The Month in Greece Where Everything Fell Apart

In June 2025 I packed up my London office and flew to Greece for a month. I had this idea that I'd step back from the day to day, let the business run itself, and focus on scaling through paid advertising. CodeSpring was making about £9,000 a year at that point, all coming from my personal audience on social media, and I wanted to prove it could grow beyond just me.

What actually happened is that everything fell apart almost immediately.

The plan vs reality

The plan was simple: set up Facebook ads, drive people to a webinar, sell subscriptions. I'd automate the marketing, the product would do its thing, and I'd work on the big picture from a villa near the beach.

Within the first few days I'd spent about five hundred dollars on ads and made back about six hundred. I needed the ads to return three times what I spent to make the numbers work, and they weren't even close. The problem wasn't the ads themselves, it was everything behind them. I didn't have a proper funnel set up. I wasn't clear enough on who the product was actually for. I knew all of this before I spent the money, and I spent it anyway, which is one of those founder mistakes that feels obvious in hindsight but somehow still happens.

I burned through about two thousand dollars before I gave up on ads entirely.

Everything else that went wrong

The Airbnb had terrible wifi. I could only get a decent connection from one specific corner of the house where the router was, which is not ideal when you're trying to run a software company remotely.

But the bigger problem was that I had no idea what to actually do with my time. Back in London I was always either coding or doing marketing, completely locked in. In Greece, without that structure, I kept bouncing between tasks without finishing anything. One day I'd work on the product, the next day I'd try a marketing experiment, and nothing really moved forward.

I also spent weeks building a complicated AI feature that would have required me to restart all of my marketing from scratch. It was genuinely cool technology but completely the wrong thing to be building at that stage. And I tried to launch an affiliate programme that nobody asked for. Poured hours into it with zero evidence it would work.

The thing that actually mattered

The one good decision I made was picking a villa near the beach. When things got overwhelming I'd go for a swim, and my brain had nothing to do except think.

That sounds like nothing, but it turned out to be the most valuable thing I did all month. Being stuck with no internet, no clear direction, and no ability to just dive into code forced me to zoom out. Who am I actually trying to help? What is this product really for? Where should we be going with it?

If I'd stayed in the London office I would have spent the entire month fixing small bugs and tweaking things that didn't matter. Instead I got the space to see the whole picture. And since getting back to London, that clarity is what made everything else work. We went from £9,000 a year to £150,000 a month in the six months after Greece.

What I'd do differently

Don't spend money on ads before you've got something worth sending people to. I knew this and did it anyway, which cost me two thousand dollars I didn't really have at the time.

Don't build features that require you to throw away all your existing marketing unless you're absolutely sure. The sunk cost of rebuilding your entire message from scratch is enormous.

And if you're feeling stuck, sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop working and go think. Preferably near water.