Over 1.5 years ago I quit my job to build a web app with the goal of creating a passive income. I started work on Flaregun, the domain name and SSL expiry notification tool. I was finally building my own product. I revelled in having complete control over every part of the project. Everything seemed great.
However my small amount of burn money meant I needed to take on some client work. Once I started dabbling I was on a slippery slope. I quickly became seduced by the instant profits and got pulled into the freelance vortex. Worked stopped on my web app in the summer of 2010.
The freelance vortex
From the beginning I made good money from freelancing. Every month I had a lot more disposable income that when I was an employee and I had complete control over my time and work method. Having my own clients was exciting, and with so many new tasks in my working day I was learning at an accelerated pace. After a few months the attractiveness of my instant freelance profits pushed my ‘might make money in the future’ SAS startup onto the back burner and eventually into a digital grave where it lay for over a year.
Rising from the ashes
But the story does not end there. I recently faced up to the fact that I am great at starting but awful at finishing. I love the initial buzz of a new idea. The excitement, the productivity levels, the day dreaming. But as projects go on my motivation levels seem to dry up and I find it hard to finish.
So I took a look at my hard drive and decided this year I would finish my two major uncompleted projects, my web app and my novel (25k words written). It was no longer about the projects themselves; I wanted to teach myself a life lesson. I wanted to get it in my head that I can only start things if I intend to finish them.
To my surprise picking up Flaregun’s abandoned codebase, finishing it off, and launching took no time at all. How could this be? Why did I abandon the project when it was so close to being ‘launchable’?
So what went wrong the first time?
I had an endless list of todos. I battled on in my spare time and although I thought I was cutting back features I wasn’t being rigourous enough. For example I saw being able to add multiple domains at once as a core feature. It isn’t. It is a bit of a ‘faff’ to add your domains one by one but it isn’t the end of the world. It doesn’t stop you using the product. I made my MVP too complex and lost motivation.
What did I do differently this time?
This time round I maintained two lists. The pre-launch and post launch. I adopted my ‘It just doesn’t matter. You won’t have any users at launch’ approach and cut absolutely everything back until my pre-launch list was tiny. I then launched before my pre launch list was even complete, and I was totally embarrassed about my version 1.
And I got my first paying customer within 24 hours
Profits from my first paying customer spent on a yummy Pizza.
Hoorah! Wow! Was it really that easy? One evening I pushed the button to go live and launched in complete obscurity. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t blog. With no marketing or advertising I got my first paying customer and earned $12. I was no longer a lone coder in a bedroom with an idea. I was in business. My hours of hard work had paid off.
Ok so the money is meaningless. The real pay day was the motivation surge and the realisation that I was capable of building a for sale product.
But then I got a sudden sinking feeling that I had been hugely foolish. I had been right a year and half ago. Someone did buy my product. I had let self doubt get the better of me. I started to imagine what revenue my web app would be pulling in if I launched a year ago. I had lost out on a year of growth and revenue.
Lesson learnt: finish what you start.
So this process has taught me that to start and not finish is the biggest failure. If you have a side project which is lying dormant, resurrect it. Finish it off and get it out there. Who knows whether the world will like it but I guarantee that it will make you grow as a person and motivate you to greater things.
