My Q1: What I learned, loved and how I failed

I'm someone who always wants to improve myself, work on myself and am a very ambitious person. Maybe you are the same way? But I'm also neurodivergent and struggle with many things in my daily life, like executive functioning problems, fatigue and a lot of health troubles.

So while I dream of building a successful online business (although my health is a huge issue, one can still dream, right?), I need to do it gradually. I had a very severe burnout late 2024 that lasted over a year, and had to stop my freelancing. Now I'm focusing on passive income opportunities and "work" circa an hour a day, but it doesn't feel like work, cause all I'm doing is spending time on my hobbies! I really think that's the key to making money online. In this post I'll list what I loved, learned and how I failed in the first quarter of the year.

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🥰Loved

My Pinterest strategy finally started to pay off

Quick summary: I've gone from ca. 3000 impressions a month and 20-ish clicks to over 100 000 impressions a month with ca. 2000 clicks to my website. It feels wild, I never thought that would happen to me. I even had a pin go kind of viral and be saved 1300 times so far! It really is true what they say: Pinterest is all about the long game and being consistent.

Pinterest is the only platform I actively make content for, because the content's lifetime lasts so long. I've had pins that were over a year old suddenly starting to gain traction.

➡️ Click here to follow me on Pinterest

P.volve

You know that feeling when you find something you completely forgot you owned? That was me this week, digging through my closet and stumbling across my P.volve workout gear. I'm not a gym person at all, and always struggle to motivate myself to do any other types of physical activities than going for walks in the neighborhood.

Finding my p.band was the little nudge I needed. I pulled up some beginner P.volve videos on YouTube, and within minutes I remembered exactly why I fell in love with this method in the first place. There's something so satisfying about a workout that doesn't feel like punishment. The p-band especially is such a genius little piece of equipment - it's light, takes up almost no space, and you can do an endless variety of exercises with it. It's not your typical resistance band, I have those too, but this is a completely different thing.

➡️ Check out the P.band here

Audible

I've always need something to listen to while doing the boring-but-necessary tasks of life: folding laundry, getting ready for bed, tidying up. Last month I decided to try Audible's free 30-day trial. I'm currently listening to Kristin Neff's Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, and it's one of those books that quietly shifts something in you.

➡️ Check out the book here

➡️ Start listening to the e-book for free with the Audible trial here

Neff is a pioneering researcher in the field of self-compassion, and her book makes a compelling case for why being kind to yourself isn't self-indulgent - it's actually essential for resilience, emotional wellbeing, and even motivation.

Holo

Holo is such a fun and easy AI tool to use. It's like an AI marketing agency that creates beautiful content for you in your style, based on your website or the design DNA you give it. It's thanks to Holo and a few other AI tools that I manage to post one Pin a day. if you're interested in learning more, check out their website! I also wrote a review here.

➡️ Read more about Holo here

Making fashion photography with Ideogram

I'm having SO much fun with this tool. It used to be one of my go-to's for Pinterest pins (but now I use Holo more), but I still use it for illustration pictures for my blog, clipart and so many other things, but the last six months or so I've been obsessed with making beautiful fashion photography shots. I used to be an avid hobby photographer when I was younger, so it has been so cool to make these pictures!

➡️ Check Ideogram out here (and get 100 extra free credits if you sign up for any paid subscription).

🤓Learned

I had such a productive burst of energy last month, all thanks to joining Elizabeth Goddard’s ‘Get It Done Week.’ It was a fun, live challenge (this round was more of a long weekend, which was perfect!) designed to help you take action. The whole thing is based on her free training, Freebie Optional, which is brilliant.

The core idea is that you don’t actually need to create a complicated freebie to grow your email list. Instead, she teaches you 11 simple ways to get more subscribers using things you’re probably already doing in your business. For me, the challenge was the kick I needed to finally write and send out my first proper welcome email! If you’ve been putting off list-building because the thought of making a freebie is holding you back, you have to check out her short and super practical training. It’s a total game-changer.

➡️ You can grab the free ‘Freebie Optional’ training here!

😭Failed: My cute Teachery course theme

One thing I spent a big chunk of time on this quarter (hello, hyperfocus!) was designing a custom theme for Teachery, a course platform I really love. I had this vision of a dreamy, magical aesthetic - think holographic stars, pastel gradients, and soft glowing lesson cards, and I genuinely had so much fun bringing it to life.

I designed the header and the lesson thumbnails in Canva, and got help from AI with all the CSS coding and finding out how to tweak things the way I wanted.

I was so excited about the idea of it becoming a consistent income stream through their theme marketplace, which only had 10 themes or so. I thought that if this was accepted, this could be a small, but table monthly income source for me.

You can view it here

So you can imagine how deflating it was when I finally wrapped everything up... only to find out that Teachery had closed their marketplace submissions. Honestly, it stung. But looking back, I don't feel like the time was totally wasted. I learned so much about CSS in these few weeks, and it's incredible to see how AI allows anyone to do anything. I can only imagine how much time it would take back in the day to do all research on how to do this or that in CSS through googling.

I genuinely enjoyed the process, and the theme might still find its audience somewhere else. And let's be real, there was always a chance Teachery wouldn't have accepted it anyway.

What you can take from this, is that there's always a risk with setting up passive income streams, you put in work up front and hope for the best. That's why it's so important to find something you enjoy as a hobby, not just trying anything to make money.

How was your Q1?