The Question
What does it take to be successful in life? A commonly accepted measure of success is the size of the bank account. According to some statistics, which i am too lazy to look up (lets be honest who would even read them), the majority of wealth is created by founding a company.
Exactly how hard is it to start a company?
The Experiment
Short answer: I have no idea.
Long answer: I will find out.
What do I start with?
Honestly - not much. Last Silvester I was unemployed, I managed to get back into the workforce as a developer but I am still in the red for another 5k+ €.
Not everything is bad though, I have saved up a few hundred bucks that I intend to spend on this endeavor.
Why so little you ask? Because if I spend thousands, racking up more debt or something then some smarty pants will tell him-/herself that they can't do it because they only have X amount of dollars.
If you can't save up 300$ over a few months, you have a different kind of problem.
I have also been programming since I was 11 years old. Don't get me wrong, I will not need that level of expertise - in fact I think you could learn what is required within a few weeks, months if you are slow.
Last but not least I have a good friend with whom I will do this since I am more technically inclined/introverted while he likes talking to people and has enough technical training to know what I am talking about when I start explaining code.
I am currently working full-time and since I very much like my employer I will continue to do so for as long as I can. On the contrary that means I do not have a lot of time on my hands to get this system rolling.
What do I do?
The keyword in the previous sentence was "system". If i just kept developing everything myself then I would be pretty much still be employed, just by more people.
I am a developer with a very broad spectrum of knowledge so I could probably do anything from a local standaloen-software, server-, mobile- or web-app.
Remember, simple is good
My strength is building efficient systems and automating the boring stuff. I did it for several companies, I did it for myself, I am doing it right now for my current employer. Next, I want to do it for my own company.
Complexity naturally comes into being as the number of components in a system grows - do not introduce it artificially through bad design choices!
The goal is to provide something relatively simple, technical and hopefully automatable. I have decided on responsive websites for companies/freelancers. More specifically using Ghost CMS.
Where do I start?
Legally establishing a business entity right? - Wrong (no legal advice btw).
Step 1 is to get a Salespage.
How do I get that?
Well I got myself a cheap VPS (a virtual private server).
What's next?
We need to have some kind of Website right? Remember that I wanted to provide exactly that to other companies? - Right, I will use Ghost CMS (an intuitive Wordpress alternative, not built on stoneage php but based on nodejs - which is blazingly fast) So now we need some nice salespitch.
How do I get some good salescopy?
Pay someone else to do it. I will use iWriter and slap ~80$ in their golden hands to type a professional salespitch for me that (hopefully) convinces a lot of people to pay for getting their dusty company website into the current age. The only problem right now is, that my VPS is basically just an IP (123.45.678.9) nobody in their right mind would trust a company without a proper domain.
Where do I get a domain?
I use namecheap. Which domain? The one I brainstormed with my friend David.
How is the look?
If you went with a standard theme, probably not astronomical - not bad, but still...
Where do I get a professional theme?
Two Options:
- DIY, it's not that hard honestly
- Order it (eg Fiverr)
Since I am kind of short on time (remember I am working full-time) and there is plenty more to do, I will order it for ~40$ from fiverr.
Voilá, a Website with a salespitch, good design (hopefully) and a professional domain-name.
So how do my potential customers order?
Right... I do not sell some small-time articles so it's not a webshop.
Remember, simple is good
I will use formsubmit, since it is free, unlimited and I can personalize it freely. Something along the lines of
- your name
- your email
- your budget
- your project description
There are plenty of other options like form.io or just creating a form and backend-api myself (simple enough actually) but the goal is to be fast right now. So no fancy self-hosted or self-developed setups for now. We can always improve it later can't we ;)
We finally have a website, domain, salespage and people can send us inquiries.
People? What people?
Right we have no one looking for us right now. Just a lonely salespage that not even the google crawler knows about yet. This is fine for now. We did a lot in a week. But next week we will have to get our first customer fast.
How?
Paying for ads of course, we only spent ~ 150$ out of the 300 available. The rest is left for ad-spending.
How to do advertising?
No idea, but I have this week to learn while I build the salespage :) Udemy or skillshare are a pretty good place for that kind of knowledge.
I am looking forward to the end of next week. I will continue documenting the experiment as it progresses. Have an amazing new year.
Success is born from doing the work, not from talking about it
Starting requires a fraction of what you think it does
