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Taking a ride in the slow lane -- and it's been great!

Beijing

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After spending several years living a very budgeted existence, last summer I found myself at a crossroads. I'd returned to my country of birth (I normally live in China) to help with a family crisis and although in retrospect, I definitely made the right choice, the decision to come back to Canada for half a year left me with very little start-up capital for a return to what I'd been doing in Beijing. Return to my usual routine (working a few days a week to cover the basic costs of life and spending the rest of my time working on my own business) would have required about $4000 that I didn't have, so I decided to return to full-time work for a little while, just out of necessity.

I put my name out in the right circles and made some people aware that I was willing to accept full-time employment offers. This would have still left me with some time each week to work on my own business and allowed me to build up a little extra cash as well. I knew that getting a fulltime job that paid $50K in Beijing would be easy for me, but what I wasn't expecting was to get several six figure job offers. In the process of working on the development of products for my own business, I'd learned some unusual skills and put together a very creative portfolio and that was exactly what several niche employers were looking for.

I accepted one of the offers and after waiting three months for my work visa to come through, I returned to Beijing in November.

Previous to this new experience, I'd done a good job of scraping by financially. Employers didn't value me especially highly (at least in what they were willing to pay me), so I had to accept the jobs I could get. I'd started working on my own entrepreneurial ideas out of a feeling of necessity. I figured that if no one was going to give me any opportunities, I'd just create my own. This didn't lead immediately to having a thriving business, but it did lead to doing more interesting (and better paying) freelance work for a couple of years and brought me 75% of the way to having my own products to sell.

I'm definitely looking forward to getting back to entrepreneurship at some point in the future, but for the moment, I'm really enjoying life in the slow lane. My job comes with only 7 personal vacation days a year, but with national holidays in China, I get a total of about 4 or 5 weeks off each year. Not very useful during a global pandemic, but I'm finding other ways to make use of this time off, besides travel.

While the job can be a bit tiring and there's some natural irritations that come with working in an office with other people, for the most part, I work with really talented team-members and what we do is really interesting. I don't have the energy to go out every night, but I do something a lot of nights and every weekend is a blast. And I'm always happy to return to work on Mondays, rather than dreading it. When I was working for myself before, I really didn't have much of a social life and was living in a small place that made it really tough to host more than on person at a time, so my passion for hosting house-parties took a hit. The corporate office worker lifestyle has been way better and with a six-figure income, I never need to worry about money.

Of course, as I mentioned, I'm eager to return to developing my own business at some point, but I'm not sure how soon that will be. I'm still carrying some student debt from university, so priority number one is paying that down so that I'll be more free to follow my entrepreneurial dreams in the future. I've paid down $15,000 of debt in the last five months and I'm on course to have it all paid off by April next year. After that, I'll start building a nest egg. If I save half my income for a year (which is no problem, because I can live well on have off what I'm making), I'll have enough money to last me for three years on a budget if I live somewhere affordable, such as south-east Asia. I can't work on my own projects for the moment, since my current job comes with an iron-tight non-compete clause, but that's not stopping me from learning a lot that will be useful for my own products in the future.

Until then, though, I'm really enjoy life in the slow lane. It's been amazing to have a work schedule that allows me to have time for friends and dating and live a comfortable existence in an awesome bachelor pad. Of course, this experience may affect my long term goals. After just several months of work, my division manager surprised me this week with an unexpected 9% raise, so it's also possible that if my salary continues to rise and the right promotion opportunity (or better job offer somewhere else) comes along, I might just opt for a corporate career instead.

Question for the other forum members here: What would a prospective employer need to offer you to make you put your entrepreneurial dreams aside for a while?
 
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kleine2

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Great story. It sounds like a great plan for you to be able to save money and to enjoy your time as well.

I've been in the software industry for 20 years and 10 years as a manager.
Recently certified, my goal now is to build a coaching business which I am really passionate about.

I am now in a process which may lead to a full time offer as a business coach. I will seriously consider that option because it will allow me to gain more coaching experience and to earn a living doing coaching instead of software.
 

Beijing

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I've got an update now that (nearly) two years have passed. I've paid off all my student loan debt and am saving up money for living expenses so that I'll have some runway for completing product development and getting my business on its feet and generating revenue once I finally quit my day job. Since January 2021, I've also been using a portion of my income each month to pay freelancers to do work on my products' development that I don't have the energy for or that I don't have the skills for myself, so I'm moving towards my entrepreneurial goals even as I live in the slow lane.

