Hello fellow fastlaners!
First post here to try to jot down an introduction. If anyone asked me 5 years ago if I'd ever thought I would willingly be anyones boss or even think of starting my own company I would have told them no laughing. But here I am owning 2 LLCs and helping my wife with her freshly build web shop selling baby related items.
I have never felt quite content with my life, and that resulted in me halfheartedly and without real clear direction moving to bigger cities and trying to "follow my passion" in music and photography. I grew up in a really small place in the north of Sweden (population 2000ish), growing up I both played guitar and later begun singing. I got a taste for music production as a "culture day" initiative at the school I attended at the time and ended up moving to Stockholm about 8 years after that to go to an audio engineering school to become a recording engineer. I quickly after that realized that it would be really tough to get into competing with all the bedroom producers popping up and trying to get struggling bands to pay for recording sessions in studios that would be super expensive to rent to begin with. So I ended up back in IT where I had been working since the first job I ever had.
Fast forward around 10 years. During which I had the time to work 7 years as a dead end computer monkey swapping peripherals on office computers and working weekends trying to make it in wedding photography. At this time I had just met the woman I now call my wife and mother of my son, and I could not shake the feeling of stagnation. By accident I got into crypto trading and saw a video about coding trading bots which lit a spark inside (dont worry, I'm not becoming the next big crypto trader). Previously I had thought I was too lacking in the maths department to ever be able to get into programming, but now I fought that though and jumped into a college education to get some base skills to complement my youtube procured coding knowledge.
After about 6 months into my 3 year education I started working part time as a web developer on top of my full time studies to not have to take on too much debt in student loans. I was taking home a whopping $20/h as a junior developer and that was more than I was making in my previous job as a computer monkey. The lack of time and declining interest killed what was left of my wedding photography "enterprise".
Around the one year mark of my studies and in the middle of the pandemic we had a course that had us partner up with one or two other students and we where tasked to create a service, anything really. A couple of nights later I was laying in bed thinking about what to create and I was trying to think of a way to help the struggling businesses through the hard times during the raging pandemic. I remembered hearing about various influencers pleading to people to buy gift cards at stores/companies to help them get some revenue despite many stores not being able to be open to walk-ins. So I thought that there would be some kind of platform that sold mobile gift cards, but I could not find anything in the mobile space, only physical, email or text-message based gift cards. So I thought I'd build just that for my course. A marketplace for companies to join to sell their gift cards, kind of like Uber Eats but for mobile gift cards.
I slowly started to realize that this idea had some real value to it if done right. Since it would be quite "easy" to build and automate most of the processes. At least with my skill set. Me and one other student started building this with tools that was free to use or at least free up to a point. I really had gotten to believing this might be worth pursuing so I started the Swedish equivalent of an LLC to run with this. No competitors that was doing this on the mobile platform. Gift card sales is a constantly growing market. E-comm mobile spending is steadily growing. No-one I know wants to get a gift card in the form of a printed email or a text message. And there was no place for stores to sell their gift cards other than through their own physical storefronts and web-shops.
Today (about 2,5 years later) I have started to do freelance consulting development work through another one of my LLCs to get a much better take home pay to be able to fund my family after getting the news of becoming a father. But I now am getting to know what it feels like to know that the amount of hours available to me is the limiting factor of how much I can make in freelancing (if I don't start a consultancy). Now my mobile gift card business is waaay passed its MVC stage and I have not yet launched it into the wild and I have only gotten a few pilot businesses to start with, but they are all super excited about the service. I have several parts to my revenue model to try to maximize the value to both the businesses and the consumers and I have build a entirely new way of presenting these received gift cards in addition to the possibility for consumers to do group purchases without having to send funds to one another after the purchase.
I am now at a stage where I dont really feel I can do much more on the products side, I just have to say "f*ck it" and get out there and sell. But I'm a computer nerd and I have always hated selling but now I'm learning to take real interest in the psychology of sales and the application of it.
So sorry for the long and winding snapshot of my life. I just read the Millionaire Fastlane a few weeks ago and in that realizing that this gift card business might become a golden goose if I act now and treat it well!
An other book I'm on the second read is "$100M Offers" by Alex Hormozi
So.. Hi! I'm Nicklas, and what you just read is basically where I am today, still in the slow lane, but beginning to see a sliver of hope.
