2023 Year in Review

2023 was a memorable year. My wife and I spent two weeks in the Outer Banks, celebrated our 7-year wedding anniversary, and renovated 3 bathrooms in our house. We also converted one bedroom into a nursery after finding out that we’re going to be parents! Henry Robert Olpinski is expected to join us in March 2024 💙

I’m still working full-time for Instacart, which successfully completed its IPO and I helped launch Instacart Business — a big new bet for the company. I also helped ship several big features including product variants and tax exemptions.

I re-coded my entire website from scratch and my newsletter surpassed 3,300 subscribers. I only worked with one freelance client (TaxExact) and ditched Google Analytics for Plausible. Late in the year, I bought a new Macbook Pro and two of my previous projects won their second international design awards! 🏆

I also became fascinated with Midjourney AI and started selling printable artwork on my Etsy Shop , my wife tripled revenue for Rachel’s Edit Studio, and I nearly fell victim to an elaborate identity theft scam — yep that happened.

As my life and career have continued to change, I’m continuing to adapt my year in review structure. This year, I’ll share more professional reflections first, then share some personal highlights!

Instacart & Freelance Work

I’m still working full-time at Instacart and continuing to enjoy my role, projects, and team. After I find out that I’m going to be a father, I became even more thankful that I decided to make this career change. I’ll get 4 months of paid family leave and have fantastic health insurance — two things I wouldn’t be enjoying as a full-time freelancer.

While I can’t share exactly what I worked on at Instacart, I can share that I’m now working on the Instacart Business team, which is a big new bet for the company. I helped launch tax exemptions, alcohol tasting notes, and improvements to product variants, among many other projects.

In September, Instacart successfully completed it’s IPO under the ticker CART, which was a very exciting moment for everyone at the company. I’m grateful that Instacart had the foresight to stop hiring in 2022 to avoid participating in the mass tech layoffs that have plagued the industry in 2023.

In terms of freelancing, I only worked with a single client all year, TaxExact. I worked on some exciting new product features, but sadly the partnership gradually deteriorated throughout the year and I’m not planning to do any freelance work in 2024. Because I’m not doing freelance work right now, I paused my W-2 payments from my business account to preserve those funds.

It’s a little strange to not be freelancing right now, but my life has never felt more balanced. Working 9-5 and having weekends off has allowed me to spend reliable quality time with my family, which will soon be more important to me than ever. That said, it’s very likely I’ll continue freelancing part-time or full-time in the future — it’s just a matter of time.

Website Analytics

My website didn’t experience any unusual fluctuations in traffic this year. This website (https://mattolpinski.com) saw about 50k unique visitors and 80k total page views. What you might be surprised to learn, however, is that I stopped using Google Analytics and adopted Plausible as the analytics tool for all my website properties.

I wrote an entire article about my decision to switch, but it boils down to Google Analytics being garbage software that’s overly difficult to use. Plausible is incredibly lightweight, user-friendly, and shows my all the key data points on a single page — what a concept.

Major Website Updates & New Macbook

In the Spring, I attempted to push some small updates to my website, but was quickly reminded of the verbose and clunky code structure. The HTML, CSS, and PHP were long overdue for an architecture update. I also identified a few key design changes I wanted to make.

First, I designed my entire website from scratch in Figma with proper variables and components. Then I began to explore design enhancements. This was all a long and tedious process, but well worth the effort. Now the website is far easier for me to use and the code is much cleaner and component-driven.

For example, I previously had no way to control the order of topics, which appear in several places throughout my blog. But now, all instances of the topics list pull from the same master list in the WordPress admin which I can easily select and re-order. The topic icons are also pulled directly from a single source in WordPress.

I also added some exciting new features like the topics page, which allows you to browse my top 3 articles in each topic, and get a birds eye view of all the content on my blog for the first time ever. I also made dozens of styling improvements and the website is now more SEO-friendly.

💻 Towards the end of the year, I treated myself to a new max-spec Macbook Pro in a space black finish. I’ve been absolutely blown away by the processing power in this laptop. Tasks that used to take 60 seconds now take under 1 second. Other things I’m excited about include:

• the 16″ screen + higher refresh rate
• the lack of a touch bar
• a space black finish
• the classic mag-safe charger
• the variety of ports
• the slightly larger + more sturdy frame

This is by far the most powerful and sturdy Macbook I’ve ever owned. Well done, Apple. It was a splurge, but I had some gift cards, a work stipend, and I got a nice trade-in credit for my previous one too!

Midjourney AI + Etsy Shop

2023 was undeniably the year AI (artificial intelligence) went mainstream. Out of curiosity, I started playing with Midjourney — an AI-powered image generation tool. I was hooked almost immediately. This technology is truly revolutionary and I’ve been astonished at the images I can create in a matter of seconds.