In a normal world, I probably would have quit my day job already and gone all in on my business ideas. I know for a fact that I can live comfortable in Kuala Lumpur for under $300 a month, including housing costs, as I've done it before pre-COVID, for months at a time. The same would go for just about anywhere in Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia. If travel restrictions weren't in place right now, I'd be able to bounce between a few of these countries on 3-month tourist visas for a year or more and could easily live in on about $4000 a year until I had good revenue coming in or decided to take my business idea out behind the barn and shoot it. I live in Beijing currently, so these countries would be the obvious place to go spend a year or more if I wanted to live on the cheap, since they are right in my own backyard, geographically speaking.

Being in the middle of a global pandemic makes this strategy riskier. Even with SEA apparently starting to open up (probably this month for many), heading somewhere that might end up somewhat locked down internally even if I can get in on a tourist visa, is not an exciting prospect. At least here in Beijing, the virus numbers have been very limited and life has been comfortable and good for living a balanced and healthy lifestyle due to no city-wide lockdowns for nearly two years now.

I've got my apartment leased until the beginning of July, so I'll be making a decision by May about whether to pull the ripcord and focus full-time on my own business starting from July or stick with my day job for another six months. Definitely won't be putting off making my move past January 2023, but sticking with the day job for another six months will mean having another $12,000+ saved up, plus a bunch more work done by my freelancers in the meantime. That extra $12,000 will mean a lot more runway, plus money for online marketing as well, so it may be a shortcut to a faster fast-lane in the long run.

Although the pandemic has thrown a monkey wrench in my original plans, having the freelancers I've hired continually working on further developing my products (including some new products that I wouldn't have had the budget or time to get started on otherwise) has been really good for having a sense of purpose in life. If I was doing nothing more than the corporate grind, I probably would have lost my mind by this point with nothing to look forward to but more of the same.

All in all, putting the brakes on moving into a fast lane lifestyle, while maintaining fast lane perspective, has been a positive thing. By employing over a dozen freelancers in the last year, I've gotten the chance to build experience hiring and managing people. For a lot of the work, I would need freelancers for anyway (rather than one or two full-timers), since things like recording content about personal workplace experiences for some of the training videos that are part of the products I'm building, are things that would take a while to do even if I was working on this full-time. The reality is that freelancers tend to have one or two primary gigs (or even a full-time job) that they need to prioritize, so they squeeze in the smaller gigs when they have the time and energy, and sometimes they don't complete any work for a few weeks at a time. So, being gainfully employed at a stable job while I have no choice but to wait for freelancer work to be completed takes away the stress I would be experiencing if I had a tight timeline and was waiting on crucial components from freelancers who simply needed to work at their own pace.

The other benefit of staying in the slow lane while having a fast lane mentality, for the time being, is that I'm getting paid to build the skills I'll need for my own business. Training videos is a core part of one of my future company's key product areas, and my current job role (which changed last June) has allowed me to do that same type of work and build my skillset in that area while getting paid to learn as I go and make mistakes at my employer's expense. For example, I'm learning new things (out of necessity) about rendering videos of the best quality with the lowest possible file size, which is very important if selling and distributing an online training product. Similarly, for those training videos, I'm getting to practice mixing PPT slides with recorded live training footage to create a more engaging learning experience.

Doing this as part of my current slow lane job has been giving me a lot of ideas (that will save me wasting time experimenting later and will also result in a better-quality product) about how to structure things on the screen for professional development training videos. For example, while PPT slides traditionally have dimensions designed to fit well on a screen, it actually makes sense to have two sets of dimensions for PPT slides for including in corporate training videos, as a PPT slide that fills only one side of the screen (either the right side or left side) is very useful, given that it'll leave room for video content on the other side of the screen. If it's live training footage, the presenter usually is standing, which means that a portrait frame of the recorded video is best. At my current job, I've simply put normal dimension PPT slides in the corner of the screen on top of the video footage content (so that trainees can watch the recorded training session while reading the accompanying PPT slides), but this makes them really small and hard to read, so it's hardly optimal.

Anyway, if you've read all of this, thank you, as I'm sure this is all pretty boring for anyone other than myself. I've written this update mainly for myself to read a few months down the road, but if anyone has any comments or thoughts, they'd be appreciated.
 

Beijing

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Six weeks have gone by and that puts me six weeks closer to the savings goal that will have me set up nicely to quit my job and start working on my own business full-time.

The most exciting part of the last six weeks has been the last two weeks. I hired a team of freelance graphic designers to work on some aspects of the product I plan to sell when I launch my business and teaming up with them to create some features that I lack the ability to do well myself has been incredibly inspiring.

Not having to do stuff that I'm poor at has reduced how much finishing the last 20% of my product feels like a grind. The nice thing about these graphic designers is that they can do in one hour what would take me 3-5 if I did it myself (and they still create something more visually memorable in that one hour).

I'd originally estimated that a big portion of the remaining 20% of product development would be a 3-4 month grind AFTER I quit my job. However, employing a few graphic designers for around 5-10 hours a week each has me on track to have the that whole portion of the final project finished in about 2 months. This will allow me to hit the ground running and I'll only need to bang out the remaining 5%, which will mainly consisting of assembling the digital files composing each product in the full product line.

