Another year is in the books!

We’ve been writing these reviews publicly for years, and you can read the others if you like: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020. 

There's a photo dump 📸 at the bottom of this post as well!

👍 What Went Well in 2025

👶 Leon’s Arrival 🥳

The biggest and most joyful highlight of 2025 was welcoming our daughter Leon Avery Zook, born on August 30th.

We found out we were pregnant on New Year's Eve (2024), so it was quite an interesting start to 2025 mentally! As we'd been trying to get pregnant in 2024, we'd already had plans in place for how we were going to shift our businesses and take parental leave. Well, that started pretty quickly this year!

We are truly grateful that Leon's birth was (mostly) uneventful 😂. Thankfully, we had fantastic care at a hospital in Lisbon 🇵🇹 and our doctor was absolutely amazing.

As of writing this review, Leon is 4 months old and currently finding her voice (sounds like a dinosaur 🦖 most days), is smiling and giggling a bunch, is doing a really great job sleeping through most nights, and she rolls REALLY well to one side… not so much the other side yet. 🤣 She's absolutely adorable and we're grateful every day that she's happy and healthy!

Becoming parents is everything people say it is: hard but so rewarding. There's no better feeling in the world than when she smiles.

🇵🇹 Year 3 of living in Portugal

We moved homes this year when Caroline was 3 months pregnant. Thankfully, the move was three houses up the same exact street 😆😆😆.

O nosso português está um pouco melhor, mas ainda temos muito para aprender. (Our Portuguese is a little better, but we have so much more to learn!)

Our 2-year residency cards came up for renewal and we went through that process 🤪. We used a service called RelocateNow.io which was SUPER helpful. There are pending changes to our path to citizenship, but for now, we're keeping our fingers crossed that our renewal goes through and we'll have 3 more years of residency before out next step.

We absolutely still love living here 🙌. It's a beautiful country with happy and kind people (who are patient with the language 🙏).

💓 WAIM: The Final (Coaching) Chapter

In February, we experimented with something familiar: bringing back a six-month coaching package that historically had worked well for us and led folks into WAIM Unlimited. Our hypothesis was that people might want a lower-commitment way to experience coaching before upgrading.

That experiment didn’t pan out the way we expected. It ended up being one of our lowest launches in years (only 6 coaching buyers and 33 WAIM Unlimited buyers). While this was a bit of a letdown, the writing was on the wall for us…

We decided to do one final WAIM Unlimited launch, knowing it would be the last time we offered our coaching program in its current form. This felt emotional, bold, and a little scary as WAIM Unlimited has been the backbone of our business for over six years (generating over $2.5m total and being very predictable).

That final launch happened in June and exceeded our expectations. 105 people joined at our $2,000 price point. We leaned into showing up more publicly than we had in a long time, posting daily on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads, and creating a handful of YouTube videos. All that work paid off as the launch gave us a much-needed financial cushion for our impending parental leave.

One highlight for me (Jason) during the launch was vibe coding (with Lovable) a sales tracker that I updated manually with each sale and shared it publicly:

It's surreal to close down this chapter of WAIM. What started in 2018, generating just $1500 in revenue in the first few months, eventually blossomed into a $30,000+ recurring revenue business.

The best part, though, is that WAIM Unlimited got a jolt of new members, a group of awesome people who we're excited to help and whose journeys we're excited to join for years to come!

🚀 Teachery Hit an All-Time High Revenue

Teachery had its strongest year ever in 2025, bringing in $325,000 in revenue, the highest in its 13-year history.

A few things contributed to that:

• Paid ads (primarily Google, with some Meta) continued from late 2024 and averaged roughly a 1.3–1.5x return, even after management fees.

• We finally shipped some long-awaited features, including a Teachery Marketplace, allowing creators to sell themes, and a modern landing page builder that feels far more flexible than our previous option.

• We made a tough but necessary decision to move from two (plus one part-time) developers to one, which allowed us to operate more sustainably without sacrificing quality.

• We hired Sara 👩🏻 (who happened to live in Lisbon!) to take over operations and customer support, something I've handled solo for over a decade. Handing that off freed up hours every week and dramatically improved our quality of life! 🤩👏

This was also the first year we ran a Teachery Black Friday deal. We offered 50% off the Lifetime Plan, something we’d never done before. That single week generated roughly $92,000 in revenue, giving us both confidence and breathing room heading into 2026.

🍼 3ish Months of Parental Leave

One of our biggest goals was to truly step away after Leon’s birth… and we did! For about three months, we were largely offline, focusing on adjusting to life as parents.

Having waited much longer than most to have kids, we also intentionally saved up to hire some support, specifically a night nurse. What a game-changing decision that was! The day we brought Leon home from the hospital, absolutely exhausted and overwhelmed, our night nurse Silvana was there waiting for us with open arms. The relief of her presence brought us both to tears after a tough weeklong stay in the hospital due to Leon having jaundice 😔. Words can't express just how grateful we were to have Silvana in those early weeks and months. It truly made such a difference in keeping our mental health and our relationship strong.

