Entries from January 2008 ↓

ShoeMoney (can you tell I’m a fan) often talks about respecting a company or person because they just did something. Don’t spend all your time analyzing - do work.

Such a simple thing and yet for me sometimes the hardest thing.

I called this blog “Solo Programmer” because I work alone. Partially by choice but mostly because I don’t have anyone I know who would be a good partner (though that’s changing somewhat). When you work alone you have to decide on a regular basis exactly what it is you should be working on.

Too often lately I waste away me day reading blogs, playing poker, reading forums and trying to figure out what I want to work on next.

I started this blog in part as an effort to motivate myself. I was going to start off the New Year with a new dedication to productive work. From the date of the first post and the frequency of the posts you can see how well that’s working. So now I’m going to start of February with a new dedication to productive work.

We’ll see how that goes.

Interesting that both ShoeMoney and John Chow recently ascribed their success to support from their wives.

Certainly the very least that a married would-be-entrepreneur needs is permission from his partner to spend the time needed to build anything of import on the web. When I started building my successful site I was single. My girlfriend then fiancee then wife didn’t really understand all the time I spent “playing on the computer”. In part that’s because I was awfully shy about talking about it. It was a project that seemed pretty trivial and while I hoped it would someday make money I wasn’t planning on it becoming huge.

It did become huge however and when it serendipitously become our sole source of income my wife began to understand that not only was it something important to me it was something that could bring financial security.

Now don’t get me wrong. My wife didn’t come to accept my pursuits simply because they were making money. She’s long supported me doing the things that interest me. More interesting is her support now when I don’t have a successful project going and don’t have a lot of clear direction. It’s her belief in me that keeps me going much of the time. It’d be easy for her to demand I pursue a more traditional employment but she won’t unless it becomes clear that such a move would really be best for me.

Beyond that she’s brought me quite an interesting project. It’s working with someone who has some great ideas and materials about parents helping their kid’s education. She has very little knowledge of how to use the web for her business (just a simple brochure site at the moment) and I’m hoping to help her build out that site into an important part of her business. I’ll keep the blog updated as the project progresses.

She also wants to develop a project for mom’s who’ve left the professional world to stay at home to raise their kids. It’s an idea that we’ve both tossed around for a while and my wife is ever the networker and we hope to drive it forward in the near future.

The site that made me an entrepreneur was something I started in my “free time” back in 1999. This was pretty close to the peak of the first dot com bubble and since everyone else was getting rich I figured why not me.

The first dot com explosion was decidedly web 1.0. I’m sure that many of today’s startups look back at what was happening then and laugh. Oddly though my site was based on user generated content. All you kids today need to remember that many of us have been doing web 2.0 things way before there was even the term or the need to add version numbers to something as large as the web.

What was different however is we didn’t have the huge explosion of “social networking” sites that we see now. I’ll cover my skepticism around some of the big names (Facebook, MySpace) at a later time but clearly this is a big change in the nature of the web. Part of the reason I want to do this blog is because I’d like to do some things in support of this new world and need to be part of it to help me understand it.

5 or 6 years ago as my site was growing I remember commenting that there was a limited window of opportunity for small startups to create new sites and grow them to a reasonable size. That’s come true to a certain extent. What I did then was find a niche that was underserved and look to serve it. Finding that underserved niche is nearly impossible today since there’s just so many sites out there and so many startups jumping on every new opportunity.

Still I think it’s a fun world to operate in and look forward to trying to navigate these new waters and figure out the new rules. I hope to eventually get a few readers along for the ride.