There are a few awesome things about starting a company entirely on your own. You’re your own boss. You work your own hours. You continue to work when everyone else has gone to sleep. You’re still working when you really should have stopped hours ago. You restructure your schedule so that you start working while everyone is asleep so that you can stop when the family comes home. Oh wait, I think I’m projecting again.
One of the things I love about this life is that when I’ve had enough for the day, I go hit the lap lanes. For that matter I can go swim laps pretty much any time I want. I tend to do it either during my first break for the day around 9am, or when I’m stuck on something and need to get away to let my subconscious work on something. I find aside from while taking a shower, I get my best ideas while breath hold swimming the length of the pool.
A rather large downside, however, is having to do everything myself. My background allows me to address everything from systems administration to software development without issue. I’ve recently added graphic design and copywriting to my list of skills. This blend of skills lets me rapidly build an MVP landing page style site suitable for ad traffic buy button testing or hosting a questionnaire for the prospects to fill out.
Excluding the time to write copy for the landing page, my goal is to be able to stand up the rest of the framework for an MVP site in under 15 minutes. To accomplish this, I will be using some old tricks from my systems administration background to ensure that it gets done quickly, and exactly the same way every time. Automation will ensure reproducibility and speed and a checklist will ensure I don’t miss anything.
In my next couple of blog posts, I will be detailing how and why I do things towards this effort, and will share some of the techniques I use. I’m hoping that I can save others some time and/or pain. If you find this at all useful, or have specific questions you’d like me to address, please send me some email and let me know.
Karl
