Geekmade

The Bootstrapped Report : Month 1 - Laying the foundations

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:29:00 +0100

The bootstrap report is a month by month account of my efforts as a bootstrapping entrepreneur. It will include insights and lessons from the beginning of a bootstrapper’s adventure. My aim is to give up freelance or consultancy work to be my own boss and create a lifestyle business.

It has already been a month since my declaration about the start of my year of hustle and its been very busy. Unfortunately there has not been much bootstrapping going on.

I got back from travelling and spent most of the month finding a place to live and looking for work, as a bootstrapping entrepreneur I will initially need to freelance for a bit to fund my efforts.

All is not lost though.

Laying the foundations

This month was concentrated on learning. This may seem a bit of a waste of time as I am not really going to make any money from learning, but I see it as laying the foundations.

I need to learn to build the house properly before I start, I don’t want to have to pull down walls later because they were built incorrectly. I need to create a foundation of knowledge about creating, running and developing a new business. With that in mind, the main way I want to generate income is by building web-based products that will be subscription based. This will come in the form of one or many startups.

Off on a slight tangent!

As a founder with a technical background I have had great successes using Agile methodologies to produce software, so I was looking for methodologies to follow for internet startups. Methodologies provide tried and tested methods to improve practices, overcome problems and provide a better way of working. There are not too many startup methodologies around, but I found one that appealed to me, The Lean Startup.

As part of my business education I read (or listened to, as I got the audiobook) the Lean startup and hope to put into practice the ideas presented in the book. Hopefully I will glean some learnings from trying to implement the lean startup techniques and I will share on the bootstrap report. Maybe I will get round to a book review in the future.

The First Product

My plan of a product empire has to start somewhere and my first product is called Chefnote. It’s not ready for public use yet, that will be next month. Its also a big part of what I have been up to the past month.

I had actually started coding before I went away travelling, when I came back to the app I decided to re-write the code and give it a bit of a redesign. The aim is to get the product deployed and for me to start using it. The idea for this app came from a problem I was having so I will become the first customer and in true 37signal style I will be eating my own dog food, I think it is vital when you build a product. This will then be followed swiftly by a Minimum Viable Product release to friends, family and anyone else who want to use it (Lean startup already working!), that is the plan anyway.

Easy Ltd.

As part of getting up and running as a serious startup I also started my first limited company, Tiny Code Factory Ltd. This will be my product and dev. company that will allow me to separate business from personal finance and be just that little bit more professional.

I found the process of setting up the company easy because of a service called golimited.co, well recommended. This is a simple product by crunch a UK accountancy and web-app firm. It cost £15 and they do all the company house registration for you.

Summary

I am not making money but so far not spending much either (just the cost of setting up the Ltd). The first release of Chefnote is live, only for me, but will be opening up for others soon so things are looking good.

Overall I discovered that coming home from travelling and moving into a new flat is very disruptive but, if you pick and choose tasks carefully they can all work in harmony with major disruptions. I have yet to see if my learning foundation will have a good effect and allow me to steer the business in the right direction. Onwards and Upwards!

Leave some comments, tell me if its too boring or is there anything you would particularly like to hear about.

The Beginning ...

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 03:17:00 +0100

I am currently writing this post from a hotel room in Rio. In two days I will be back home in Manchester, but this time I want things to be different.

This year things really started to change for me, I got married at the start of the year to the love of my life and we embarked on a 7 month honeymoon around South America, a trip I had always dreamed of doing.

This is the year I stopped talking or planning and started doing!

As my wife can tell you, I talk a lot about starting a business and the various new ideas I come up with, but I never actually do anything.

I actually got married this year and went on a 7 month trip round South America. (note highlighted verbs, I am doing stuff!) I am going to use this momentum to pursue and do things I just talk about.

Actions speak louder than words.

Such a classic quote!

Rewind..

A few years ago my thinking shifted quite radically after reading the book The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. Some of his ideas really struck a cord with me. Particularly creating muse businesses to fund you lifestyle then taking mini-retirements throughout your life.

I wanted the freedom to live my life as I wanted and create a lifestyle business. But I never acted on the books inspiration and advice.

Why? Because I am afraid.

I know I can build a great product with an amazing user experience, that is what I am good at. Marketing is my problem, I don’t know how! I am afraid that I will devote all my time to creating a product and no one will view it, let alone pay for it.

This year it changed. Fear of failure to launch a product has been superseded by another greater fear. I now fear doing nothing and being average. I don’t want to be a 9-5er like everyone else.

Life is too short, it needs to be lived. I want to continue to travel and when my children are growing up I want to be there. I have too many things I want to do in life to have a 9-5 job so I need to make my own money in my own way.

As I hinted above, the main driver for me to do this is my future family. When I got married it really pushed me to think about my future. I calculate roughly that I have about one and a half years before my first child is born. By then I need to:

Be free from the 9-5 rat race, so I can spend time with my wife and family.
I also need to be financially stable, ideally up to my current level of income or more, to provide for a new family. This should all be generated from passive income steams, so not to effect my time freedom.

Time to start hustling, wish me luck!

Instagram Javascript Badge

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:25:00 +0000

Recently I discovered Instagram. I love how you can take pictures, apply filters and share them really easily. It’s a service I will be using a lot more of.

I want to be able to show my lovely, arty, filtered pictures on my blog. A quick Google round and I couldn’t find a Javascript widget or badge to stick in my tumblr template so I decided to make my own.

Presenting the Instagram Javascript badge

Here is where the hack comes in.
Instagram is a very new service and doesn’t even have public profiles yet, let alone an API or a feed. It does however, post to services that do, namely Flickr. So I took the code for the flickr badge, altered it slightly, gave it the Instagram design treatment and hey presto.

You can see a working example of the badge in my sidebar or see the picture below (if the sidebar one is not working).

When Instagram posts to flickr on your behalf it tags it, so the Javascript can pull all the pictures from Flickr tagged instagramapp. Easy!

How to use it

Post your pictures to Flickr
Put the code in the gist into your template where you want the badge to appear
Change the user from your_user_id to your own. (You can find your flickr user id if you go here and its on the right under Useful Values)

Fonts & Design

I have included styles for Chunk Five, a font used on the Instagram homepage. To get these working you will need to get the font kit from Font Squirrel and host them somewhere. I use Dropbox and reference them through the public link

Uh oh, problemo

There are a couple of problems with the badge. Firstly the pictures link to flickr, not to Instagram. Because it’s piggybacking on the flickr API this cannot to fixed until Instagram have an API or feed and the badge uses that instead.

Secondly the Chunk Five font does not work in FIrefox because of a security issue with linking to font files, Boo!

Feel free to use the badge on your own blogs, if you run into any problems installing it I would be happy to help. Get in contact through twitter or leave a comment.

Update

You can get Font Squirrel to embed the Chunk Five font into the CSS using Base64 encoding so it displays correctly in Firefox. Warning - It massively bloats your stylesheet, not good for mobile browsers!

"For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today..."

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:29:00 +0000

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

- Steve Jobs