Summer's almost over

Self-care is important folks! Avoid burnout, have some downtime, step back and touch grass once in a while.

It's been just over three months since I quit big tech to start Brookhaus with the aim of building a new, intentionally small, company.

Now that summer is almost over, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on that post, my expectations, and the reality three months in.

Almost burning out

I'm happy to admit now that in the 18 months running up to exiting Sharedo in May, I was just starting to cross the line into burnout.

It had been an exhausting 15 years building Sharedo, usually working 60+ hours a week. In particular, the six months before and after the acquisition were a fun, valuable, and rewarding experience, but it was also relentless. I think I timed my exit perfectly as I'd gone from thoroughly enjoying my job to kind of resenting it and its demands on my time towards the end - typical burnout symptoms.

Breaking off in May was perfect - I had the summer to slow down for a while, recover, relax, spend time with family, potter in the garden etc, whilst also starting to kick off new projects across the 3 pillars I wanted Brookhaus to be structured around.

The plan for the first three months was to kick off a few projects, whilst also slowing down and taking a bit of a break.

And I mostly did - this summer was a welcome extended break whilst I also got some things up and running, but I noticed one thing in particular.

I felt guilty!

Honestly, I've worked my backside off for the 32 years of my career - maximum effort, all the time, so you'd think I'd feel fine taking some time out right?

Nope.

For the first half of summer at least, whenever I stopped, took a day out to just tend to the garden, or read a book, the guilt would come, my stomach would clench, and I'd feel a slight anxiety - like I was slacking off, despite being beholden to no one but myself.

I'd say it took a solid 6 weeks to get out of that cycle. During that time I was looking to do more to keep me busy to justify my worth, my existence - and so, I did perhaps kick off more projects than I originally anticipated back in May😁

But I did slow down for summer. Having time to spend with my family, enjoy the sunshine, holidays, potter in the garden, get my ass to the gym, whilst also chivvying along these various projects was great for recharging the batteries and stepping away from that burnout that had been rapidly approaching.

Aside from that bit of reflection, let's have a look at how I thought I'd spend my time versus how I actually did.

What I expected.

In the original post from May I anticipated structuring Brookhaus around 3 key pillars:

• Helping other founders

  • This is FirstCTO - the aim being to help other founders with fractional CTO services and potentially co-found other smaller enterprises.

• Building useful software

  • This is the main Brookhaus company/brand - to build useful software that I'd use myself to solve real-world problems and pain.

• A creative outlet

  • Passion projects for fun - this is where "Dad Makes Games" comes in - developing games for fun to scratch a personal itch I've had since I was a teenager.

I expected to spend the bulk of my time here:

• FirstCTO would get the lion's share of time.
• Then the Grassroots+ coaching platform
• Then writing my book "The Accidental CTO"
• Then everything else when time permitted.

And I'd set a handful of goals for the year ahead:

• To establish the new company
• To slow down at least a little
• To establish multiple streams of income
• To publish the book by the end of the year
• To ship one game within 12 months.

The Reality check

Establishing the company

Brookhaus Ltd is finally registered as a company in England and Wales, so we're off and running properly now. This is the company vehicle that all the other brands (FirstCTO, Dad Makes Games etc) operate under, and now we're registered we can actually start operating as a "proper business".

Doorstep family app

Doorstep is an app to help manage busy families. It has chat, a shared calendar and schedule, a chores system that feeds into a reward shop, plus other handy things like shopping lists, gift lists, all in one place, private to your family group.

This was on the radar in May, but I've taken it much further forward than I'd hoped. It's about 75% complete and now I'm hoping to get it on app stores by the end of the year.

Grassroots+

I started Grassroots+ with 3 others a while ago and the platform has been available for some time, but I've not given it much attention because we've got the audience wrong and so, we're going to pivot it later this year and relaunch in 2027.

The platform is all about managing grassroots football teams and clubs - from managing facilities, pitches, compliance and coaches, through to team management, players, and assessments, with a large bank of session plans, drills, and e-learning materials to help coaches train and manage their teams more efficiently.

The mistake we've made is about positioning - so we're going to pivot and expand the platform. The learning here is how you must align the pitch to the audience who benefits, and we picked the wrong audience.

The service is currently targetted at clubs themselves, whilst most of the value of the platform is derived by coaches. The coaches love it, want it, but clubs don't derive the same level of value, so it becomes a hard sell.

Most coaches in grassroots sports are volunteers and the app helps them save a lot of time - from planning schedules, training and match day fixtures, polling for availability, attendance, working out training session content - volunteer coaches spend a lot of time planning things out, and that's where the platform brings massive benefits, saving up to 70% of the time they'd usually need to put in just doing admin.

So we're going to pivot. We're going to reboot the platform early next year now, aiming it directly to those who derive most value - coaches, building more features, and expanding it out to cover all sports, all teams, at all levels.

The Accidental CTO

The book is kind of stalled due to all the other things I've taken on. I've outlined 30+ chapters so far, but I think a more reasonable target for publishing will be late 2027.

I'm a bit disappointed to push this back as I really think I've got the book in me, and it'd be of great value to anyone following the same path I took, accelerating some of the necessary learning to succeed as a CTO. That being said, the projects I'm bumping this in favour of are clearer wins right now.

