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Using Slowlane skills to start Fastlane business

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Feek

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The book got me all fired up again! I haven't had a business in a few years and I'm ready to start another one.

I'm making a promise to myself not to give up this time when the road gets bumpy. I'm hoping that posting here and reading other progress threads will kick me in the butt any time I think "this isn't going to work." I have a very thick skin, and I hope the you guys will be hard on me if it looks like I'm wavering.

The skills
I have 20 years professional experience in software development, 15 of those years consulting and managing offshore development teams. I've worked in everything from tiny start-ups where I was employee #2 (after the owner), all the way up to multi-billion dollar organizations with hundreds of thousands of people.

I have many years experience building effective development teams that produce very high quality work under budget and on time. I accept nothing less from my teams, and with time my team comes to expect nothing less of each other.

The plan
The plan is to take freelance software development opportunities from established businesses and farm them offshore. I will be the management and quality check until I can hire someone to do that for me.

I not only believe that I can turn this "offshore development with onshore management" model into a viable business, I was recently involved in a startup that has that business model and that guy is enjoying some moderate success. He's just too much of a control freak and it's one of the only things holding him back.

I have contacts within the industry that can help me get jobs. While nice, that's not absolutely necessary because I know this industry backwards and fowards, and can sell what I need to sell because I know the pain points that need fixing.

The goals
  • 1/1/2014 - Come up with a relatively automated business plan
  • 3/1/2014 - Have an offshore team in-hand, vetted and ready to go
  • 10/1/2015 - Have the offshore team finish up some of the software I've been working on independently to sell under my own company name
  • 6/1/2016 - Quit the Slowlane full time
This is all I have right now, just a vague goal to shoot for. That's why I've given myself till the end of the year to come up with a viable plan. It won't be too difficult, I just need to sit down and do it.

I also have plans for expanding past this business once I get the capital, but those are queued up for when it comes time to flesh those out.
 
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Feek

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I've deleted this post because that idea is on hold for the time being and this post no longer applies.
 
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Feek

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So here's my CENTS analysis of this software consulting plan, and it's making me rethink the order of my milestones above:

  • NEED
    • Without getting into specific industry pain points, how I'll be running the consulting will solve a lot of need currently ignored by the majority of software consultants out there today. Essentially, the way I work when consulting is structure it so that what's good for my customer is good for me. It's essentially partnering, but not in the legal sense, rather than the "pay me first" attitude many consultants have.
  • ENTRY
    • Many people can try to get into software consulting, but the industry is run with no mercy and many people are chewed up and spit back out. I've essentially had training on how to turn a profit in this industry using someone else's dime.
  • CONTROL
    • I'd have full control of the business. Since I'll have to hire people, the pricing of my services is contingent on the margin above those expenses, and compensation will have to be industry standard. One way I'm planning on mitigating this is by looking at my employees as my customers. I work by giving the best possible customer service I can to my employees, which makes them engaged, passionate and loyal. I follow and espouse a culture of SUCS, though I've never really called it that before I read the book.
  • SCALE
    • Considering there are multi-billion dollar companies doing this very thing, I think it's pretty safe to say it's a scalable business.
  • TIME
    • This is probably the biggest downside of software consulting - it'll take a lot of my time for a while. Software consulting is something that's not super-easy to make self-sustaining. I know I can find someone to run the business and be able to train them properly (the tenets I use aren't difficult to understand, just underutilized in the industry), but even then it will require me to have a hand in the running of the business. Even if it's not day-to-day, it need my personal attention on a regular basis.
It's this time component that's making me rethink the consulting. I believe, with my situation right now and wanting to keep working, that now may not be the time to jump into the software consulting side of things.

With that said, this idea is not dead.

I said in the first post above that part of my plan is to finish up some software I'm making and sell that. Since that has much of the advantages of this CENTS analysis without the detrimental time requirement, I'm thinking this is a better way to start.

2 of the programs are mobile apps (one of which is a game), 1 is a mobile communication platform I can patent and sell licensing on, and 1 is a data aggregation service that I can turn into a subscription/advertising model. I have a couple options for these. I can finish the software myself, which isn't that difficult to do, or I pay an offshore team to help me finish.

The data aggregation service I can finish by myself by the end of the year. The startup costs on this are next to nothing, and with enough time, I can start sending out trending information, yet another source of income.