There's also a product area that I was NOT planning to include in my Minimum Viable Product when I released the first version, but it would add a ton of value and I've realized now that by working with freelancers for 10-20 hours, that entire product area could be finished as well.

Managing the members of the graphic designer team and overseeing the projects I've assigned to each of them has also led to me having some structure with which to finalize to some important product development decisions that I'd been putting off, because they didn't feel urgent. It's also gotten me excited enough about the product again that I've felt motivated enough to use some of my free time to finish off some half completed produce development tasks that I'd put temporarily shelved years ago and never gotten back to finishing.

I'm now down to just four and a half months before it'll make sense financially to quit my day job. Those remaining months can't go by fast enough. I'm quite excited about the prospect of working on my own product every day, instead of rotting away in a corporate office, feeling only half-fulfilled.
 
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Beijing

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Things went a little differently than expected since my last post about 10.5 months ago. Three months before I would have had enough money saved to quit my job, Beijing city got hit with a COVID outbreak and my company got shut down by the government for two months. My employer decided to just stop paying us for that period of time, so instead of banking a bunch of money, I ended up going backwards.

I kept going, though, and by October was again three months away from having enough saved to quit my job. But then in November, the same thing happened. Government shut down my employer's offices due to another big COVID outbreak, and we didn't get paid for the next three months.

However, all of this just freed me up to work on my product. I got four months of solid work done (spent one of the five months off work sick with and then recovering from COVID). The remaining work ended up being more than I anticipated, but with some major milestones out of the way, I'd estimate that there is now only two months of full-time work remaining to finish my product.

I have to save up a bit again now before I quit, but I'll do so in either two or four months. If I quit after two months, I won't have much of a marketing budget, but if I quit after four months, I'll have a good nest egg saved to run Google ads and utilize some other paid advertising platforms.

Although it's a bit disappointing to have had my plans delayed in this way, it actually worked out OK. Although I couldn't afford to quit my job and focus 100% on my business, I did get to do 4 months worth of full-time product development in the last 10 months, so that's a major step forward. The tasks that I passed on to freelance graphic designers ended up taking about 4X longer than anticipated, so it also ended up being wise to just keep working my day job and getting paid till at least January, because freelancers tend to work at their own pace and I felt that rushing them wouldn't get the best results in terms of quality, anyway. If I'd quit my job as original planned in July 2022, I would have just ended up waiting six months for work to be done by my freelancers and that would have been insanely frustrating.

However, those projects are all finished now, so I'll definitely be quitting the day job one way or another in this half of 2023, so just a few more months to go and I'll be on to bigger and better things.
 

Beijing

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Since returning to work full-time, I've been super eager to get out of the slowlane and into the fastlane. As of January 1st, for a particular core feature of my flagship product, there were 893 components still unfinished out of the 1,837 key components required.

I'd done 944 of the components a few years ago, before I shelved my fastlane project and took advantage of the good paying slowlane job I wrote about in my original post in this thread.

There is no meaningful MVP that could be developed without completing all 1,837 components, so it simply is a progress bottleneck that I absolutely need to clear.

Since the beginning of January, I've done 857 of the remaining 893 necessary components, leaving only 36 still to do. Of those 857 that I've finished since the 1st of January, I've actually done about half since returning to work 3 weeks ago.

So, despite being back in work full-time, my productivity just using evenings and weekends has been comparable to my productivity when I wasn't working (in January) and had every day free to work on these tasks.

I doubt I've ever been this truly motivated in my life. I'm not riding a wave of positive feelings or doing anything to pump myself up. I'm just tired of feeling trapped and getting this work done is my most likely ticket to more control over my life, as well as increased lifestyle flexibility. I'm not using every free moment to work on this. I'm making a point of leaving time for my relationships and remaining in good shape to be able to be productive at my day job. But I'm also making sure to pencil in specific time each week to make progress on this remaining work.

I'll have the remaining 36 components finished by next weekend, and then I'll be able to start work on assembling an initial MVP (such as producing the basic essential user documentation). My product is digital, so putting the pieces together basically just means organizing thousands of files to be easy to access by customers in an online environment.
 

Subsonic

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Since returning to work full-time, I've been super eager to get out of the slowlane and into the fastlane. As of January 1st, for a particular core feature of my flagship product, there were 893 components still unfinished out of the 1,837 key components required.

I'd done 944 of the components a few years ago, before I shelved my fastlane project and took advantage of the good paying slowlane job I wrote about in my original post in this thread.

There is no meaningful MVP that could be developed without completing all 1,837 components, so it simply is a progress bottleneck that I absolutely need to clear.

