Rich implemented a number of Soapbox UI improvements and cleaned things up some. Internet Explorer still looks a bit funky but Safari and Firefox are looking pretty good.

Most people don’t expect to be great at something the first time they try it. As a programmer, the first few applications I created were pretty horrible. When my 6 year old daughter Madeline started roller blading, she was pathetic. The first year I had a garden in the yard, the results were clearly sub-optimal. I’ve been trading the stock market for over 3 years and I’m still an awful trader. Come to think of it, most of the things I’ve worked on in my life started out in pretty sorry shape. The areas I’ve been able to develop any skill are the ones I was able to stick with through the “hard”. If there wasn’t a hard part to developing the skill, then everyone would have the ability and it wouldn’t be that valuable. The people with perseverance and discipline are the ones who develop worthwhile skills over the long term.

Obviously, as we practice skills our expertise grows. Some skills, though, just take a ton of repetitions to even become competent. Over the last 11 years or so, I’ve made a ton of software applications and web sites. I was able to improve as a programmer over time. My daughter stuck with roller blading (with some convincing) and is now winning some short track races in the cul-de-sac. The garden is getting better each year. I’ve made hundreds of stock market trades. Stock market trading takes a ton of reps.

Starting businesses is no different. Most people aren’t good at running businesses the first few times they try. Most businesses fail. Yet for some reason, most folks expect their first attempt at starting a business to be an overnight success. There aren’t many overnight successes. If your first business fails, don’t beat yourself up about it. Learn the lessons you need to learn and get up and try again. The failed business is just another rep, another learning experience. The more reps you get in, the more likely you are to succeed. Judging from the other experiences in my life, it could be many many reps before I’m competent at creating successful businesses.

Richard Powell from Samedis has done an amazing job on the first pass of the new Soapbox skin. There are still a few things we need to do before starting to market the site in earnest, but the first pass is such an incredible improvement I had to mention it here.

I’m getting more and more excited to see if the site becomes useful to people.

The public release of Soapbox is scheduled to happen after Rich from Samedis Design completes his first pass beautification of the site. I’m pretty excited about it. I’m hopeful that the release will happen this month.

In anticipation of the release, I’ve been intensely studying marketing so that I might have a clue as to how to market the site. I have no background in the subject and I’ve never studied it before. It has been fascinating.

The study has actually triggered a number of feature changes in Soapbox. I’ve made it much easier for users of the system to tell others about the site and I’ve adjusted the signup page to be more explicit it its request for permission to contact customers about updates. Users can now easily email a review to friends and they can connect to multiple friends in one shot rather than one friend at a time. The study of marketing was actually one of the reasons I created this blog in the first place.

One of the authors I’ve been reading is Seth Godin. He has taught me much.

It’s something we’ve all heard before and it’s something we’ve all said at some point. In a previous post, I wrote about not needing a ton of money to create a business. Instead, we can use our time and energy to get things started. The question I’d like to address is how do we find the time to achieve the goals we’ve set out to achieve when it feels like there’s not enough time in the day?

I’ve come to the conclusion recently that if you want to achieve a long term goal, you’ve got to spend some bit of time on it every single day (or better yet 6 days a week.) If you’re not taking a step toward that goal each day, that goal just never seems to get accomplished.

Here’s an example. For many years, I’ve had a goal to create a business of some kind as a way to move past the idea of exchanging my time for money. I’ve wanted to create a running system that provides value to people and compensates me more passively than consulting would. It’s been on the goal list for a whole bunch of years. No progress though. Nothing done for a long time.

Then recently I decided that I was going to spend approximately 2 hours per day creating businesses. In the past month and a half, I’ve made great progress toward creating a business. It’s a wonderful feeling knowing that I’m taking at least a step or two every day.

Will the business work? I don’t know yet. I plan on creating another if it fails. And then another. And another. I plan on failing and learning from those failures until a business that I create works. It’s perfectly fine to fail as long as I learn from the failure. I feel much less pressure now because my ego is no longer wrapped up in the outcome. It could be 10 years before I create a successful business. If it takes that long, I could be an expert in how not to start a business.

Where did I find the time to spend about 12-15 hours per week creating businesses? It was pretty simple really. I wrote my current schedule down on a piece of paper and then I figured out which parts of my daily schedule I wanted to change to accommodate the 2 hours per day. The time had to come from somewhere. I had to give something up in order to add something new. I decided that I was no longer going to spend 40 hours per week consulting. I was only going to spend 30. That gave me 10 hours extra per week to put toward starting businesses. I found another 10 hours per week by deciding to work at home rather than driving to an office every day.