ADJST.AI

This is probably the surprise in the mix because it wasn't on my radar at all in May. I've joined ADJST.AI as technical co-founder and CTO.

ADJST.AI is an insurtech startup with the goal of doing to insurance what we did with legal at Sharedo - disrupt and elevate the market into the modern era of technology.

Unlike Sharedo, this will be a software + services organisation, offering a full third-party administration (TPA) service to handle the full lifecycle of insurance - policies, incidents, claims, backed by a modern software platform with AI assistance for users.

It's currently pre-seed, early days, and it presents a fairly major change to my original plans. With FirstCTO, I planned to help multiple startups on a fractional basis, but this is likely to be big enough to consume most of the time I'd carved out for "CTO work" (~50%).

The reason that I said yes though is it's quite exciting to disrupt another large market, to make the lives of people in that market easier, and to modernise an entire industry - it's a big, hairy, audacious goal.

The other reason is I've known and worked with the founding team for many years and, together, we have a proven track record. I'm convinced that if anyone can make a success of this business, it's the founding team.

On that note - I'm hiring! We're starting with a build out of the engineering team and I'm looking for a dev lead and several engineers. If you know anyone interested in joining a pre-seed startup with salary and significant equity options, ask them to get in touch.

Dead Letters: Crossword Escape

Finally, a goal from May that I haven't deferred! I intended to get at least one game published within 12 months of establishing Brookhaus - well, it's small compared to other creative projects I have in flight, but it's a game, and it's published, and within three months, not 12!

Dead Letters is out now for iOS. It's a proper crossword with a twist - a zombie is chasing you whilst you solve. Complete a word and it staggers, use a hint and it gets closer. There's also a relaxed mode for those who just want to solve the puzzles.

One of the things I thought I'd experiment with here is whether the old-school way of monetising an app could still work today. I'm not a fan of models where you buy gems/coins/whatever to progress and I also don't like ads interrupting play, so I've gone back to how it used to work - no ads ever, no subscriptions, no consumable purchases, just a free download, 36 free puzzles to try it out and 300 puzzles with a one-time unlock that also gives you all future puzzle packs.

This launched on iOS yesterday (24th Aug), and I'm working on getting an android port available soon.

You can grab it on the app store here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/dead-letters-crossword-escape/id6801104061

Million to One

This is an ongoing passion project for me - it's well advanced already, but it is quite low down on my priority list, so will take some time to get out - hopefully some time in 2027.

It's a 2D precision platformer with a story based around the H.G. Wells "War of the worlds". It's a long time in the making because I made the decision when I started that everything would be 100% hand crafted by me - the art work, the animation, the sound fx, environment design, background music, code, everything - 100% hand made by me. I'm not sure if that's a stupid decision or not!

More game projects than I know what to do with

I think I've kicked off more projects in the indie game studio space than anywhere else because of the fun factor and the variety of creative appetites it feeds. More than that though, games are something I can bring outside help in with - and most thrilling to me is my son is getting involved. He's just finished high school, has a keen interest in game development, and so is pitching in on some of these projects as well.

Projects wise, I've delivered one, have one in progress, have a backlog of 10+ additional projects in consideration and have kicked off 2 other projects that are in early stages of development and prototyping.

Appeal Denied

Very much an early concept at the moment with the mechanics being prototyped as a physical game using cardboard and pens!

The concept is a card-based roguelike where you've died and mistakenly find yourself in hell. You have to battle through several levels of hellish bureaucracy, gain upgrades, passives and specials to finally get your case reviewed to reverse the decision and get into heaven.

So, I work with zombies

Another early concept in prototyping. Most of the mechanics are already proven, the art direction is set, and build should start soon.

It's a 2.5D rogue like where, whilst taking a "break" from work, your entire office building is hit with a zombie outbreak. As you leave the bathroom, expecting to be berated for how long you were in there, you realise the entire building has been sealed off and quarantined. It seems you're the only human left in the building and need to get out - the problem is, you're on the 20th floor - can you escape? Slight spoiler: there's also a plot twist which fundamentally changes the game mechanic mid way through.

Final words and the year ahead.

Summer was a good break - it gave me time to recover from the looming burnout, focus on building healthier working habits, and plan ahead. It was also a productive three months, kicking off a number of good projects, without over-stretching, and whilst there's a bit of refocussing ahead, there are some good opportunities on the table that I'm looking forward to getting stuck into as we enter Autumn.

So, onto revising my predictions, objectives and goals for the next 12 months:

• FirstCTO: ADJST.AI - to be fully established, seed funding secured, first engineering hires completed - by end of October '26.

• FirstCTO: ADJST.AI - first iterations of the key platform features delivered, and we've onboarded our first client within 12 months.

• Dad Makes Games: Deadletters - ported to Android and released on google play by end of September '26.

• Brookhaus: Doorstep app - launched and running by Jan '27.

• Brookhaus: Grassroots+ - first release of pivoted platform within 12 months.

• Dad Makes Games: Another game release by May '27.

I think ADJST.AI is likely where I'll be spending the bulk (~50%) of my time for the foreseeable, with the other 50% focussing on the other goals there. Given I seem to have a compulsion to fill all time available, and I will be trying to maintain those healthier working habits, I can bet I'll of course nudge forward the other projects if able.

For now though, my intended focus is that list. Let's see if I can stick to it!