The communication platform I can finish the proof of concept used to sell the licensing by the end of the year with help, otherwise we're talking probably middle to end of first quarter '15. The huge benefit to this one is that since it's just licensing, I have to do very little in the way of actual work, but this brings up a good question; do I just patent and license the idea, or do I make the software and license the software?
 
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Feek

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What languages and platforms are you targetting.
For the software products there's a couple:

Mobile - I'm primarily a .NET person, so I'll be trying out some of the C# tools that do .NET -> mobile. I have a little experience with Java, so if I have to use that and native Eclipse instead, it's not a big deal. All mobile apps I make will be Apple and Android, minimum. If I get requests for other platforms, I'll evaluate the demand on that and see if it's worth my time to port over.

Desktop - Being a .NET person, all my desktop and web apps are done in C#. Back end will be C# on Windows, and front ends will be done on desktop or web, dependent on which makes most sense given the application.

For consulting, the language used can get a little up in the air. Many times, a customer just wants a solution and doesn't care what technology you use to get them there - with the caveat that it has to be supportable on their current infrastructure. When they do care, usually they just ask for it to be web-based, or it has to be a Windows app, it needs mobile availability, etc. and then it's up to you to figure out how to make that happen. In all of these cases, it'll be in a .NET language, probably C#.

If we're working in more of a staff augmentation-type role, I'll have to determine if I have the sufficient knowledge on my team to cover their need as constrained by the current team we'll be assisting. If my team doesn't have the knowledge, then I'll have to pass on the opportunity. If I keep getting requests for knowledge my team doesn't have, then I'll work on getting people on my team that do have that knowledge.
 

RoadTrip

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Hi Feek,

Nice to see a fellow Fastlaner who works in IT as well! I haven't got the amount of experience as you in the field yet (3+ years), but I can relate to what you are trying to set up. I am Software Tester myself and see that outsourcing development to lower wage countries isn't going away soon.

However, from personal experience I have seen that it also brings plenty of issues. For my country that means language barriers, cultural differences and in general not a thorough understanding of how businesses are run in my country. All resulting in lower quality and longer time to markets. I see you have lots of experience and you DO know how to run a team so that should be less of a problem for you.

I have given this idea a thought as well, but since I don't have sufficient experience skipped on it (for now). Also, even if you are the best team builder and outsourcer there is, I can't see how you can remove your TIME from the equation. You can delegate tasks of course but that means growing, which again means more complexity and more people to manage. Of course, if you aren't too worried about the TIME component and just want to work for yourself and earn a lot of money, then I can see this is a great opportunity.
 

Feek

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@RoadTrip

Thanks for the response. Let me break down your comments and respond to each issue you bring up, because they are real issues that need addressing if you're thinking about offshoring.

Let me just preface this by saying that a very large part of my offshoring experience has been with teams in India, so your mileage may vary depending on the target country you outsource to.

I am Software Tester myself and see that outsourcing development to lower wage countries isn't going away soon.
Remember you're living in a global economy now. You're correct that it's not going away any time soon (ever, really), but is that necessarily a bad thing? A high tide raises all ships.

One thing I can tell you, however, is that the doomsday stories saying that offshoring is increasing are full of hot air. Offshoring, in the US at least, is about the same rate as I saw 10 years ago. The thing that is happening is a maturation of the offshoring process, on both sides, including a greater understanding of the level of ROI that your business will get.

However, from personal experience I have seen that it also brings plenty of issues. For my country that means language barriers, cultural differences and in general not a thorough understanding of how businesses are run in my country. All resulting in lower quality and longer time to markets. I see you have lots of experience and you DO know how to run a team so that should be less of a problem for you.
It's not a problem for me now, but I used to say the same exact things as you. Lower quality, higher lead time, burned deadlines, etc, etc, etc.

You want to know what changed my perspective? The understanding that if I have an offshore team that I'm leading, it's incumbent upon me to make sure that they're working to the level of quality and time awareness that I expect. In my experience, this teaching step doesn't take much effort. At this point, I can bring an offshore team up to the quality that I need within a month, sometimes shorter depending on the team.

On a side note, if you're offshoring for your own company, you need to be sure that the people you're offshoring to can understand your language in a way that reduces the amount of hindrance to work. These days, most everyone can use English, and India teams are getting much closer than they have in the past to being able to have fulfilling technical conversations about the work they're doing.