Since the beginning of January, I've done 857 of the remaining 893 necessary components, leaving only 36 still to do. Of those 857 that I've finished since the 1st of January, I've actually done about half since returning to work 3 weeks ago.

So, despite being back in work full-time, my productivity just using evenings and weekends has been comparable to my productivity when I wasn't working (in January) and had every day free to work on these tasks.

I doubt I've ever been this truly motivated in my life. I'm not riding a wave of positive feelings or doing anything to pump myself up. I'm just tired of feeling trapped and getting this work done is my most likely ticket to more control over my life, as well as increased lifestyle flexibility. I'm not using every free moment to work on this. I'm making a point of leaving time for my relationships and remaining in good shape to be able to be productive at my day job. But I'm also making sure to pencil in specific time each week to make progress on this remaining work.

I'll have the remaining 36 components finished by next weekend, and then I'll be able to start work on assembling an initial MVP (such as producing the basic essential user documentation). My product is digital, so putting the pieces together basically just means organizing thousands of files to be easy to access by customers in an online environment.
Man this thread is awesome.
I'm really curious to see what will become off your project.
I wish you the very best.
 
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Kevin88660

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Things went a little differently than expected since my last post about 10.5 months ago. Three months before I would have had enough money saved to quit my job, Beijing city got hit with a COVID outbreak and my company got shut down by the government for two months. My employer decided to just stop paying us for that period of time, so instead of banking a bunch of money, I ended up going backwards.

I kept going, though, and by October was again three months away from having enough saved to quit my job. But then in November, the same thing happened. Government shut down my employer's offices due to another big COVID outbreak, and we didn't get paid for the next three months.

However, all of this just freed me up to work on my product. I got four months of solid work done (spent one of the five months off work sick with and then recovering from COVID). The remaining work ended up being more than I anticipated, but with some major milestones out of the way, I'd estimate that there is now only two months of full-time work remaining to finish my product.

I have to save up a bit again now before I quit, but I'll do so in either two or four months. If I quit after two months, I won't have much of a marketing budget, but if I quit after four months, I'll have a good nest egg saved to run Google ads and utilize some other paid advertising platforms.

Although it's a bit disappointing to have had my plans delayed in this way, it actually worked out OK. Although I couldn't afford to quit my job and focus 100% on my business, I did get to do 4 months worth of full-time product development in the last 10 months, so that's a major step forward. The tasks that I passed on to freelance graphic designers ended up taking about 4X longer than anticipated, so it also ended up being wise to just keep working my day job and getting paid till at least January, because freelancers tend to work at their own pace and I felt that rushing them wouldn't get the best results in terms of quality, anyway. If I'd quit my job as original planned in July 2022, I would have just ended up waiting six months for work to be done by my freelancers and that would have been insanely frustrating.

However, those projects are all finished now, so I'll definitely be quitting the day job one way or another in this half of 2023, so just a few more months to go and I'll be on to bigger and better things.
Do you intend to find investors?
 

hyperreal

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Thanks for sharing this great story and looking forward to next posts about your journey. Wish you all the best.

You story shows well how slowlane is very sensitive to lockdowns and pandemics. The fastlane is more and more becoming the only way to live rather than just a better way.

My The Millionaire Fastlane copy is "updated for the bitcoin era" @MJ DeMarco maybe an idea for the new revision to make it "updated for the lockdown era" :) Half-serious half-joking but it would be interesting to discuss how to design a business resilient to this type of situations. On top of obvious things like commandment of control and online business model.
 

Beijing

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Do you intend to find investors?

Not until I've launch an MVP and have clear numbers on the value of the business. WIthout some sales to demonstrate its potential worth, the valuation that I'd be able to get investment at just wouldn't be worth it. Bootstrapping the business has slowed down the process, but it's also been more cash efficient than doing it faster (speeding up certain processes would place a multiple on the cost of product development). Investment might force the business to grow faster and bigger that would really make sense for the market it is in. Staying cash efficient means that there won't be a high level of pressure to quickly achieve specific benchmarks and there will be room to make careful, steady decisions, with time to collect good data prior to taking any calculated risks. The success of this product will largely be based on maintain credibility with the end user group, which means that focusing too much on growth (and profits) could alienate the core customer group, anyway.

Based on the type of product that it is, I'm guessing that doing a friends & family investment round may be the most that would be needed for early stage capital, and even that might not be necessary. I have a marketing strategy (partnering with very specific potential product evangelists) that will mean smaller initial profits for the first couple years, but also not require an investment budget. The lower early years profits might be worth owning the business outright in the end.

Personally, I'd rather utilize equity to bring on some late stage founders (someone to expand the technical side of the business where most of the growth potential is, and possibly someone to focus on Youtube marketing content), than trade equity for funding. Giving a percentage of the business (vested based on specific metrics) to the right early stage contributors would probably do more to grow the business than the sort of money I'd be likely to attract at an early stage from investors.
 
