Mind Your Business

I’m a little biased in that I like Amazon and use it on a regular basis. Anything that saves me from making the trek to the mall to fight through traffic and weekend drivers is a good thing to me. Here’s a Forbes article that peels back some of the layers to explain just WHY Amazon (and, to the same extent, Apple) is so successful at what it does when the company looks an awful lot like it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

P.S. Amazon might become key to the work I’m doing right now. Still trying to figure out how to leverage their cloud services.

…to work on someone’s resume. It’s something I’ve been casually doing now and again to help folks out. Didn’t consider monetizing it or making it a business. Rather, it’s kind of a win-win with no cash involved. I get to keep my writing and thinking skills sharp, they get a jazzed up resume. So far, I’ve got some sort of freaky golden touch. Every time I’ve helped a person tweak a resume, they’ve gotten a job with it. I thought the first two were coincidences, but then it just kept happening over and over again. Hmm.

I just had a major moment of clarity. I was digging through the App Store on my iPad, trying to find a decent tumblr app. While the “revamped for iPad” web interface is nice, the interface is still too cluttered for it to be truly tablet-friendly. Also, there are very few tumblr apps out there in the market. The ones which are paid are just OK, while the ones which are free are just utter crap.

I kept wondering: what can I do with this newly rediscovered desire to code and build things? How can I monetize this? Where the Hell do I even start?? Then it hit me: the world needs a better tumblr app. Hell, I NEED A BETTER TUMBLR APP! I’m so sick of having to type on the revamped website in super small, eye-strain-inducing fonts. So I’ll start developing it for me first and see where the road takes me. It feels nice to have a purpose. :-)

Still fighting with for/while loops. Theory is one thing, execution is another matter. I really do want to understand how they work, so I’m not going to let the situation beat me down.

In the meantime, I’ll sleep on it and see if I can get a better grip a little later.

Hi - I had to take a little time away from the blog to deal with some of the frustrations of Failure #1: my retail business. I had to learn some hard truths and thought it was time I return to writing about being an entrepreneur again. I figure that I learned from watching and gaining knowledge from what others before me have done. That being said, I feel an obligation to contribute to the dialogue, but from a different perspective. I also noticed that in writing this blog, people were finding it and reading it as well. That tells me that I’ve hit upon something important and I need to follow my gut and keep writing.

Most “coverage” (books, blogs, magazine/newspaper articles, etc.) of entrepreneurs talks about them from an outsider’s perspective. We all love to do the “Monday Morning Quarterback” thing and pick apart their successes and (especially) their failures, hoping to glean something from the process.

Instead, I want to talk to you, the reader of this blog, about the process from the inside. I want to talk about the things that can drive a person to become an entrepreneur vs. being satisfied with the daily grind in corporate America. Because to me, part of being an entrepreneur means inherently being dissatisfied with things as they are or as people expect them to be. You have this constant, nagging voice that says, “This could be so much DAMN better than it is right now!”

That being said, here are the truths I had to learn:

1) Blogging is cathartic and therapeutic. It gets a lot of the frustration out and helps to quiet some of the things that bother you. Blogging, for me, clears a lot of the “noise” out of my head to make room for the ideas and mindset I need to run my own business. “Noise” for me equates to self-doubt, questioning (internal and external) and general malaise.

2) DO NOT, under any circumstances, sell someone else’s stuff. MAKE YOUR OWN. I learned this from an attempt to sell products from a MLM. Truth be told - people aren’t going to go out of their way to buy stuff unless they find something they love that they can’t find somewhere else. That last part about finding the product is key. The company I was working with is starting to sell their product in stores. Lots of stores. I can’t compete on price or marketing with the local big box in the neighborhood. I can compete somewhat on service, but again, service doesn’t mean squat if I can be underpriced.

