It's nearly been a year running my business, here's some thoughts.

Ok so what happened?

I didn’t blog about this, not outside of socials at least. At the moment of writing this, this is a secret blog, hell, it’s a secret website.

This website isn’t linked anywhere so it’ll serve nicely as a place to dump my thoughts & maybe I’ll get into a good routine of doing this daily, who knows.

So last november I was laid off from my dev rel job. I thought everything was going well (although I really was starting to not enjoy it very much), but a random tuesday invite to call with HR soon made me realise that wasn’t the case haha.

I remember the feel the first time I was laid off. I was very emotional, like really emotional. But this time I just closed my laptop and went downstairs to tell my wife. I felt super relieved, I actually felt good.

This is probably due to the fact that I had at least 6/9 months runway so I wasn’t panicking, I just felt nothing at all really.

Ok cool, so then what?

Well I did try to find a new job, I promise (I’ve been offered a bunch since then but turned them all down). I just…didn’t want them?

I was pretty tired of reporting to a boss, and having to be online at 9am for some shitty standup, it just didn’t make me feel very good to be honest.

So, I just didn’t get a job, instead I just started a business and started to tell people about it!

And thats the first learning point. I started to tell people about it..

Ok so?

I don’t want this to end up being a super long article, maybe over time I’ll break down all the lore, then go deeper into each part of the business, and then I guess just keep people updated on how it’s going.

For now, these are my thoughts:

1. You really can just do things, it’s not just a meme
2. Getting an accountant takes away 90% of the stress of running a business
3. Don’t rush into bring other people on board, and don’t hire perm. I found a great designer that I trust and respect and I’m sub contracting them. I view them as a business partner.
4. Likes and followers don’t matter too a degree. I’m having more success than people with 100k x followers but probably doing worse than people with 1k.
5. Put more aside for tax than you need to.
6. Don’t work weekends. I don’t work on my main client work on weekends unless I really want to. Usually I’ll chill or do fun design work.
7. Buy a good monitor and chair.
8. Don’t waste company money. You’ll feel like it’s free money because it’s technically not yours, but cashflow is super important. I now have enough in the business account that I can survive on that for nearly a year.
9. Don’t stop marketing. It’s SO easy to get comfortable when you have a few clients on the go, you want to optimise those for time and then chill but really you should push for more, it’ll pay off.

That’s all I can think off for the time being but I’ll try to keep consistent with this.

Peace.