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Beijing

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Due to internal improvements in some key areas, things have been a lot less stressful at my day job since we returned to work four weeks ago. One benefit of this is that I am not completely drained by the end of the day on Fridays. This has allowed me to remain somewhat productive in working on my product during weekends.

The last two days were particularly productive. I solved a product development problem in just five hours that I'd had no idea how to even approach for several years.

I also took another shot at designing a product sales website (something I gave up on for the moment four years ago, as weeks of effort at that time did not result in a website that looked nearly professional enough to be credible). In about 10 hours of work over the weekend, I came up with a design that I was very happy with. My cleaner and visually appealing than my last attempt. My graphic design skills have definitely improved in the last few years.

If I'm able to maintain my current level of weekly productivity (and with a little help from my small team of freelancers), I might actually be able to achieve a product launch previous to quitting my day job, which would be good, because it would help me avoid the risks that come with quitting prior to having any sales.
 

Beijing

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Finally gave my landlord notice that I'd be moving out. On June 10th, I'll be leaving Beijing to go live somewhere cheaper for a while in south-east Asia while I focus on my business full-time for the next few months.

Going to put in my notice at my day job in early May. I was apprehensive previously about such a big decision previously, but now it feels like the move I have to make.

No more waiting.
 

Beijing

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The last several weeks have been full-steam ahead on both product development and creating the product website.

Rather than make the website my main project, I've been systematically working on it when I'm in the mood, but the bulk of my free time each week is going into finishing the product itself.

I had a particularly encouraging interaction two weeks ago. I showed some samples of my product to two coworkers and they both immediately demanded that they wanted buy the product and even suggested a price about twice what I was planning to sell it for. I'd just shown them the samples as part of a professional development training activity, and definitely wasn't pitching the product, so their response was very helpful in giving me some assurance that I'm in the process of finishing something that solves a real problem.
 
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circleme

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I had a particularly encouraging interaction two weeks ago. I showed some samples of my product to two coworkers and they both immediately demanded that they wanted buy the product and even suggested a price about twice what I was planning to sell it for. I'd just shown them the samples as part of a professional development training activity, and definitely wasn't pitching the product, so their response was very helpful in giving me some assurance that I'm in the process of finishing something that solves a real problem.
I don't want to be a dick, but...

In the course of product validation (I am currently in this stage myself), it is not necessarily the most sensible thing to ask your immediate environment (colleagues, friends, family).

1. If they are people who like you, their answer will always be somewhat biased. They're probably not going to say "Hey, your product sucks" right to your face. Maybe they think it sucks, but they wouldn't tell you that because they like you and don't want to offend you.

2. It rarely corresponds to the actual target group

I've talked to my brother myself with my idea, until a few hours into the conversation I realized how pointless my question was in the first place, since he matches 0 of my target audience and even if he did, he certainly wouldn't have given it the full thumbs up in terms of suitability/non-suitability. An actual, potential customer would, however, 100%, because he has to pay for it at the end of the day.
 

Beijing

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I don't want to be a dick, but...

Being honest and helpful isn't the same thing as being a dick.

But just to respond to your comments...

In the course of product validation (I am currently in this stage myself), it is not necessarily the most sensible thing to ask your immediate environment (colleagues, friends, family).

1. If they are people who like you, their answer will always be somewhat biased. They're probably not going to say "Hey, your product sucks" right to your face. Maybe they think it sucks, but they wouldn't tell you that because they like you and don't want to offend you.

That's true, but these two individuals did not know that I'd made the product. They just assumed I'd purchased it somewhere myself and asked for the website address and wanted to know how much I'd paid for it.

When I told them that it wasn't a product that was available for sale yet, just something I'd worked on briefly as a freelancer a while ago before my current job (I don't ever tell anyone at work that I'm working on my own side-business, because I'm in a key management role and if any of the 120 people I oversee were to get the impression that I was planning on quitting in the next three months, it would cause a massive disruption to my department's effectiveness) and that the company that had development the materials wasn't planning to release the product until this summer.

One of them immediately begged me to contact the company and ask if they could buy the product in its current state, telling me that they'd happily pay $400 for it right then and there. The other agreed, saying, "I'd pay $400 for it too. I need this."

2. It rarely corresponds to the actual target group

I've talked to my brother myself with my idea, until a few hours into the conversation I realized how pointless my question was in the first place, since he matches 0 of my target audience and even if he did, he certainly wouldn't have given it the full thumbs up in terms of suitability/non-suitability. An actual, potential customer would, however, 100%, because he has to pay for it at the end of the day.

The good news is that both of these individuals, who I'd only met once before that training session, are literally members of the target user group for my product. They make a living doing the thing that this product makes easier.