Our parental leave time also confirmed that the systems we’ve been building for years actually worked! The businesses didn’t fall apart, and we didn’t regret slowing down. A huge thank you (again) to Sara for keeping everything running smoothly AND our customers for being understanding.

🌟The best purchases we made in 2025

This is Jason's favorite section, so we keep it in! We're in baby-mode, so you get baby purchase recs…

👩🏻‍🦰 Caroline’s best baby purchase: Ergobaby Bouncer*. This thing was single-handedly our most used item. From day one Leon has been one of those curious babies who wants to watch us do things, so being able to put her down and give our arms/back a break is a life saver. Leon loves this thing and we couldn't live without it.

👩🏻‍🦰 Caroline’s best biz purchase: This simple MagSafe tripod*. We call it "Trippy" and it sits on my desk and makes filming content so frictionless.

👨🏻‍🦲 Jason’s best baby purchase: Eufy 21 Baby Monitor*. Yeah, a pretty obvious one, but we literally use thing for HOURS every day and it's been perfect.

👨🏻‍🦲 Jason’s best biz purchase: Hollyland Mark M2S wireless microphones*. These are LEGIT the best microphones I've ever purchased. Insane value for the money.

*aff links

👎 What Didn’t Go Well in 2025

💔 Losing Caroline's Dad

It goes without saying that by far the hardest obstacle we faced in the past year was Caroline's Dad passing away. Managing the grief of that while seven months pregnant and not being able to travel back to the U.S. to be with family (due to Caroline's high risk factors while pregnant) was a huge challenge. The thing about grief is… there's nothing you can really do to make it better. It's supposed to hurt like that because it's the loss we feel from loving someone so much and realizing they're gone.

As much as we still feel the pain of Lamar's absence, remembering his humor and his optimism fondly is how we get through those waves of grief. As hard as it was to experience such a loss a few months before Leon's arrival, on the other hand it was such a gift to have the joy of her debut to look forward to.

🧪 WAIM 6-Month Coaching Experiment

Our February launch of WAIM was definitely a flop, especially the 6-month coaching we spent a week or two working hard to set up. But, it's not like we'd go back and change anything, it's just worth noting here.

😕 Letting go of Teachery Developer

Having to let anyone go, especially someone who has been so helpful for 4+ years was truly a low moment of the year for me.

The great thing about running a business that generates revenue is it affords you the ability to hire people to help see more of your vision come to life! The crappy thing about running a business is that sometimes for the health of the business you have to make the awful decision to let someone go.

🔮 2026 Preview (What’s Next?)

👧 Raising Leon!

Obviously, our biggest focus in 2026 will be helping Leon become a full-on tiny human! By the time we write next year's review, she'll be walking and possibly talking 🤯.

We are very fortunate that we have a nanny named Aneth who has joined our tiny family. Having a nanny has made returning to work possible, and she’s become an important part of our family rhythm. This support has allowed us to move forward without burning out. 💖

🧭 A New Direction for WAIM

In 2026, WAIM will look very different.

We’re officially moving away from coaching and toward building small, useful tools (aka "micro-SaaS" products) using Lovable.

Our first experiment lives at VibeCoding.to, where our community is helping us vote on which ideas get built through pre-orders.

The goal in 2026 is to build 4–6 small tools throughout the year, each developed in focused six-week sprints. I will lead product development, Caroline will focus on content, marketing, and branding, and we’ll collaborate closely throughout.

Financially, we’re aiming to generate $100,000 in revenue from these tools, roughly replacing the launch revenue WAIM would have brought in during a “normal” year.

🍎 Teachery’s Next Chapter

2026 will be about refinement and expansion for Teachery.

Product goals:

• A full UI refresh across the app

• Supporting standalone digital products (like PDFs or Notion templates)

• A brand-new, more flexible course template

• Stripe Tax integration and PayPal checkout (maybe on PayPal, we'll see 😆)

• Launching our long-awaited Canva integration

Marketing goals:

• Continue with paid ads for at least first quarter

• Start looking into paid content creation

• Send more email broadcasts to our list

And, because sharing a goal publicly helps you stay accountable to it… I'd really love to see Teachery hit $500,000 in gross revenue in 2026! 🎯

✈️ Travel Plans

Leon will be taking her first big trip in early 2026: two weeks visiting family in Florida, followed by a week in Mexico. We’re excited… and nervous (10-hour flight, here we come!)

We also hope to take 2–3 trips around Europe and finally explore more of Portugal, places like the Algarve and Porto, while Leon is still young and relatively easy to travel with.

🖼️ Wrap-Up: Framing 2026

👩🏻‍🦰 Word: Risk

I'm a risk-averse person by nature, but this year I want to push my own comfort zone a bit! With business, with making new local friends, with trying new things…I want to put myself out there more and get more comfortable living in the uncertainty to invite in more possibilities.

👨🏻‍🦲 Word: Fun

I want to have more fun this year! Our vibe coding project has already opened that door for me (I added a silly side-scrolling lofi game to our first project for no reason). But, I also want to try to push the envelope with Teachery and not try to be overly professional. More fun, less overthinking!