From Heartbreaks To Hotel Rooms (The End Of maxjancar.com)

The weirdest career pivot I never thought I’d make. This is a repost from my Substack. Check that out if you’re interested in what I’m building next.

Over roughly five years, I built a modest but thriving online brand where I write breakup advice. It was my first business venture, and my full-time job from 2020 to 2025. It was decent money, enough to live comfortably on.

But early-2025, my blog traffic plummeted, and revenue halved. While external factors like the rise of AI and Google’s algorithm changes played a role, I know I contributed to the decline.

Below, I’ll explain how—and how I eventually turned things around… only to then turn my back on it all and stumble somewhere completely unexpected.

First, the market evolved, and I was too stubborn to evolve with it.

I built my breakup brand on blogging and SEO. And that’s how I kept scaling it for years. Turns out this is a dying strategy for growth in a time where video reigns supreme.

But no, I thought. Fuck video! I didn’t sign up to be an iNflUenCeeeer. I wanna continue playing writer goddammit!

And so I stubbornly kept publishing article after article to a shrinking audience, falling deeper into an abyss of irrelevancy with each post.

Second, I started prioritizing joy over profit.

Early on, I focused on concrete, profitable problems: how to get over an ex and how to get them back. My content zeroed in on these, with an emphasis on the latter (which drove 70% of my revenue).

But then I started writing about general psychology, philosophy, and self-help. I shifted from how-to advice hyper-specific to my audience, to what I thought were “cool ideas” applicable to just about everyone going through a personal crisis, with breakup examples clumsily tossed in. As you’d expect, it didn’t resonate with the audience I’ve built up.

Why the transition? Honestly… it just felt fun. I needed a change. I got so fucking bored with writing about breakups. I said everything I wanted about the topic. And spending the next however many years beating the same drum felt about as exciting as sticking my dick in a light socket.

Third, I backed away from marketing.

I basically stopped promoting my stuff — books, courses, all of it. I sent fewer emails, dropped CTAs from my content, and let the marketing machine wind down.

This move was deliberate, however. I did it as part of a temporary experiment to see how much or how little marketing actually helped my brand grow. Or whether it was simply the content I produced that moved the needle.

Turns out, it was the marketing. My content just wasn’t good enough to carry the number of sales I needed on its own. Still stings like a motherfucker. Because yeah… turns out I wasn’t as irreplaceable as I wanted to believe.

Fast forward to mid-2025, I made a pivotal change that unlocked massive growth despite my brand’s decline: I separated the “church” (creativity/fun) from the “state” (profit).

Put another way, instead of one muddled brand, I broke it down into two—each with its specific purpose.

The “state” became my breakup brand. I’ve optimized it to become a pure profit machine. During the transition, I rewrote old content, reworked my funnels, ramped up my marketing, and cranked out new pieces until it started humming again.

And when it was finally humming, I stepped back and made it as passive as possible. During this period, I worked about 2-4 hours per day on the brand. My goal was clear: get the machine running on minimal effort—and let it print.

As for the “church,” what became of it was writing on a private blog (now slowly migrating here, to Substack)—a place for creative freedom, personal exploration, and sharpening my craft as a writer.

It’s everything I used to try and squeeze into my breakup brand but could never quite fit. The fun stuff. The philosophical stuff. The writing that didn’t have to convert or rank or sell.

Now after turning my breakup brand into something that ran with minimal input, I realized something interesting. …I realized I actually don’t care about it anymore. In fact—and I hate to admit this—I fell out of love with it.

I’d built a whole identity around helping people navigate heartbreak… and now I was bored with the whole damn thing.

That realization messed with me more than I expected, and I struggled with it for over a year before I even had the balls to admit to myself that it was a problem. It showed up as avoidance. Excuses. Endless tinkering of unimportant things like website design. Anything but sitting down to make great content—the lifeblood of my business.

So in late 2025, I finally sailed out of the breakup advice industry for good.

I also pondered what’s next for me. I have to make bread somehow. And on a more philosophical level, I want to feel useful. And a great way for me to feel useful is by doing quality work.

So I eventually decided to take an opportunity that my family kept shoving down my throat since I was a teenager: to succeed my father as the next owner of our hotel business, Eurotas Hotels. Established in 1873, it’s the largest private hotel chain in Slovenia, with 9 hotels spread across 6 destinations.

This decision surprised everyone, including me—I’ve never shown interest before. For a long time, I even hated the idea of taking over the family business since my parents kept forcing me into it.

But it felt like the right next step.

My breakup business felt stale and I wanted out. I also made enough money to prove to myself that I can support myself without my parents’ help (another big reason I didn’t hop into the family business sooner). And jumping into another online industry was also out of the question since I would have to play influencer due to the video-dominant markets today.

And to top it all off, the other family businesses just didn’t grab me. Flipping real estate would require me to be salesy and comfortable with losing large sums of money. It’s a high-risk, high-reward, rather inauthentic business—and I’m just not the type of person for that.

And our casino business… well, that one felt like joining the mafia with slot machines. It felt like a dark parody of everything I stood for. Helping people heal from emotional pain on one hand… and profiting from numbing it on the other. No thanks.

But what ultimately got me to leap into the hotel business was the realization that my role would be way different and a hell of a lot more interesting than what I initially thought.

As I’m writing this, I am in the weeds of our hotel business. Alongside the non-workey stuff, I’ll be using this Substack to document my journey into this new world — warts, wins, weird turns, and all.

For the first time in years, I have no idea what I’m doing — and that’s exactly the point.