So it’s been a while now since my last post and also since I decided to go solo and start out on business for myself. I’m not 100% sure that the former is due to the latter but it most definitely has had an impact. Writing posts is actually a good healthy habit that I have somehow managed to remove from my diet, and to be honest, has probably been to the detriment of creating my own business overall. The fall-off was mainly to do with the fear of writing about stuff that either A) Seems obvious or B) that no one wants to read about. I’ve now got myself over this by simply thinking who cares!
Given the above it’s with great pleasure that I present “The fuckwits guide to starting your own business“. This will probably turn into a more what-not-to-do set of posts given my success rate but it’s a case of you’ll get what you get.
First up. Going solo. That is, being a solo founder.
If anyone has not read the stuff by Paul Graham and so the idea has not been force fed that this is kind-of seen as a bad idea then let me tell you it is. Never do it if you have the option of getting someone on board with you, and this is as close as I can bring myself to say don’t bother starting up unless you have a co-founder – yes it’s that important. Unless you have the complete and total discipline to avoid getting sucked down the tar pit of either A) working too hard on the product development or B) working too hard to customer development, then it’s important to have the perspective granted by having more than one founder. I’d imagine that most developers with suffer from (A) more so than (B), and I’ve known that I’m suffering from (A) for quite some time and yet I continue to sink in the tar pit – I’m almost hoping that vocalising it jolts me into action (it didn’t with my last blog post about the very same thing though).
It was hard for me to even suggest that starting a business without a co-founder just shouldn’t be done, as invariably it’s never that straightforward and, in my heart (not head), I think it’s better to start something than nothing. Before deciding to go solo I had been down the rabbit hole of attempting to start a business with others but it always failed to materialise. 99% of the time the reason it failed to even get out the starting blocks was that the other folk were often not willing to take the risk that was involved of possibly having no meaningful income (by which I mean closely matched to their current income) for an extended period of time – possibly more a British (Scottish?) problem.
OK negativity aside what can you do to make it work? Obviously I don’t know or I wouldn’t be failing so miserably at it. However, here are the steps that I’m about to take moving forward:
- Be more accountable. I’m currently pretty disciplined on the number of hours I work – I use a timer to ensure that I do enough hours in a day. However a fellow startup founder Lee from icmobilelab.com suggested an accountability buddy! This struck me as a good idea but I felt I had to take it a step further and use this blog to make my accountability a bit more public rather than depending on a single person.
- Segment time better. Be more specific about how I spend my time during the day. So something like 8am-10am software development, 10:15am-11:15am write blog post, 11:30-13:30 customer development, and so on. I’ve tried this in the past and if memory serves me correctly it works well – this blog post is sort of evidence of that! Obviously there are days where this becomes harder to organise but it should be the exception rather than the rule.
- Get out and speak to people. Potential customers here are the obvious choice but it’s worth meeting other founders or investors even just to catch up. I want to prevent myself from going dark for extended periods of time as it’s never a good idea.
- Blog. People like hearing about what other folk are doing so I should do it more – many Scottish people have a curious trait of enjoying seeing others failing, so there’s always an audience! Also developers love telling people how their way of doing stuff is WRONG, so again, even with technical articles, always an audience.
Anyway, shit, over my allocated segmented time for this. Don’t worry going to pencil in another hour for Monday! Maybe more details of what I’ve actually created. Over and out.