I have given this idea a thought as well, but since I don't have sufficient experience skipped on it (for now). Also, even if you are the best team builder and outsourcer there is, I can't see how you can remove your TIME from the equation. You can delegate tasks of course but that means growing, which again means more complexity and more people to manage. Of course, if you aren't too worried about the TIME component and just want to work for yourself and earn a lot of money, then I can see this is a great opportunity.
This is exactly why I pushed the consulting side of things to a lower priority. While I am going to be circling back around to it, the time factor was just too much at this point.

That in mind, to speak to TMF , software consulting past a certain level of scale has magnitude, and quite a bit of it. On top of that, this industry is still young enough that it's relatively easy to find competent, passionate, trustworthy people to help run your business. These are computer people - not a group generally known for their illegal or unethical behavior. :)
 
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The-J

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I planned to do this for front-end web development. Had no trouble getting the guys to do it (thanks to a hookup from the ol' dolphin), sent them the rest of my business, it went well, made some money. Then had trouble finding more clients. It might work better for software development as there is much less competition out there squeezing your prices.

At the end of the day, I was just scalping profit. But there are real benefits for the client. They worry about less. I was doing most of the quality control management and the client didn't have to worry about a thing: I just had to make sure deadlines were met (and that the client had no idea what was going on haha) Quality was not an issue because the people I used were good. Basically, it was:

Client -> Me -> Guy running the dev/design team (offshore) -> The team itself

I had zero communication with the team, didn't need it because the manager was doing QCM on his side and I was doing it on mine. The client goes directly through me, who translates what he wants into instructions for the team to follow. I send it to the manager, the manager sends it to him.

The benefit on the manager's side was that even though I took a cut on top, he had more work. But I couldn't get more work: I wasn't on eLance (and when I got on I was getting priced out), I was getting completely priced out locally (which caused me to STOP the business), and the people who needed work that I knew personally were being flaky about it and decided to, instead of going through a local person, just go to outsourcing themselves.

The model was good, I just wasn't for a variety of reasons. I was an added layer scalping profit off the top while having no system in place for customer acquisition. Fix that mistake and you'll do well.
 

Feek

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I planned to do this for front-end web development. Had no trouble getting the guys to do it (thanks to a hookup from the ol' dolphin), sent them the rest of my business, it went well, made some money. Then had trouble finding more clients. It might work better for software development as there is much less competition out there squeezing your prices.

At the end of the day, I was just scalping profit. But there are real benefits for the client. They worry about less. I was doing most of the quality control management and the client didn't have to worry about a thing: I just had to make sure deadlines were met (and that the client had no idea what was going on haha) Quality was not an issue because the people I used were good. Basically, it was:

Client -> Me -> Guy running the dev/design team (offshore) -> The team itself

I had zero communication with the team, didn't need it because the manager was doing QCM on his side and I was doing it on mine. The client goes directly through me, who translates what he wants into instructions for the team to follow. I send it to the manager, the manager sends it to him.

The benefit on the manager's side was that even though I took a cut on top, he had more work. But I couldn't get more work: I wasn't on eLance (and when I got on I was getting priced out), I was getting completely priced out locally (which caused me to STOP the business), and the people who needed work that I knew personally were being flaky about it and decided to, instead of going through a local person, just go to outsourcing themselves.

The model was good, I just wasn't for a variety of reasons. I was an added layer scalping profit off the top while having no system in place for customer acquisition. Fix that mistake and you'll do well.
I worked at a small start-up digital marketing firm back in 2008 that had used that offshoring model. I was in the same exact position as you in your chart above because the owner (my boss) asked me to be 100% client facing. I agree with you, it is a very good model when driven well, but then I got to use someone else's dime to figure out what worked and what didn't.

Software consulting can blend you up and spit you out if you're not careful. You have to have everything done last week for less money than you have for an ungrateful client that doesn't want to have to pay you.

All I'm saying is that's the exact type of environment I've learned I absolutely thrive in.
 

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A thought just came up to me. What if you write an ebook about the "Best Practices for Building a Kickass Offshore Team", "How to Know When Offshoring is a Perfect Fit for your Company" or "40 Tips on How to Avoid a Disaster with Offshoring to India"?

And market it to companies, on Amazon, Google Adwords, etc. That will also take time out of the equation.

And you could probably get your testimonials from your previous employers :)
 
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Feek

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A thought just came up to me. What if you write an ebook about the "Best Practices for Building a Kickass Offshore Team", "How to Know When Offshoring is a Perfect Fit for your Company" or "40 Tips on How to Avoid a Disaster with Offshoring to India"?