I’m planning to write an entire article about how it works and my strategies for monetization, but for now I’ll just share that I’m selling my printable AI-generated artwork on my Etsy shop. These are exclusively digital downloads, so I don’t have to manage inventory or shipping.

I’ve always loved posters and have purchased many in the past. But I never created my own posters or prints because it was just too time-consuming to bring my imaginations to life. Midjourney resurrected a passion I forgot I even had and gave me the opportunity to create beautiful art in a fraction of the time.

In terms of process, I use Midjourney to generate the artwork in the correct aspect ratio, then fix any imperfections in Photoshop and adjust the details using Camera Raw. Then I drop the source image into my custom Photoshop template and batch export the JPG files, which include the source images and contextual scene mockups.

Initially, it took a lot of time to set up my Photoshop templates and figure out how to create compelling/competitive listings, but now my process is much more streamlined. I can generate an image (or set of images) and have it listed on Etsy in about 30 minutes.

These images are simply incredible, but it’s still not as easy as it looks. I re-run the prompt for each image up to 4-6 times. This gives me composition options and minimizes the time I spend fixing imperfections in Photoshop. I use Camera Raw for the lighting adjustments and Photoshops built-in generative fill to fix any mistakes or remove unwanted artifacts.

Here are my all-time shop stats at the time of publishing:

• 330+ items listed
• 212 sales
• 41 reviews
• $1,195 revenue
• Perfect 5-star rating
• Earned “Star seller” badge
• $841 Etsy Ad spend

As a new Shop, I wanted to run paid Etsy Ads to boost my shop and item visibility. That strategy worked, but I barely made a profit in 2023. However, 2024 is off to a much stronger start. From Jan 1-25 2024, I had 1,027 visits, 29 orders that generated $219 — a massive year over year increase.

In 2023 most of my effort was focused on populating my shop, exploring art styles, and learning how to create compelling Etsy listings. My plan for 2024 is to analyze how effective the Ads really are, turn off any Ad listings that aren’t performing, and focus on profitability.

But more than anything, creating and selling AI art has been fun — and that alone makes it worth doing!

Personal Life

Overall, I had a wonderful year filled with exciting home renovation projects, a wonderful vacation in the Outer Banks, and lots of baby preparation. I’ve captured some of the most memorable moments in this next section of this year’s review. This is the only time I share glimpses into my personal life on my blog and I’m excited to share them with you!

Visiting the Outer Banks

My wife and I like to do a big trip each year and in 2023, we decided to spend two full weeks on the beach in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. Rachel found a cozy beachfront cottage on VRBO and we made the 680 mile drive in late April.

It was a bit early in the season and unfortunately, the weather was colder than expected. We spent most of our time in sweatshirts, especially on the beach. But we did get to explore the area quite a bit and we loved all the local clothing stores, coffee shops, ice cream shops, and restaurants. We could see dolphins from our front porch on most mornings and we even drove down to Cape Point to drive our Honda CR-V on the beach!

Here are some of our favorite places and a list of 70 saved places on Google Maps:

• Surfin’ Spoon
• Salt Coast Outfitters
• Ashley’s Espresso Parlour
• Jockey’s Ridge State Park
• Stack’em High Pancakes and So Forth
• Duck Town Park Boardwalk
• Nag’s Head Pizza Company
• Coquina Beach
• Cape Point
• Henry’s Restaurant
• Corova Beach
• Nag’s Head

The Outer Banks is extremely pet-friendly, so our dog Lily got to go everywhere with us, even shopping! This was also her first time experiencing the ocean and she absolutely loved it 🌊🐾

Puzzles & Picture Frames

My wife and I started the year by completing more than a dozen Dowdle Puzzles in just a few weeks. We purchased this puzzle board on Amazon, which has made doing puzzles so much more enjoyable. This was a really fun and relaxing indoor winter activity that helped pass the time in January and February.

I also spent some time crafting these magnetic picture frames to hang national park posters in my office. I’ve really enjoy woodworking, but I’ve been putting this small project off for 3 years — so it was long overdue. I needed a way to secure these pictures to the bar without damaging the prints themselves. So I decided to drill holes inside two pieces of wood and glue magnets inside each piece.

Then, the magnetic pieces of wood act like clamps and hold the picture inside without damaging it.

This is tricker than it seems. The magnets need to be strong enough to prevent the print from slipping out and support the weight of the bottom pieces, but not so strong that they damage the print. The magnets also need to be aligned perfectly across two dimensions, or the two pieces of wood will be offset slightly.

Remember, magnets also have polarity. So if you glue a magnet in upside down, they will repel rather than attract. I learned that the hard way. Staining + polyurethaning was a nightmare because of all the sides (6 sides per piece, 4 pieces per frame, and 4 frames, 1 coat of stain, 3 coats of polyurethane).