I did the product validation over four years ago. I first did end-user testing to develop a prototype over a two year period. The product was something I needed for my own job at that point, so initially I was purely developing it for my own use. I was a corporate trainer at the time and my product gamified learning for what is normally a really boring HR training topic that employees everywhere still hate.

Once I realized that it might have potential beyond just my own use, I put up ads on an industry website describing the product and had numerous potential buyers (both business owners and freelancers) contact me after reading one of my ads.

I'd show them some of the prototypes I'd been using for my own work and tell them that a finished version would be ready in three months (turned out to be a much bigger project in the end, but at that time, I thought three months would do it). Many told me that it was exactly what they needed, but to meet their customer's needs, the product needed a few more essential features. One potential buyer, after looking at my prototypes for two minutes, offered me $5,000 to utilize my technology to create a similar proprietary solution for his business. So, I went to work for him for four months and he ended up paying me about $7,500 in the end to create and implement the solution he wanted.

I took what I learned from that experience and redesigned my product to not only continue to solve the initial problem I'd been solving for myself with my early prototypes, but to also be a robust one-size-fits-all solution that would have also solved the problem of the guy who paid me the $7,500 to create a specific solution for him.

Last summer, with the full product finally taking shape thanks to the hard work of several graphic designers who helped me finish some key features, I did another round of product validation with potential buyers and the most common phrase I'd hear after a 10 minute product demo was "how much?"

So, I feel comfortable with where I am at in the product validation process.
 

Beijing

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On Monday, I'll be one month away from putting in my notice at work and two months away from my last day altogether. Some recent frustrating situations at work (being told to tell lies to cover up for other people, among other things) has resulted in a lot of stress for me, but I took a long walk today and thought through a plan for how to channel that frustrating and stress into productivity, while remaining balanced and healthy.
  • Today is a holiday, but instead of working on my product/business, I'm going to spend some much needed time with some friends, as staying positive and healthy is what I need most right now.
  • This weekend I'm going to go on a two day product website marathon. I use the term "marathon" loosely here, but basically I'll put in 5-8 hours per day into building out some of the core product description pages. On at least Saturday night, I'll get out of my place for dinner, because I know that I'll be more productive on Sunday if I get a change of scenery Saturday evening. I was looking at the progress on my website today and I feel good about what I've accomplished so far and how the three pages I've mostly finished look, but I also realized I'd feel much less stressed about some of the situations at my day job if I got several more pages (mostly) finished by Monday.
  • Two weeks and and three days from now, I'm using some accrued vacation days and national stutory holidays, to give myself a 16 day stretch of holiday time just to work on my product. These 16 days will give me the opportunity to start putting my product's digital pieces together in an accessible format and also do some final work on some necessary components that I haven't gotten to yet.
Towards the end of those 16 days, I'll start putting some thinking into what my plan is for the first 90 days after my last day at my day job. Once I'm free to work on my business full-time, I'll have five primary task areas:
  • Finish any uncompleted product development tasks.
  • Start contacting Youtube influencers in my niche to discuss ideas for affiliate marketing. (I'm currently monitoring several influencers on my wishlist and compiling data on how many quickly their videos get views on average).
  • Begin making my own marketing videos for my own YT channel. These will be a mix of product demonstration videos and just general helpful videos to hopefully attract more visitors to my channel.
  • Start writing a blog on my product website for SEO purposes.
  • Arrange and deliver free webinars involving topics peripheral to my product to attract more eyeballs.
Since it's just going to be me working on this going forward (I'm going to stop giving work to my freelancers until I have revenue coming in), I'll have to be very strategic about what I put my time into, so thinking through a plan in advance will definitely help with being efficient and smart about what I end up prioritizing first.

Really looking forward to the next two months being over with and being finally able to pursue my dream full-time.
 
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Last edited:

