To make up for the missing social interaction I play football with friends, do some consultancy jobs on the side and I help where I can with my son’s football club.
This really is my dream job and I enjoy it thoroughly. I have no problems staying motivated and every day I have loads of inspiration.
The moment I lose motivation will be a sign for me to sell everything and start something new. I ran an online marketing company before this and that was really exhausting for an introvert like me. Selling that company was the best decision I ever made, apart from marrying my wife.
Did you quit work to start this, or did you manage to work around your day job?
I get that it’s not for everyone but I grew up on a farm so I kind of got used to the quietness early on I guess.
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I only learn when I have a project in mind that I want to do. No matter if it’s work on or around my house, creating an app or designing something like a logo or interior. Then I just start. Walk into a wall. Stop. Look for learning material or inspiration. Start over.
Reiterate. Learn more. Reiterate.
I’m not easily frustrated by failure, starting over or general lack of progress. If I have an interesting goal I just keep going. It might not be the most efficient way, but it’s how I learn best.
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There is no magic bullet. It's a combination of inspiration, motivation and perseverance. Example: I spent 1 year learning to built an app in Swift (together with a friend, one evening every two weeks), then we decided to ditch most of what we learned and start over in Flutter, knowing that it would take us another year and I just don't care. I'll get there eventually.
The hardest part of building this business is to keep motivated for a relatively long period of time. I'm still early in this startup journey. This is only the 2nd year of me working full-time on Listen Notes.
I think it would be helpful to surround yourself with like-minded people (online or offline) -- we are social animals. Indie Hackers is pretty good: https://www.indiehackers.com/
I live in San Francisco and I used to work for companies, so at least I can often hang out with some friends/former coworkers who are doing startups or working in tiny startups.
In my coworker space, people from different companies rarely talk to each other...
You managed to pull me away from my previous preference, player.fm. Good job!
What you gain is the flexibility to control e.g. which extensions you want to run, and exactly how you want to set it up. How important that is really depends on what you want to do.
We just made a Twitter recently, but it has all the links: https://twitter.com/ih_worldwide
Dedicate a given day of the month or week for all your meetings so scheduling is simpler.
Chase invoices on the same date every month, chase all invoices that are overdue by some threshold you have set. Just follow the rule, and chase using a template. Perhaps even code the first few chases into an automated system.
Try to avoid customized proposals, use templates for many things. I agree this one is hard.
Managing employees, you have to consider each employee is a force multiplier. The idea here is to invest a day to get a week or similar.
Overall, you need to just invest a limited time into each decision. After that time, go with what feels best even if it isn't perfect and move on. I find the same thing hard myself.
Especially when you think "this all works great, but would still work equally great with another human or two here."
I'll see if I can clean it up and finish it though; if you have any particular questions you'd like to see included (selfish: so I can feel like it's less braggy and more interesting), I'd love to hear them. Contact info is on profile if you don't want to derail this thread. :)
https://github.com/pushcx/barnacl.es https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters
Sure, you can do it with friends etc. But at some point you just become menace asking them to think about your stuff so much.
One man show / sole proprietorship is great, but its bad for family life. It's 24x7. Atleast thats how I saw my dad, dining room was the company meeting room and we all are unpaid company "helps",assisting our Dad support the family. This is the main thing that holds me back from being an entrepreneur (sole proprietorship 2.0).
at another space i find people are more social. they organize events, coding workshops, even cooking classes, occasionally they cook meals. there is a fully stocked kitchen that everyone can use whenever they like. just pay for materials used. people often go out for meals together. etc...
when you are working, people will leave you alone, but if you know who else is there and what they do, you can talk to them and help each other. it helps that many are freelancers and not secretive startups hustling for investment money.
It's so hard sometimes. No one to really bounce ideas off of, every little thing you have to do yourself. Staying inspired to work is sometimes difficult, because you are literally doing everything yourself it just gets so overwhelming.