Gratefulness

2024 for came and went, and today, we mark the entrance of 2025. It’s a wonderful thing to watch a year come and go. It marks the beginning and it marks the end. Such a beauty comes from beginning and ends. It’s what makes life worth living. It is what makes everything have a worth.

For me, it starts and end with family. My two beautiful kids, my wife, and my family. But, what is anything without a sense of self. I am what I choose to do. And I chose my beautiful family, I chose to endeavor on various business journeys that make me who I am today. I would not be who I am today without Crema, Multiply, or any of my businesses. To me, it is part of what makes me, me. And I am obsessed with perfecting it.

To start a new year, the most important thing is to reflect on the past. What was great, not so great, and challenges you faced, overcame, or perhaps, failed. This exercise is to me more important than the results (in some way at least). 2024 was a year of extreme ups and downs for Crema. For me, it is still the closest denominator what what I consider “business Chris” because it is now mature. And so, most of this piece will revolve around my experiences of Crema this year. It started of great. The first quarter gave us learning, growth and new hope in terms of acquisition channels. We grew, we learned, and we saw revenue increase from some channels, leading us to believe in the power of paid acquisition (something we did not believe in before). This trend gave us more hope and belief going into the second quarter of 2024 and we gave it our all and it paid of. On a personal level, I wanted to start my health journey and I wanted to be more healthy. Straight up. I wanted to eat more healthy. I wanted to exercise more, and I wanted to have more energy around my kids seeing as they were growing older so that I could be with them without getting exhausted (turns out, it doesn’t matter how fit you are… You’ll get exhausted either way). Either way, I started eating healthier, running, and going to the gym more often (something I used to do often in my younger years). And as a result, I lost 12 KGs. In losing weight, and doing more exercise i felt better and more energized in my work, and I think I saw the results not only in my personal life with my kids, but also with my work.

Crema had a wonderful Q2 and Q3 where we saw all important metrics go up and to the right and we felt great. I felt great with my wife and kids and everything was awesome (like the Lego Movie song). Up until September, where we started seeing an influx of fraudulent transactions, chargebacks and straight up fraud. From there it went downhill and we got hit with a cyberattack and had to shut down our services until we were able to clean out our servers and our code. This led to an outflux of businesses more than anything that were using Crema for paying their workers and freelancers. Which in turn led to a downturn in revenue and all metrics. From there it has been an uphill battle to gain their confidence and trust, and obviously revenue. Writing this in public is hard because it sucks. Everything about this sucks. But, it happens. What I can gather from good things about this is that they didn’t touch user data or information, which is good. But, we still had to pause our services for about 5 days, which is a lifetime for a user who trusts us. Most of our freelancers are still with us, but some of our businesses chose to go with other options. Which I understand. But still, it hurts.

For Q4, our work has been to focus on regaining trust with our users, and finding new ones (which for anyone who knows business is the most difficult part). Churn sucks. New acquisition of users sucks. But, its the name of the game, and we are playing. On a personal note, I am feeling great in terms of health. I am still eating good, working out. And for a new years resolution I have committed myself to a marathon this 2025. I have no doubt I will finish it, but my goal is below 4 hours (we will see if that will hold up in court).

Anyways, now that we know how 2024 went, let’s look at 2025. Let me tell you, I am excited! I am excited because I feel like we have touched 1% of what we can achieve with Crema. I am excited because we have several businesses lined up with Lori Consortium. I am excited because I am healthy, energized and ready. And I am excited because more than anything I am content. Content with my kids and family. Content with what I am doing on a professional level. Content with what I am doing on a personal level. And excited about what 2025 holds.

Let’s get to it!

Cheers,