Some real honest and actionable advice here. I think the natural course for intelligent people that enjoy crafting things is very much in conflict with the real world. We care about the things we are building because we see them as an extension of ourselves. Anxiously perfecting our creations in a safe place, obsessing over ever smaller details of finished portions; working on detailing while ignoring the missing half of the ship. Its an ego thing. We see these things as pieces of ourselves, we’re afraid that the world won’t accept them, and by extension us. It’s not real though; nothing and nobody is perfect, and its okay.
I have a deep feeling that i can “do it myself”, yet i work for companies because deep down I like the anonymity and the safety of it; at a big company we get to be part of something established, we don’t have to show our own faces to the world.
It's a thing I had to get over, because in the end, people were quite content with what I released and no one minded if I shipped an extra 25kb to the browser or did not have consistently rounded corners.
I learned that lesson again with art. You have to frequently zoom out and see if the entire picture works, or otherwise you make highly detailed turds.
After 20 years building software for other companies, I started my own thing a few weeks ago. The reality check hit fast. When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market. When it's yours, every signup or lack of one is direct feedback. No buffer.
> When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market.
You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.
But here’s the catch: You choose the market.
To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
In 2020-2022 I had a repair side-hustle that became unexpectedly profitable, so I started scaling it up and thinking about quitting my job. Then interest rates went up, assets stopped appreciating, and I realized that most of the value I thought I was adding was actually just asset inflation and the common wisdom that repair is a miserable business niche was correct after all.
Yes, and none of that matters when the money runs out and you can't convince investors that your business will bring them a worthwhile return in an environment that includes all of those outside forces.
Seems the page is down. So, yes, Reality is where money is. For money to reach you, you need to setup the pipelines, or poke a hole in an existing pipeline.
Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.
I wonder how many decades the advice “use WP-cache; WP-supercache” has endured. Is it still the advice? Why knows. It’s been 20 years of WP (last week) and seeing that error message.
The gold nugget here is: your number one job as the business owner is: find new customers. Forget everything else. You must find ways how to talk to them, get them to trust you and tell you about their problems.
Forget scaling, google ads, until your customer #10, probably more. All your early customers will be from your network, real people you talk to in real world.
It is a chicken and egg problem - you don’t know what product customers need until you have customers. So go find them, build and try to figure out what they have in common.
Thank you for sharing. My wife and I have been down this road in physical retail, SaaS, consulting, and real estate. It always feels like the first time when you learn slowly, and you’ve done a Good Thing by helping us all learn faster.
FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH
well... it's a certain KIND of reality... one where numbers fight with "common sense"...
examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...
(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)
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I have a deep feeling that i can “do it myself”, yet i work for companies because deep down I like the anonymity and the safety of it; at a big company we get to be part of something established, we don’t have to show our own faces to the world.
I learned that lesson again with art. You have to frequently zoom out and see if the entire picture works, or otherwise you make highly detailed turds.
You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.
But here’s the catch: You choose the market.
To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
In 2020-2022 I had a repair side-hustle that became unexpectedly profitable, so I started scaling it up and thinking about quitting my job. Then interest rates went up, assets stopped appreciating, and I realized that most of the value I thought I was adding was actually just asset inflation and the common wisdom that repair is a miserable business niche was correct after all.
Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.
Another biz lesson I learned luckily through observation (WP sites being down too often and a nightmare to configure and maintain).
Forget scaling, google ads, until your customer #10, probably more. All your early customers will be from your network, real people you talk to in real world.
It is a chicken and egg problem - you don’t know what product customers need until you have customers. So go find them, build and try to figure out what they have in common.
FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH
examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...
(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)