The last few months certainly hasn’t been what was expected. My day job started consuming a significant portion of my waking hours as my team worked to finish a two year project of replacing the company’s ERP system. I have, until three weeks ago, been putting in 70-90 hour work weeks to get the team through the project and launched successfully. It launched successfully on May 10th,and after a couple of weeks stabilizing things and cleaning up some loose ends,I’m finding myself back on the Startup trail.
While I didn’t write about it since I was buried myself, my developer counterpart had given up in February, which is about the same time I started dumping ridiculous hours into the day job. He has been having too much difficulty context switching, being creative all day and then working on different problems in the evening, so this has been weighing on me as I think about the best way to get started again. I’ve lost my artist and my developer, so limitations abound.
I did gain a new team member, however, which will be harder to lose than the others – my wife. She was a stay at home mom for the first several years of our marriage. We had our first kid a year after being married. Once the kids were all in full time school, she went back to school and got a degree in nursing. She’s been working as a nurse the last few years and loves being a nurse, but hates the bureaucracy and problems that come from working for other people. A few weeks ago, we went away for a few days to discuss our next move.
Without the dev, software is out of the picture for now. While I had a plan on getting started with the fitness company without a dev, that doesn’t really interest my wife; in order for this to work, it needs to be something that we’re both passionate about. We discussed ideas that she has, other ideas that I’ve had, and settled on something we are both excited about. While it represents a significant shift, and much of the material I had already put together will need to be redone, it is the right thing for the long run and has the best chance of success.
The idea that we’re moving forward with is a travel platform to help travelers with specific destinations as well as other entrepreneurs working to build travel blogs, services, and companies. The first is a prerequisite to the second in the way we are planning to do this, and it can be done with no developer. We will be able to do everything we need in the foreseeable future to prove our concept without writing any significant amount of code. If we do need any, it will be a small amount that I will be able to handle.
There are tons of travel bloggers out there trying to travel the world while writing about adventures. The space is very crowded (who wouldn’t love to get paid to travel the world?) so this is not what we are trying to do. We will embark on building a site and eventual platform that will help these entrepreneurs on their journeys, which also fits in with this blog in a way.
I’m really a bit disheartened that the fitness thing fell apart… again, and that I couldn’t make that work, but looking at history, many failed multiple times before landing on something that worked. What’s important is to learn from failures and mistakes, adapt based off those learnings, and don’t stop moving forward. Those have been common keys to success of some of the greatest people the world has seen.
What are you doing to keep moving forward?