Roli

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On Monday, I'll be one month away from putting in my notice at work and two months away from my last day altogether. Some recent frustrating situations at work (being told to tell lies to cover up for other people, among other things) has resulted in a lot of stress for me, but I took a long walk today and thought through a plan for how to channel that frustrating and stress into productivity, while remaining balanced and healthy.
  • Today is a holiday, but instead of working on my product/business, I'm going to spend some much needed time with some friends, as staying positive and healthy is what I need most right now.
  • This weekend I'm going to go on a two day product website marathon. I use the term "marathon" loosely here, but basically I'll put in 5-8 hours per day into building out some of the core product description pages. On at least Saturday night, I'll get out of my place for dinner, because I know that I'll be more productive on Sunday if I get a change of scenery Saturday evening. I was looking at the progress on my website today and I feel good about what I've accomplished so far and how the three pages I've mostly finished look, but I also realized I'd feel much less stressed about some of the situations at my day job if I got several more pages (mostly) finished by Monday.
  • Two weeks and and three days from now, I'm using some accrued vacation days and national stutory holidays, to give myself a 16 day stretch of holiday time just to work on my product. These 16 days will give me the opportunity to start putting my product's digital pieces together in an accessible format and also do some final work on some necessary components that I haven't gotten to yet.
Towards the end of those 16 days, I'll start putting some thinking into what my plan is for the first 90 days after my last day at my day job. Once I'm free to work on my business full-time, I'll have five primary task areas:
  • Finish any uncompleted product development tasks.
  • Start contacting Youtube influencers in my niche to discuss ideas for affiliate marketing. (I'm currently monitoring several influencers on my wishlist and compiling data on how many quickly their videos get views on average).
  • Begin making my own marketing videos for my own YT channel. These will be a mix of product demonstration videos and just general helpful videos to hopefully attract more visitors to my channel.
  • Start writing a blog on my product website for SEO purposes.
  • Arrange and deliver free webinars involving topics peripheral to my product to attract more eyeballs.
Since it's just going to be me working on this going forward (I'm going to stop giving work to my freelancers until I have revenue coming in), I'll have to be very strategic about what I put my time into, so thinking through a plan in advance will definitely help with being efficient and smart about what I end up prioritizing first.

Really looking forward to the next two months being over with and being finally able to pursue my dream full-time.

Great thread, it shows how the slowlane can fund your fastlane business, it also highlights how lack of control can threaten the slowlane.

I'm rooting for you and I can't wait what for your next chapter.

My only advice would be to think of a catchier title for the thread, as I think a lot of people are in a similar situation to you and would get value out of this.

Who knows? Maybe @MJ DeMarco will make this a gold thread one day.
 

BizyDad

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Following. This is the first time I read a thread and thought, "I wonder if this guy will let me invest". Hahaha.

I'm 99% not serious, but it's a compliment all the same.
 

Beijing

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On Monday, I'll be one month away from putting in my notice at work and two months away from my last day altogether.

Two weeks and and three days from now, I'm using some accrued vacation days and national stutory holidays, to give myself a 16 day stretch of holiday time just to work on my product. These 16 days will give me the opportunity to start putting my product's digital pieces together in an accessible format and also do some final work on some necessary components that I haven't gotten to yet.

It feels like months since my last post in this thread on April 5th. The past 18 days have creeped by very slowly, but I finally made it to my 16 day vacation. The last two weeks in particular were especially draining. A lot of negative circumstances at my day job left me reduced to just focusing on getting enough sleep and staying positive on a daily basis. Yesterday, most of the final day of work before the start of my vacation was spent in a really stupid meeting where my boss directed our team to make up numbers out of thin air (that were of course nowhere near accurate) on formal regional audit reports that go to headquarters to make her look good.

She then lectured us on how we needed to be prepared to defend the numbers when headquarters (inevitably) did proper data collection themselves for their own audits and discovered discrepancies.

She signed none of the documents with the fake numbers herself, ordering us do so instead, so that she could blame us later if she needed to.

I can't get out of this job soon enough.

The timing is perfect, though. I'll need today off to just recuperate from the last two weeks, but tomorrow I'll be jumping into my big product development push and the desire to escape my work situation is definitely going to fuel a lot of productivity. Fortunately, despite the stressful working conditions in the last few weeks, I still came up with a solid strategic plan on how to fill several remaining product development gaps with one tool instead of several different ones, which will reduce 50-100 hours of the remaining work to finish Version 1.0.

I'm really excited to be able to forget about my day job for the next two weeks and focus solely on my own product.

When I get back to work after my holiday, I'll wait three days till my next monthly salary payment is in the bank (so that my recent pay raise doesn't get stolen -- it's happened to other people) and then put in my 30 days notice.
 
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Beijing

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I've been pushing hard for the past 12 days of my vacation. I gave myself a weekend, but otherwise I've been putting in 7-8 hour days, which for me, working from home without a boss hanging over my shoulder, is a couple hours more than I've been successful at doing in the past.

This two week holiday has been a bit of test of my current ability to self-motivate and I am now confident that when I quit my job (my last day should be June 9th), I won't waste the opportunity created by not working a day job anymore.

Version 1.0 won't be finished by the end of this week, but I'll be within spitting distance. With four more days to go before I need to go back to work at my day job for one more month, I'll have enough time to finish off some key goals and there won't be many tasks left at that point. Maybe one to two more months of work after that and I'll be ready to launch, including having my website up and ready to go.

I spent the last two months counting down the days till my final day of work and the weeks just crawled by at a snails pace. But I know that when I go back to work on Monday, with the finished line in sight, the last month is just going to fly by.

This may be immature. but I am looking forward to giving my boss the news that I am leaving. A month-and-a-half ago, she gave me a miniscule raise (kinda an insulting amount) and some long lecture for about 40 minutes about how big of a raise it was. I think that it'll be quite a shock to her when I announce that I'm quitting.