All the best to you all!
First post here to try to jot down an introduction. If anyone asked me 5 years ago if I'd ever thought I would willingly be anyones boss or even think of starting my own company I would have told them no laughing. But here I am owning 2 LLCs and helping my wife with her freshly build web shop selling baby related items.
I have never felt quite content with my life, and that resulted in me halfheartedly and without real clear direction moving to bigger cities and trying to "follow my passion" in music and photography. I grew up in a really small place in the north of Sweden (population 2000ish), growing up I both played guitar and later begun singing. I got a taste for music production as a "culture day" initiative at the school I attended at the time and ended up moving to Stockholm about 8 years after that to go to an audio engineering school to become a recording engineer. I quickly after that realized that it would be really tough to get into competing with all the bedroom producers popping up and trying to get struggling bands to pay for recording sessions in studios that would be super expensive to rent to begin with. So I ended up back in IT where I had been working since the first job I ever had.
Fast forward around 10 years. During which I had the time to work 7 years as a dead end computer monkey swapping peripherals on office computers and working weekends trying to make it in wedding photography. At this time I had just met the woman I now call my wife and mother of my son, and I could not shake the feeling of stagnation. By accident I got into crypto trading and saw a video about coding trading bots which lit a spark inside (dont worry, I'm not becoming the next big crypto trader). Previously I had thought I was too lacking in the maths department to ever be able to get into programming, but now I fought that though and jumped into a college education to get some base skills to complement my youtube procured coding knowledge.
After about 6 months into my 3 year education I started working part time as a web developer on top of my full time studies to not have to take on too much debt in student loans. I was taking home a whopping $20/h as a junior developer and that was more than I was making in my previous job as a computer monkey. The lack of time and declining interest killed what was left of my wedding photography "enterprise".
Around the one year mark of my studies and in the middle of the pandemic we had a course that had us partner up with one or two other students and we where tasked to create a service, anything really. A couple of nights later I was laying in bed thinking about what to create and I was trying to think of a way to help the struggling businesses through the hard times during the raging pandemic. I remembered hearing about various influencers pleading to people to buy gift cards at stores/companies to help them get some revenue despite many stores not being able to be open to walk-ins. So I thought that there would be some kind of platform that sold mobile gift cards, but I could not find anything in the mobile space, only physical, email or text-message based gift cards. So I thought I'd build just that for my course. A marketplace for companies to join to sell their gift cards, kind of like Uber Eats but for mobile gift cards.
I slowly started to realize that this idea had some real value to it if done right. Since it would be quite "easy" to build and automate most of the processes. At least with my skill set. Me and one other student started building this with tools that was free to use or at least free up to a point. I really had gotten to believing this might be worth pursuing so I started the Swedish equivalent of an LLC to run with this. No competitors that was doing this on the mobile platform. Gift card sales is a constantly growing market. E-comm mobile spending is steadily growing. No-one I know wants to get a gift card in the form of a printed email or a text message. And there was no place for stores to sell their gift cards other than through their own physical storefronts and web-shops.
Today (about 2,5 years later) I have started to do freelance consulting development work through another one of my LLCs to get a much better take home pay to be able to fund my family after getting the news of becoming a father. But I now am getting to know what it feels like to know that the amount of hours available to me is the limiting factor of how much I can make in freelancing (if I don't start a consultancy). Now my mobile gift card business is waaay passed its MVC stage and I have not yet launched it into the wild and I have only gotten a few pilot businesses to start with, but they are all super excited about the service. I have several parts to my revenue model to try to maximize the value to both the businesses and the consumers and I have build a entirely new way of presenting these received gift cards in addition to the possibility for consumers to do group purchases without having to send funds to one another after the purchase.
I am now at a stage where I dont really feel I can do much more on the products side, I just have to say "f*ck it" and get out there and sell. But I'm a computer nerd and I have always hated selling but now I'm learning to take real interest in the psychology of sales and the application of it.
So sorry for the long and winding snapshot of my life. I just read the Millionaire Fastlane a few weeks ago and in that realizing that this gift card business might become a golden goose if I act now and treat it well!
An other book I'm on the second read is "$100M Offers" by Alex Hormozi
So.. Hi! I'm Nicklas, and what you just read is basically where I am today, still in the slow lane, but beginning to see a sliver of hope.
All the best to you all!
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