And market it to companies, on Amazon, Google Adwords, etc. That will also take time out of the equation.

And you could probably get your testimonials from your previous employers :)
Hey, now there's an idea! I've spent probably a good 6 months trying to think of how best to monetize that knowledge, but I was thinking much larger (read: more difficult).

The knowledge I have would be extremely useful in that sort of format, and I could probably write more than just those 3 books with all the experience I have. Plus, the best part is that it's providing the exact type of value to the industry that I was looking to give.


Thank you so much @RoadTrip for the idea, repping you immediately! Now I get to spend the whole weekend thinking of plan of attack. I'll post something as soon as I figure it out.
 

RoadTrip

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Glad to have been able to help you!

Once you fully decide to go that route, check out the posts on this forum on self publishing as well. And consider becoming an INSIDERS. There's lots of great motivational stuff in there including one progress thread about self publishing.

Looking forward to your updates.
 

Feek

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After thinking about it this weekend, I've come up with a plan for @RoadTrip's excellent idea. While the book(s) idea is a good idea that provides value I believe in, I think the data aggregation software will provide it to a much larger group of people.

So, I'm going to continue with the software now and when I circle back around to the consulting, the first step I'm going to take is writing at least one book that I can use as both income and a selling tool for my services. There's huge pain in that industry that I can help solve so it'll stay on the list, just at a lower priority.

The way I look at putting the book idea on hold is that it's a matter of time. I generally sleep 5 to 6 hours a night, which leaves me at least 18 hours of waking time.

About 9 of those hours are chopped right off for my job, which leaves me 50% of my day. 4 hours travel time (2 there, 2 back) cuts off another 25% of my time. I wouldn't want to work on a book unless I could devote at least 2 hours a night, which is about 12% of my time, or a full half of my time left.

That is a precariously thin margin to use when trying to get something off the ground, something I've learned the hard way. I'm going to take those 2 hours from the potential book and give myself a full 4 hours a night for the software. This will include business AND technical development time.

This is one of the difficulties when trying to keep a full time job and start a business at the same time...
 
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Feek

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I've finished the data feeds and information parsing areas of my application. Now to build the part of the application which does the calculations. These calculations are the value I'm providing, and they will do the heavy lifting to fill the actual need. I'll be spending a bit of time on this since it'll be the thing people pay me for so I want to get it right.

Another thing I need to do is get a higher quality data feed from one of my feed suppliers. That shouldn't be too difficult since I have experience on the other side of this equation. I've been the person at the company building out data feeds for partners, so I know the process and the types of things my vendor will want to hear. Since my application will directly drive traffic to their website, I can make a pretty compelling argument why it makes sense for them to give me the better feed.

At some point I also need to start building the website my customers will go on to sign up for my service, do account administration, and see their past email blasts. I'm also planning on having some sort of section for trending, but that will be a premium service so I don't need to get on it until at least the proof of concept is complete.

Onward and upward!
 

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Nice progress Feek. A real action taker!

How long do you think it will take you to have an MVP ready?

Also, I suppose you know your market exactly already but have you considered doing presales? This is a great way to validate the demand and get early input from your customers.
 

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Feek

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Nice progress Feek. A real action taker!
Thank you, I appreciate it, but this is the easy part. In my experience, the simple part of any business I've started is the part all the way up to actually putting the idea on the market. Up until then, it's thoughts, ideas, plans, and even the actual building of the product (in this case) that's pretty much all still in the mind. It's when I get out there and actually interact with my customers and constantly tweak what I'm doing that's the hard part.

Fun, but hard.

How long do you think it will take you to have an MVP ready?

Also, I suppose you know your market exactly already but have you considered doing presales? This is a great way to validate the demand and get early input from your customers.
I'm assuming "MVP" means market-viable product? I'm going to take another 2 or 3 weeks for the calculations I mentioned in my post above. Since that's really what I'm selling, I'm prioritizing that work and giving myself time to do it right. Then, another couple weeks to build the website and find my email blast provider.

I think it makes sense to modify my original timeline to go to market from the beginning to the middle of January.

From there, it'll be bug fixing and a few enhancements probably for the first few weeks while I market and start getting subscribers and word of mouth. I believe word of mouth will be big with this one, so building a free subscriber base is part of my marketing plan. Then I can concentrate on adding the pay-for enhancements.

As of right now, I have a relatively nebulous idea of the pay services because I'm still so early in my development. Once I know the quality of my calculations, then I can get a better idea of what I can put out there for pay services. At that point, I can start interacting with my customers to find out what they want most in something they'll be paying for.
 