But it worked — and it was worth it! I’m really proud of how these turned out.

3 Bathroom Renovations

In the summer, Rachel and I decided to remodel our master bathroom. Then we found out we were expecting a child, so naturally we decided to renovate the other two bathrooms as well — because soon we won’t have time for such things.

But bathrooms are incredibly expensive to renovate. We got a few quotes and even considered doing the work ourselves, but ultimately decided this was a job for the professionals. In fact, we hired Knaub Home Solutions who did our basement renovation in 2022!

The master bath got an incredible new walk-in tile shower with linear drain, tile floor, vanity, light, toilet, mirror/medicine cabinet, paint, and trim.

After seeing how much work was involved, I’m VERY glad I did not attempt this myself! It was well worth the money. The bathroom feels like a mini-spa retreat, just in time for baby.

However, I renovated the two other bathrooms myself. One was a half bath/powder room and the other didn’t require any updates to the shower, so they fell within the realm of my DIY capabilities. For these two bathrooms, I installed new floors, vanities, toilets, mirrors, and lights as well as paint and trim.

I planned ahead, didn’t hit anything unexpected, and I’m extremely proud of the results! Tackling 3 bathroom renovations in just a few months with a baby and holidays on the way is not something I’d recommend to a friend, but now we’re enjoying the fruits of our labor!

Canadian Wildfires

I live in Rochester, NY — just south of Lake Ontario. Canada is just 40 linear miles away on the other side of the lake.

On the evening of June 5th, I was driving to Lowe’s. Before I got to the end of my street, I noticed the sun had turned blood red. I pulled over, got out of the car, and briefly wondered if I had missed the rapture. The scene was unsettling to say the least.

The next night, the moon was an odd yellow hue. By June 7th, it was obvious something was wrong because the in the middle of the day, the sunlight was dim and the air smelled toxic.

I later learned that millions of acres of wilderness were on fire in Canada. The winds had blown the smoke all the way into the United States and beyond. The Air Quality Index (AQI), which normally holds steady at 30 had skyrocketed 431 — extremely hazardous air conditions.

Here are some photos I took near my house and screenshots of the AQI charts:

By the end of the year, 6,551 fires had burned 71,414 square miles (45.7 million acres). Smoke emitted from the wildfires caused air quality alerts and evacuations in Canada and the United States. In late June, the smoke crossed the Atlantic Ocean, reaching Europe.

Home, Summer Nights, & Family Time

I worked fewer hours this year than I have in over a decade. That meant I got to spend more time with my pregnant wife, friends, and family. Between our trip to the Outer Banks, bathroom renovations, pregnancy, and preparing to be parents, we didn’t go on as many dates, walks, or small trips. Toward the end of the year we did start going out to eat more often which was fun!

One thing that stayed true this year was that I felt more relaxed than ever. Preparing for a baby definitely fortified our marriage and our friendship.

I also had some work done on my Mustang GT. I wanted to maximize power without breaking the bank or doing any major engine work. So I strategized with my mechanic and decided to do a gear swap and performance tune. It is noticeably faster and only cost about $1,500 parts and labor.

Baby Henry 💙

On June 28, 2023 our lives changed forever. We found out we were expecting our first child! We told our immediate families and later did a simple gender reveal in our own home. The mobile ultrasound tech hooked her machine directly up to our T.V. so we got to meet our baby BOY on the big screen!

Rachel’s pregnancy has been wonderful and for the most part, she’s really enjoyed it. Henry Robert Olpinski is happy and healthy too and due in March 2024. Throughout the pregnancy, we’ve had many ultrasounds, even some in 3D!

We converted one guest bedroom into a nursery and chose a woodland/forest theme. Creating a living space for your own child is truly an incredible experience.

Then it was time to plan our baby shower! We hosted 20 of Rachel’s close friends and family at our house for the Winnie the Pooh themed event just a few days before Thanksgiving. Then we hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas at our house as well. After months of renovations and hosting 3 major events back-to-back, we were totally exhausted 😅.

We’ve put a lot of effort into preparing for Henry’s arrival and we can’t wait to meet this little man!

End of the Year

After a lovely Christmas, we breathed a sign of relief and coasted into the new year. In just a few weeks, we’ll welcome our firstborn son into the world and our lives will change forever, so we’re trying to relax as much as possible.

In the meantime, we need to finish a few tasks like installing the car seat and finding a pediatrician.

I only have a few weeks left before I can take advantage of Instacart’s generous 4-month paid family leave policy. It’s been a little difficult to focus lately. I can’t wait to be a father and I feel incredibly blessed. 2024 will be one of the best years of my life!

If you’re interested in seeing how my business and personal life have taken shape over the years, check out all my annual reviews.

Last updated on February 3rd, 2024