Forcing everyone to participate in a collective delusion is her specialty and due to this job being the best pathway to achieving my goals, I just ended up learning to put up with all sorts of horrifying behaviour. But now that I've got my ducks in a row, no delusion of hers can stop me from doing is quitting. It's going to be very satisfying to finally do what I've been fantasizing about doing for about a year-and-a-half-now.
 
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Roli

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I've been pushing hard for the past 12 days of my vacation. I gave myself a weekend, but otherwise I've been putting in 7-8 hour days, which for me, working from home without a boss hanging over my shoulder, is a couple hours more than I've been successful at doing in the past.

This two week holiday has been a bit of test of my current ability to self-motivate and I am now confident that when I quit my job (my last day should be June 9th), I won't waste the opportunity created by not working a day job anymore.

Version 1.0 won't be finished by the end of this week, but I'll be within spitting distance. With four more days to go before I need to go back to work at my day job for one more month, I'll have enough time to finish off some key goals and there won't be many tasks left at that point. Maybe one to two more months of work after that and I'll be ready to launch, including having my website up and ready to go.

I spent the last two months counting down the days till my final day of work and the weeks just crawled by at a snails pace. But I know that when I go back to work on Monday, with the finished line in sight, the last month is just going to fly by.

This may be immature. but I am looking forward to giving my boss the news that I am leaving. A month-and-a-half ago, she gave me a miniscule raise (kinda an insulting amount) and some long lecture for about 40 minutes about how big of a raise it was. I think that it'll be quite a shock to her when I announce that I'm quitting.

Forcing everyone to participate in a collective delusion is her specialty and due to this job being the best pathway to achieving my goals, I just ended up learning to put up with all sorts of horrifying behaviour. But now that I've got my ducks in a row, no delusion of hers can stop me from doing is quitting. It's going to be very satisfying to finally do what I've been fantasizing about doing for about a year-and-a-half-now.

Awesome, I'm so rooting for you! Can't wait to read the next episode.
 

pickeringmt

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In 2019 I got out on my own for the first time. Before that everything was a side hustle. I spent the year slowly going broke, raising my 2 kids in a tiny 2 bedroom apartment. At the end of that year I was in a car accident and my car was totalled. Insurance paid out about half of what I had bought my vehicle for less than 2 years earlier and I had maybe $3k in the bank. I was pretty much screwed. I had to get a job.

It was one of the worst feelings in my life. After everything, I had failed at pretty much the only dream I have had in decades. I got a good job with a marketing agency, but about 2 months in covid happened and I went to getting paid about 60% of my salary. Since it was salary, the work didn't really change.

I was there for about 1.5 years and I have to admit it was good for me. It made me let go of caring about what I wanted. I learned a ton and grew a lot, and that was all that mattered. And getting paid I guess.

If I fail again, I'll get another job tomorrow. And then save up, try again, and fail again if I have to. Everyone says they will "never work for anyone else again." I'll do whatever it takes to put a roof over my kids' head and food on the table. Do I want to work for someone else? No. Will I? Sure. I will never stop building my own thing, even if I have to work for someone else to make that possible.
 
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PC123

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Today's the day I put in my 30-day notice at work.

I've been fantasizing routinely about this day for a year and a ha
Congrads! It's a great feeling.
 

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Beijing

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Congrats!

Was there an impetus? Sales? Preorders? Or are you burning the boats?!

1. I needed to get out of my current job ASAP (for a variety of reasons). If I wasn't quitting to launch my business, I'd be aggressively job hunting instead.

2. I have enough money saved up for at least 6 months of living expenses. I'm fine with job hunting again. I'd just rather do that 4-5 months down the road, after my product will be finished and I've had time to do plenty of SEO work and create a good amount of Youtube marketing content to drive traffic to my website.

With the product finished and the marketing channels in place, if I do take another job, it'll be easier to grow the business on the side. If I tried to finish my product while still working a job, it would take up to a year just to have the MVP completed. I've been working on it most weekends and often evenings since February and it's just too far a bridge if I'm not working on it full-time for a while. If I just take some time off from working, I can finish the product in about 2 months instead.

3. I've put (portions of) my product in front of a good number of members of the target user group and many have offered me money on the spot (some rather aggressively), so I feel comfortable about the current level of product-market fit and I believe there is a strong potential of being able to get enough sales coming in within half a year to pay myself a basic salary that can cover my living expenses as I build the business further.
 

Beijing

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I made it! Yesterday was my last day of work at my day job. I'm spending the weekend resolving my affairs here in Beijing and on Monday I fly off to see family for the first time since the initial COVID outbreak. A week from now, I'll be focused full-time on getting my fledgling business up and running.
 

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