Feek

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Great work so far Feek, keep it up mate.

Also noticed that we have a Dev and Tester here so as a BA myself, our team is complete! lol
Lol, perfect! Should we get a PM, too? Naaah, who really NEEDS PMs? They just get in the way. ;)

Thank you for the link, I'm definitely going to read through that. I'm actually glad that I'm not doing SaaS, I've worked in a couple startups doing that and there's just something vaguely soul crushing about it.

It's actually one of the reasons I'm doing this as an email blast business to start - super simple and most of the important software is on my side so I don't have to worry about making it user friendly. I can see a path for this becoming SaaS in the future, but I'm hoping I can hire a team before then.
 

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Lol, perfect! Should we get a PM, too? Naaah, who really NEEDS PMs? They just get in the way. ;)
hahaha yeah true plus we'd all die by Gantt chart, we don't want that now do we? Just get Skype and Trello and we are good to go!


It's actually one of the reasons I'm doing this as an email blast business to start - super simple and most of the important software is on my side so I don't have to worry about making it user friendly. I can see a path for this becoming SaaS in the future, but I'm hoping I can hire a team before then.
So is your idea similar to mailgun?
I work in media and have friends in marketing who do email blasts all the time, could be something for them (or our devs) to test out.
 
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Feek

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So is your idea similar to mailgun?
I work in media and have friends in marketing who do email blasts all the time, could be something for them (or our devs) to test out.
The software I'm making isn't like mailgun, but it would certainly make use of it. My service is a subscription service that will send out specific information in email every day to people that can use the information to make decisions about their business. It'll also have a corresponding website where you can set your preferences, see past information, administer your account, sign up for pay services, etc.
 

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Ah cool. You should look at beatrixapp.com
They do social media assistant, providing info to help business owners.
 

Feek

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Bad Idea
I didn't post anything yesterday because I worked on my software instead. The idea I had was that I would post every other day to give me more time to program. I think this is actually a bad idea for two reasons.

One, I want to be writing something new, creatively speaking, every day so I can build a habit to use as I start having to answer more and more customer emails. Like a muscle, my writing always improves when I use it more. That'll also be important when I start writing copy, which has never been something I really enjoy all that much - mainly because I'm not very good at it.

Two, in all startups I've ever worked in, developments happen daily and things can change in the course of just a few hours, so I'll always have something new and hopefully interesting to write about. Besides, I don't have anyone else in my life that I get to talk about this stuff with. :)

Progress
In a previous post, I said I needed to contact one of my data feed vendors to get a higher quality feed. I've started researching into who I need to contact at the vendor to get this better feed. The company is pretty large, so it may take some digging. I've found one name so far and the title sounds about right, so if he's not the right guy I bet he knows who is.

He also has a company on the side that does digital and email marketing that I think might be able to help me out, so I have to see if I can come up with something of value to provide him. I want to see if there's any kind of beneficial deal I can do with him. It may not work out to anything, but the way I figure it is it doesn't hurt to at least discuss it.

Learning
As I'm back up to reading about two books a week since I started taking the train, I've been filling my Kindle queue with a lot of the marketing book recommendations I find on this site. I have to say I've never been good at marketing, but all these books have such brilliant insights that it's starting to truly click for me for the first time in my life.

I'm very big into to-do and idea lists, so as I'm reading these books they're inspiring ideas within me that I'm keeping track of on Google Keep. Since I have ideas pretty much non-stop whenever I put my mind to something, these lists are starting to multiply and grow. It's a good thing but I have to be sure to keep on top of the prioritization.

Value
On the software side, I had a breakthrough that vastly improved the accuracy of my numbers. In fact, the breakthrough made me start thinking of various calculations I could throw together to make those numbers even more accurate.

Going forward, the accuracy improvement gains will gradually get much smaller, but I think it's important to do because these numbers should be as accurate as I can make them. I'm providing information that companies will be able to use to increase their margins easier than they do now.
 
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Feek

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Ah cool. You should look at beatrixapp.com
They do social media assistant, providing info to help business owners.
From what I can see, it looks like an social media auto-poster to keep fresh posts showing up on your FB, Twitter, blog, etc. but I have to play around with it more to see if there's anything I'm missing. I can definitely see the benefit of having a constant stream of new posts (helps with SEO), I just need to see if I can put together a feed that makes sense for my social media. Couldn't be much worse than what I have right now - all my social media sites are blank!
 