3) Take the time to figure out what you can make, and get really, REALLY good at it. People often quote Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” and talk about how you need to log at least 10,000 hours to be an expert in something. I don’t think you need to be a full on expert to be an entrepreneur. It’s tough to log 10,000 hours when you’re also giving eight hours a day to a full time job. Rather, I think you’ve got to get good enough to be able to make the act of creating effortless. In my case - I happen to have an aptitude for programming languages. I don’t know where it comes from, since only one other person in my family (my brother) is in IT. But I learn them easily and quickly. So what I need to make to have my business needs to come from that part of my skill set.

I’m sure there are other things I’ve learned, but I can’t recall them at the moment. That will have to wait for another post. In the meantime, I have a long road ahead to figure out how to restart my startup.

When I first started this blog, I posed four questions that I intended to answer…as least, from my perspective, anyway:

1) Why am I undertaking this effort of starting a business now?
2) What do I really hope to accomplish?
3) What’s the point? (AKA Why should anyone give a hoot about what I’m doing?)
4) What is this effort all about, really?

I finally have something that feels like an answer to #4. It took me starting up, struggling to stay up, failing, shutting down and crying in my beer to figure it out, though. Sometimes, the answers to life’s questions aren’t readily available to us when we first ask them.

To me, this effort of being a business owner has been about seeking to improve upon what already exists. I had to go through a couple of rounds of selling other people’s stuff (see a prior post for why that’s a BAD idea) to realize that particular point. I don’t want to go about creating a new wheel. I want to take the one we have and keep working out the defects inside it. It will take time and practice for me to get to that place where I feel I can be a contributor and potential game-changer. As it is right now, for-when loops are baking my brain in Codecademy. I get the theory but the execution is a bit lacking. It’ll require some practice to iron out the details.

Back to my regular schedule of blogging. Time for me to tackle question number three:

What’s the point?

Specifically, the question here is, what is the point of going into business for myself when I have what appears to be a perfectly comfortable corporate America job?

Simply put - NOBODY should be comfortable in their corporate America jobs. At least, not in the America we’re living in today with 9.2% (seasonally adjusted) unemployment. I won’t go into the details of what the corporation I work for does. You can read enough of that in any of the news outlets available to you.

What I am going to talk about is what that job discomfort means to me. Frankly, I don’t like the idea of waking up every day to go a job where asking the question “Why?” is considered dangerous and a threat to the established way of running the business. I don’t like the fact that I have to be known as the “IT woman who asks all the questions in the company town halls”. I shouldn’t be recognized or famous in that sense because EVERYONE should be questioning and challenging everything we do.

I’m not saying I’m brighter than anyone else or that I have some special gift or insight that no one else has. What I’m saying is that everyone has the capacity to challenge “what is” in an effort to evolve the situation into “what it could be”. The resistance to new possibilities and the exhaustion I feel when I can’t get people to start looking beyond short term corporate targets is part of what drove me to start my own business.

I’m starting at the beginning by learning some Javascript. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it, as I’m not sure how I will make a business out of it just yet.

One thing that’s helping unwind my brain a bit is reading Kevin Smith’s latest book, “Tough Sh*t: : Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good”. Yes - that sounds like a throughly messed up title, but in an odd sort of way, Smith might be on to something I need to consider.

One of the points he raises in the book is to find something you really like to do and figure out a way to get paid to do it. In my case, I enjoy writing code. When I went back to school for IT, I was the person debugging everyone else’s code. I cleaned up a lot of errors, typos, etc. and had a knack for always finding the problem which was causing the program to break. The key now is figuring out how to monetize these skills and build on what I know. Codecademy.com is helping with that effort. It’s free to learn Javascript on their site.

Smith also makes the point about rolling up your sleeves and getting stuff done. If you say you want to be a blogger, then go and blog. If you say you want to be an inventor, go invent. Talking about what you want to do so you build yourself up to take the risk is good, but getting out there and doing is much, much better.

My task now is to do and to figure out how to make my efforts pay off - literally.