Personal introduction

[ElectricFox]

Hi Fastlaners and Fastlaners-to-be!

I joined this forum in the beginning of this year and wanted to do a proper introduction with all the details that I find relevant but then I kept postponing it. Probably because I was too ambitious. So I decided to follow one of my favorite mantras, "Keep it simple", and prepare a short intro that I can still enrich later.

I'm a Swiss 34 year old developer working from home 100% of the time and my goal is to create a business that will allow me to decouple my revenues from my time by 40. I'm the "creative geek" type, which means I'm great at using my technical skills to do creative stuff (programming apps, 3D printing, video editing, etc.). However, I have zero experience in sales or financial stuff other than I know how to manage my money well. But I love to learn new things and develop new skills!

I have no mortgage, nor children/pets and I'm happily married for 7+ years to my American wife who supports me 100% with my goal. My mother tongue is French.

I want to have my own business since I was around 25 but I had no clue how to go about it. I had a lot of prejudice about it and it always seemed very risky to me. Furthermore, I'm not the seller type so I was not sure if I was really made for it. Furthermore in my late 20s, I felt like I was late in the game (I think it's one of my colleagues who told me that too) so I kind of gave up the idea even though it was still in my mind. I had a lot of "poison pens". Then, I read Unscripted about two years ago (and then later the Great Rat Race Escape ) and it was a big slap in the face for me and it made me see new perspectives and possibilities. It got me excited and I could see more clearly the type of business I would want to do!

I heard of this forum from Unscripted and decided to join so that I could gain insights from other entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs-to-be as well as to share my own insights. And simply to be part of a community with people with whom I share the same (or similar) goals of freedom and independence!

I haven't started any business yet but I write down every idea that I find relevant on a notebook. My objective is to find an CENTS idea by the end of the year that I intend to test following the Lean Startup approach.

I'm happy to be here and I will share more information along the way... And I will gladly answer any questions.

Happy end-of-year holidays everyone and take care!

ElectricFox

 

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[ElectricFox]

Following up on my preliminary intro, here is the list of the few things I tried so far and what I learned:

- In 2014, I created a web app to help school directors to compute students level change based on their semi-annual grades. I got this opportunity by contacting a school director through a teacher friend. We met and I asked what they would like to automate in their school.
--> I sold them the app for $5K and I do regular updates every year, which brings me between $500-3K/year. It's a nice project, but I don't consider it a business.
--> What I learned is that I should have made my app as a subscription model, which would have generated money on a regular basis.

- In 2019, I had this vague idea of making a web app to create visual graphs of people. These graphs could be multi-purpose. For example, for saving information about the people you meet during networking events and describe how they relate to each other or to create a family tree. So I started to develop a prototype...
--> My mistake was that I directly assumed that it was a great idea without doing much research and that I didn't think deeper about the specific problem this would solve, nor did I carefully checked if it corresponded to a real need.
--> As I was developing my prototype, I realized how vague it was and that I was more seduced by my idea than by the value it offered. So I just stopped.

- In 2020, I read Unscripted and it got me excited. I talked about it to a close friend who lives in another country and we decided to meet with her and my wife to brainstorm business ideas.
--> We came up with some ideas that we agreed to follow up with via frequent Zoom meetings.
--> Unfortunately, our friend went through a difficult period of her life and wasn't available much, so the excitement around the project died. We also ended up being unconvinced about our ideas anyway.--> What we did right was that we documented our ideas and managed to meet together to brainstorm. But what we did wrong was that, as soon as we got an idea, we should have found a way to quickly test it and validate if it corresponds to a real need instead of assuming.

- Then, I kept writing down all my new ideas in a notebook and struggled with procrastination and negative thoughts/poison pens for a very long time. I felt lame (and I still do) for being so unproductive and I even felt ashamed to post my introduction on this forum one year later without any result. So I'm working on changing my mindset because it's the main issue that separates me from my dream-realization (freedom).