Becoming a Launcher

I am an independent consultant. When moving to Seattle with a tech background in 2004, one needed to work actively NOT to land a job at Microsoft. Thankfully, my wife-to-be approved my plan: put together enough freelance income to remain independent and be able to work from home. Thusly I declared myself entrepreneurial, worked the friends-and-family networks, and landed some great long-term clients who have been paying the bills for the last seven years.

Seven years! That’s like two generations in Internet time. And indeed: the shininess of freelancing and its entrepreneurial feel grew dull and rote and flat (especially in the income department). Vicarious energy boosts came from watching other web-builders make and sell amazing things. Those with my same skill sets built out bigger and better projects than what I was working on, breaking their own incomes out of plateaus. Fascinating! I should do that some day!

“Some Day” is an exciting time. Beautiful things happen at impossible speeds, everyday life makes way for fantasy-time, and every day has 42 hours for making all your dreams come true. My Some Day was populated by blog posts about startups and Twitter feeds of “real” entrepreneurs and conference talks on marketing metrics. And every day I clocked time on my consulting contracts. And every day, the day dreaming remained only that.

Finally, about a year ago, a little side project (“Inbox Express”) with a built-in revenue model chewed its way to the front of my brain, and tumbled out in the form of a working prototype. A little taste of Some Day! My inner ‘preneur rejoiced, and I decided it was time to get serious. My first step of getting feedback from real entrepreneurs (hey, Dave McClure was in town!) went pretty well: a path forward—that didn’t even require me to quite my day job—became apparent.

My biggest known obstacle was also apparent: I knew jack-squat about business. Luckily, I was staring at my favorite Venn diagram every day and Amy Hoy was promoting her new online business class for people making web-type thingees: “30×500″, she called it, based on the simple math that finding just 500 people to subscribe to a SaaS offering at $30/mo each makes for a pretty good living for an individual.

I was taking my side project seriously, so paying for the course made sense—and with the given formula, wouldn’t take long to recoup. I signed up and emailed Amy to tell her about my great side project idea. She wrote back and told me my idea sucked. It had major problems that would make it hard to convert into a real business. It wasn’t the kind of thing that the course could help with. Sorry, you can have a refund if you like.

Huh. I was initially deflated (all those “other” entrepreneurs loved my idea, after all!). But Amy offered a fascinating alternative: A repeatable system. A repeatable, proven system for building a business around web apps, plural. That could be used over and over to build multiple products, each with their own revenue streams. The engineer in me was hard up for any kind of systematic approaches to business and marketing, so I was sold on the class. After all, I knew the instructor would be straight with me!

So I sidestepped my momentum on my Great Idea (which had made me its bitch along the way), and converted it into getting what I could from the class experience. And it really continues to be an empowering experience. Turns out developing a business requires a significant amount of personal development as well: bad habits must be squashed, new ways of thinking must be established, deeper levels of understanding my own goals and desires must be reached.

(Update: New post with more detail on what exactly I learned, including my 9 favorite lessons: Making the Internet More Awesome)

And for me, much of this came together while taking the class. Amy was right: my idea did suck from a business perspective. But I now have a list of about 20 better potential products that provide real value to customers (which means they will pay for it). I’ve already launched my first offering (which itself has already paid for the 30×500 course), and I’m in the process of building another (which will help me launch others), and applying nearly every one of the course principles. The alumni mailing list is a continual source of support and inspiration as I follow what others are building, listening to all the great feedback being shared. Amy continues to share her experiences and growing knowledge. This class keeps on giving.

Now, that “Some Day” has a much more realistic shape to it. And more excitingly, it’s closer than ever.