Feek

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No work on the software yesterday.

Worked instead on (hopefully) helping people on this forum with some software knowledge which took me a lot longer than I thought it was going to and I finished up past bedtime. It was good, though, because I got to help people and at the same time write quite a bit which means that I at worked towards at least one of my goals.

No work on the weekends, because I go visit my kids every weekend. More updates on Monday.
 

Feek

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Oct 15, 2014
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Didn't want to work last night, but I forced myself to do it anyway. I only got 2 hours of work in before my computer slowed down to the point of unusability, and I got so fed up that I used my last 45 minutes to watch a documentary on FDR. On a positive note, I've negotiated a huge amount of free time out of my schedule to work on my business. I've gotten an entire free day of time spread over two days, which at this point is a lot for me.

I've been thinking of my service offerings a lot and I don't know that the information my free service provides is going to be useful to people. What I think I might do is finish up the free service and the pay service at the same time, and then test market both and then figure out my offerings based on the results of that.

I'm having a hard time keeping on course with this data service because all of a sudden I'm getting a bunch of requests for custom development work. I hate being indecisive and I don't like switching tracks if there's not a compelling reason to. All these requests are starting to get pretty damn compelling, so I'm going to have to keep an eye on it.

I might be able to start the custom development shop and be my own first customer to get the data aggregation service done. The main issue I see with that is one of serving two masters: I'll have to keep my data customers happy while also working to keep my development customers happy. I have to roll that one around in my head to see if I can efficiently marry the two concepts.
 
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Feek

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Oct 15, 2014
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Finally found a competitor, but after some research I found nothing to worry about. People think this competitor is just "ok" but they use it because there's nothing else out there that does what they want. A lot of people have enhancement requests and because this space has so few competitors, this other company seems not so much in a hurry to make their customers happy.

My software will go a step further in terms of correlation than theirs, making my data more useful. I'm going to be cheaper, and I'm going to be relentless in listening to my customers. On top of that, I'm going to make my customers BELIEVE in my software. ;)

I think those things all put together will boost me above the competition.
 

Feek

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Hi, ho, hi, ho
It's been more than a week since my last update. I've been working pretty much nonstop and as much as I enjoy posting and reading here, it was taking too much time away from building my business so I'm trying my best to keep it to a minimum. At this point, my day looks like this:

Wake up -> read on train to work -> job -> read on train home -> REAL job -> sleep

Every day. I was even able to get Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings to myself so I can work.

Excited for the pain
There's so much work to do and so little time to do it in, but as difficult as some things in my life may be at the moment, I can't really complain. I wake up excited to go to work, and then when my day's done I'm excited to go home to work on my business. I get to have TWO jobs that I totally love. How many people can say they love even their regular jobs?

Sometimes it does get hard to be working so much and not having much relaxing time, though. Especially true while I'm working and I can see my roommate in the living room laying on the couch, browsing the internet and watching sitcoms. I want to be doing that, but what I want FAR MORE is to not still be doing that in 20 years, which is where I know he'll be (and just between you and me, that makes me a little sad for him).

TV is a sedative that makes people not care about their futures
.

The only future that TV makes people worry about is how they're going to buy they next bauble or gadget. Great if you're the person selling the gadget, not so much if you're the one buying.

Next 6 business things to do
  1. Finish website programming
  2. Finish programming calculations
  3. Learn copy
  4. Figure out how's, what's and why's of the channels I'm going to market through
  5. Get web design
  6. Get better vendor feed

Distractions
An ex-business partner contacted me a couple weeks ago because he wants my help starting a SaaS business. I want to help him but I'm concerned with having split attention with my business, especially with the limited time I have.

He's raising money right now, so I told him when he gets us enough money, we're going to hire someone to do a market test to see if there's demand. If there's demand, then we can sit down to see what time commitment he'd expect from me and see if it's in the cards for me to help him.

I understand what he wants to do, and can probably even find some passion in it, but I'm very leery about whether the market needs what he wants to build. This is something we go over again and again whenever he presents business ideas to me. I have to redirect his focus from making a really cool product that no one has to making a really cool product that someone NEEDS.
 
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Feek

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Oct 15, 2014
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Forgot a 7th "to-do":

7. INVESTIGATE MY COMPETITION

How could I forget that? It's one of those things that's so simple and pervasive that I don't even think about doing it, it just gets done. :p
 
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