2025 In Retrospect
I was not entirely sure what I should write about for this week’s Founders Diary. Call it a pre-holiday creative block. The “we’re closing for the holidays” emails went out to our partners last week and my brain immediately tried to clock out with them.
So I figured this is probably the perfect excuse to look back on 2025 and talk about some of the biggest focuses we had at Nexubis this year.
It has been a big one. I often refer to 2025 as our consolidation year. Less frantic scaling, more internal systems, refining processes, optimising how we work. 2024 was the scaling year where we went from lil’ ol’ me to a team of nine. To scale further and do it safely, we had to slow down just enough to fix the plumbing, bolt down the foundations, and make sure we are actually ready for the next growth spurt in 2026.
So let’s dig through my very poor memory and see what we can pull out. Here are some of the big ones.
Building our own operating system in Notion
One of the biggest shifts this year was how we track work and delegate across the team.
We built out a custom Notion platform where everyone logs work and where we, as a company, finally have proper oversight of the data. No more being boxed into someone else’s system or fighting a tool that was clearly designed for another team’s brain.
Now each person can customise their own environment, views, dashboards and workflows, instead of being stuck in one rigid layout like with ClickUp, Linear, Monday.com, etc. It is our own operating system, built around how Nexubis actually works, not how a SaaS startup thinks we should work.
Turning our knowledge into a proper company wiki
The second big piece of the puzzle lives in that same Notion ecosystem.
Our company Wiki finally came alive this year. It sits right next to the tasking system and has become the go-to source of truth for the whole team. It stretches from Ops documents to design standards, resource libraries and ways-of-working. It was an enormous undertaking and, at times, felt like writing a small religion.
The outcome, though, is a ridiculous internal “bible” that makes onboarding new people so much easier. Instead of guessing how Nexubis works, they can read it, follow it and add to it.
Giving clients transparent oversight with a Client Dashboard
Once all this data and documentation lived in Notion, it opened the door for the next experiment.
We built our MVP, early access Client Dashboard to give partners broader and, more importantly, transparent oversight on what the team is working on. What is in progress, what is upcoming, when the next invoice is due, access to older invoices and historical data, all in one place.
It is still early days and there is a lot more we want to build onto it in 2026, but even in its current form it is already a big value-add to our services. Less “Can you send me an update?” and more “Cool, I can see what’s going on.”
Restructuring into pods for scalable growth
Internally, we also reworked how the team is structured.
We now follow a pod-like system where each pod functions as its own little department of expertise. Brand and visual direction, systems and dev, motion, etc. Each “department” has clear ownership and effortless handovers between pods so work does not fall into the cracks.
The goal was simple. When we grow the team fast again, we do not want chaos. We want something that can stretch without snapping. The pod system is our attempt to build in that scalability now rather than panic-engineer it later.
From hourly grind to value based subscriptions
We also relooked our actual business model.
This year we started switching from hourly billing to value based subscriptions. Given how broad and all-inclusive our offering is, a subscription model just makes more sense. I wrote a full article on this that goes into more detail, but in short, it has been one of the best decisions we have made as a company.
We now have partners paying quarterly upfront, and our biggest client to date paid an entire year upfront. That kind of commitment gives us breathing room and lets us allocate excess funds into initiatives that genuinely move the needle for Nexubis instead of constantly playing cash flow Tetris.
It has been a slow transition. Some clients are still on the old model, but the majority, and all new partners, join on subscriptions. Feedback so far has been exceptional.
“Kachowww” Wednesdays
On the culture side, we introduced “Kachowww’s” on Wednesdays.
This is a one hour weekly workshop where someone on the team teaches everyone else something. It could be a process deep dive, a breakdown of a recent project, a new tool they have been playing with, or even a show-and-tell that is just cleverly disguised education.
The idea is simple. The team holds a ridiculous amount of knowledge and experience. Kachowww’s are how we distribute that knowledge instead of letting it sit in one person’s brain like an un-backed-up hard drive.
Leveling up our creative firepower
Service-offering-wise, we leveled up hard this year.
We expanded and sharpened our capabilities around animation, visual direction and branding. We also started folding in sound design and voiceovers where it makes sense for certain projects. In reality, we have tightened up almost every offering we already had, not just added new ones on top.
Quality has gone up while the quantity of shipped work has also increased, which was kind of the whole point of the value based model. More impact, less time-wasting, better alignment with the type of partners we want to work with.
Reworking our website and building the Nexubis deck
We also spent a lot of time turning the lens back on ourselves.
We reworked the Nexubis website with a new homepage, a blog page that actually gets weekly updates, and a pricing page that has been received really well by existing partners and new leads alike. Before year-end we will also be launching our case study pages, which have been sitting in the “almost done” bucket for far too long.
In the same breath, we built a full company deck for Nexubis in Figma Slides. It covers how we work, why we work this way, the main issues founders face when hunting for a new partner, and exactly how Nexubis addresses those problems. It includes case studies, plenty of eye candy, testimonials and client articles that back us up with real proof, not fluff.
This deck now lives at the center of our referral engine. It gets shared with anyone considering Nexubis as a service partner, and it has already made deals much easier to close because the context is finally clear. For the first time, we feel like we are actually painting the full picture.
In Summary
So yes, that was quite a mouthful. And technically there have been plenty of other initiatives and a few that are still very much “loading,” but all in due time.
We are gearing up for an exceptional 2026 and I genuinely cannot wait to see where the new year takes us.
To everyone who has backed us, worked with us or believed in us this year, thank you. You know who you are.
Let’s go fuck some shit up with the final stretch of the year in front of us and 2026 looming.
