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RetrospectiveIndependentYear ReviewCareer

One Year Independent: What I've Learned

A full year since leaving Meta. Reflections on independence, what I built, what I learned, and what's next.

Evyatar Bluzer
3 min read

September 2024 to December 2025. One full year of independence, and enough distance to add it up honestly.

What I Built

Products shipped:

  • TrustedChat (multi-LLM consensus AI)
  • SwingTrade Pro (trading analysis tool)
  • WhatsApp Formatter (Chrome extension)
  • Synthetic Market Research system
  • Multiple Telegram bots
  • Instagram automation projects

Nothing on that list is spatial. In March 2024 I wrote that the overlap of spatial AI and generative AI was where I wanted to build next. A year of independence produced six products and none of them in that overlap.

Consulting came to 8 client engagements across spatial AI, multi-agent systems, and perception architecture, a mix of strategy and hands-on technical work.

What I Learned

About Independence

Freedom requires discipline, because nobody imposes structure for you. The loneliness is real, and you have to fight it deliberately. Income variability is stressful right up until you have runway. The best part, still: choosing what to work on.

About Building

Distribution is harder than building. Ship fast and iterate on feedback, because users will surprise you either way. And simple products that solve real problems beat complex ambitious things, a lesson I apparently needed to learn more than once.

About the AI Moment

Multi-agent systems are powerful and complicated in equal measure. Prompting is a skill worth mastering, the tools dramatically increase output, and the frontier moves fast enough that continuous learning is a permanent line item.

Financial Reality

The income split: consulting 60%, products 30%, other (teaching, advising) 10%. Not where I want it - products should be higher - but it's sustainable. In October 2024 I said consulting would stay around 20 hours a week without crowding out the building, and in June that the mix would drift toward more building. Neither sentence reads well next to a 60% line.

Time split versus income splitTwo horizontal bars, one above the other: the top bar splits time into Consulting 30 percent, Building 50 percent and Learning 20 percent; the bottom bar splits income into Consulting 60 percent, Products 30 percent and Other 10 percent, with the 60 percent consulting segment highlighted.TIME, JUNE 2025INCOME, DECEMBER 2025Consulting 30%Building 50%Learning 20%Products 30%Other10%Consulting 60%
Where the time went against where the income came from: the June split of the working week above, taken from the June post on the consulting and building balance, and the December income split below.

Energy Assessment

What energizes me: building products from scratch, solving novel problems, working with AI capabilities, direct user feedback. What drains me: business development and sales, administrative tasks, scope creep in consulting, and the isolation of long building stretches. The overlap between "drains me" and "has to happen anyway" is the actual job description of independence.

What Does 2026 Look Like?

Scale one product to meaningful revenue. Cut consulting to 20% of my time. Write more, here on this blog, and build some community around what I'm learning. The goal underneath all of it: products that generate income without my constant attention.

Gratitude

Thanks to the early product users who gave feedback, the consulting clients who took a chance, the AI community for sharing knowledge openly, and my family for backing an unconventional path.

Now for year two.

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