PM wants to join.
We have many happy customers and proved the core thesis with very limited distribution. We’ve validated that PMs will pay for company-specific interview prep if they trust the source of the insights and know they can’t find this content anywhere else. We’ve developed a strong sense for how to create and market our guides, but still haven’t cracked large-scale distribution.
Marc and I have a full-blown collaboration in a shared repo that we each contribute to in Cursor (for the vibe-coded site as well as guide creation, updates, changelogs, etc). This project is another accelerant for Marc and I to stay very on top of AI tools (just this week Marc told me how Claude Skills are helping with some aspect of our guide changelogs). Insider Loops also gave me a reason to play with Gamma and we love it for this use case.
Marc and I dedicated a full podcast episode to talking about the full story behind Insider Loops if you’re interested in learning more:
We’re receiving real-time feedback from our customers about their interview experience and incorporating these insights into the guides on a biweekly basis. When someone buys one of our guides, they’re getting lifetime updates to that guide for a one-time payment.
The process for updating the guides is getting better every week and we’re well-positioned to become the best destination for updated PM interview guidance at top companies. Today that’s Stripe, DoorDash, Uber and Figma. But we’re planning to create many new guides for popular companies hiring PMs in the new year.
In addition to improving current guides and adding new guides, the third piece we will be looking to crack in 2026 is scaling relevant traffic to our site. This will be an ongoing area of experimentation for us.
My content footprint expanded quite a bit this year, even outside of the podcast and my Maven course and lightning lessons.
The highlight was definitely publishing not one but two guest posts on Lenny’s Newsletter in April and July, respectively:
Those two posts now dominate SEO for “Product Sense interview” and “Analytical Thinking interview.” Given that these are the two most common interviews PMs encounter, I’m very happy about this result. The Lenny posts drive consistent traffic to my interview templates (PS | AT) and course page. Writing a Lenny post is a big lift because of his insanely high bar and it’s worth every minute.
My LinkedIn follower count grew this year from 8k to 21k. My posts drove 2.5 million impressions and 32k engagements, reaching 570k members.
I also decided to start a YouTube channel early this year and have been working with an incredible video editor in the Ukraine who I found on Upwork. My channel went from literally 0 subcribers to over 900, driving over 100k views with 3.3k hours watched.
I also made two appearances on podcasts I’ve been a big fan of as a listener for years:
Content is everything in this phase of my career. Staying top of mind for my network is key to manufacturing serendipity and increasing my surface area of luck.
In addition to podcast-related content, I will continue writing regularly on LinkedIn, ideally writing more here on Substack, and doing a lot more on YouTube. I want to keep sharing my ideas and growing my platform for amplifying strong thinkers I admire. If I get invited on a podcast I like, I’ll say yes.
I’m going to create way more value for people than I capture in any of the products and services I sell. High quality, premium content, and a lot of it. That’s the goal.
I coached <100 PMs one-on-one this year with dozens of those as paid sessions (many were my students). Many landed new roles and credited our time together with their success.
There have been times when I wasn’t available for coaching so I built a very small network of top-tier interview coaches for Meta, Google, Stripe and DoorDash. I’ve learned that many PMs trust me over platforms for coach-matching, even if the folks I refer them to are more expensive. Folks looking to get matched with a coach through me can submit this Google Form.
While building my solopreneur/creator revenue this year, I also kept some fractional product work going:
I did six months of part-time PM work with a Series A fintech startup called Lettuce which was fun and kept me fresh shipping product. The company is building for solopreneurs and most of the team is fractional so it’s just a great fit. And Ran Harpaz, the founder/CEO is an awesome human being who I’ve enjoyed helping.
I completed a two-month paid customer research project for a stealth AI company early in the year, which I always enjoy.
I’ve also had a paid advisory engagement going for the past six months with a talented early career head of product.
I liked the fractional work and it generated meaningful income but I had a realization halfway through the year that fractional product work doesn’t accelerate my solopreneur flywheel as much as the podcast, course, and copilot. In a way, Insider Loops came out of my need to replace the fractional PM income.
I’m not looking for consulting projects or part-time PM work but I’d love to have another 1-2 advisory engagements going with early career heads of product at growing companies. Basically, extremely sharp people with a strong work ethic and no PM background who find themselves running the product function at their company.
Looks like my experience as the first PM at three startups paired with my experience as a coach come together to make me a pretty effective advisor to this kind of client.
I’ll keep my 1:1 interview coaching in the new year but I will likely increase my prices again since control over my time is becoming more important to me. I will keep vetting coaches to refer folks to if I’m short on bandwidth and also for more affordable rates. If you want 1:1 coaching with me, you can grab time here.
I got to a working MVP for a new product called Airframe with my friend Connor Jacobsen. I ran customer research with about fifteen PMs and learned a lot about how people are using Projects in Claude and ChatGPT. We ultimately decided not to move forward with it because the problems we wanted to solve were getting shipped faster than we expected by OpenAI and Anthropic, which is amazing. I don’t believe in building solutions if someone else is solving the problems I care about better and faster than I could.
On the community side, I’ve been investing time into two main forums.
Supra: I’ve been a member of Marc’s Supra community for over two years as the community has grown to over 400 members now. In the fall, I founded a self-facilitated Supra cohort for Maven instructors including Tal Raviv, Aman Khan, Colin Matthews, and Hilary Gridley. I organize and facilitate our 90-minute sessions every 5-6 weeks. We learn a ton from each other and some exciting collaborations have already come out of it. Excited to keep it going in the new year.
PM Creators Country Club: I become friends with Peter Yang this year after going on his podcast and we decided to bring together some of our favorite people in our DMs into a WhatsApp group that we jokingly named the PM creators country club. This group includes Peter, Tal, Aman, Colin and Hilary above and also Adam Fishman, Nickey Skarstad, Chantal Cox, Elena Verna, Marc Baselga, Sachin Rekhi. Conversations in that group have replaced a good amount of social media time for me and I love it.
Side projects are unpredictable so we’ll see what piques my interest! But the community stuff will definitely continue.
I’m transparent in a lot of ways but numbers are still a little uncomfortable for me to share publicly. That said, 2025 was the best income year in my career.
What I’m most proud of is that I got there with a real diversification of income streams, with the biggest contributors being:
35% from Maven
25% from AI Copilot
25% from fractional product work
Given that most of my revenue this year came from unexpected places, I’m not going to share public goals for revenue. I’m focused on maximizing number of hours spent doing work that plays to my superpowers and that I find engaging and meaningful. I want a lot of time in flow. As long as I continue creating a ton of value for people and capturing a fraction of that in the form of monetization, 2026 could be an even bigger year for me. Let’s see how it goes.
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