I would think most people would say something like they can’t just decide to go to work less and they can’t just decide to work at home. Well, they certainly could if they wanted to but that’s not the point. They just need to find something else in their schedule that’s less important than the goal they’re trying achieve. Is watching 4 hours of TV per day more important than achieving your long term goals? How about other leisure time? Can you give some of that up? Once you get down on paper exactly what you’re doing every day, it becomes a pretty simple exercise to identify the areas that can be expunged.

Other people in the world find time to achieve big goals. Ginormous goals. Michael Dell has the same 24 hours that we do. Where did he find the time to create Dell Computer? Steve Jobs doesn’t get a 35 hour day. Yet he manages to head up Apple Computer and Pixar. How do the successful business owners in our society find the time to achieve such big goals? They don’t do what the masses do. They’re not getting drunk in a bar. They’re not watching every sporting event each week. They manage their time and they choose to spend their time differently than everyone else. They’re able to delay gratification and work while everyone else is sleeping. It’s not evil to watch a sporting event. It’s just a choice you’re making about what’s important to you.

Soapbox has been up and running for a few weeks now. I’ve only told a few people about its location because it’s currently so ugly. It’s functional but it’s very hard to look at and the layout needs more than a little help. It won’t remain ugly for much longer now. I’d like to have a pretty site deployed by the end of the month and then I’ll start marketing the site in earnest.

I’m good at making web sites work and I’m awful at making them look pretty. That’s one of the reasons why I’m working with Samedis Design. I met with Rich Powell of Samedis last night to talk about the progress. I was once again amazed at Rich’s artistic abilities and his insights into design and usability. He also shared a number of ideas for enhancements to the site, two of which I’ve already implemented and deployed. I’m extremely excited to be working with him. Soapbox will look absolutely nothing like it currently does when Rich gets done with it. It will be completely transformed from ugly into beautiful.

The decision to focus completely on the functionality and spend zero time on aesthetics turned out to be an excellent decision. I was able to create the site way faster and the end result will look so much better than anything I could have come up with on my own. I never realized how much time I had been spending on previous projects trying to adjust the layout of my screens. When I don’t have to deal with layout and aesthetic issues, it feels like I’m moving at ludicrous speed.

A friend of mine has been an entrepreneur for over 35 years. In that time, he has created a number of successful businesses. In addition, he’s spent a good deal of time networking with other business owners and entrepreneurs. So he has a pretty good understanding of how businesses are created and how they succeed.

He mentioned to me that it’s a common misconception that it takes a ton of money to create a business. In his experience, many of the successful businesses out there have been started by people with little or no money at all. In fact, a good number have been started by folks who had no other choice.

He said that he’s one of the people who had no choice. You see, many years ago, he was down and out and had less than $10 in his checking account. He had lost his job and was having a terrible time finding work. He had no money, no job, and a family depending on him. He would describe it as a humbling experience that caused him to rely more fully on God.

He decided to try to serve some of the restaurants near where he lived. He had a knife sharpener and he thought he might be able to sharpen some of their knives for some money. He felt humiliated that he couldn’t find work and that he was walking up and down the street with his knife sharpener in hand. His family needed to eat and he didn’t know what else to do. Over time, restaurants started allowing him to sharpen their knives. His business expanded and he eventually started renting knives to his customers. What started out as nothing became a successful knife sharpening / knife rental business.

Why share this story? Well, I haven’t saved a ton of money I can invest in a business. Therefore I need to find a way to serve people and provide them value in an incremental fashion and gradually improve my business over time. It doesn’t need to start out as a grand venture to create a new industry. I only need to provide some value and improve people’s lives in some small way.

I’m not going to seek venture capital or an angel investor. I think there are a ton of problems with that approach. I would have to give up some if not all authority and the investors are often interested in a speedy return on investment rather than a slower developing long term successful business. I also think that people spend their own hard earned money much more judiciously than they do someone else’s money given to them.

If you don’t have much money to start a business, how can you possibly create it? Using your time and energy rather than money. But what if you have
no time? That will be the subject of a future post.

Well… I never thought I’d be a part of the blogging world, but here I sit. So what is this blog anyway? I’m Duff OMelia and I have two primary goals for this blog:

• I’d like people to see the entrepreneurial journey from an idea to a business that provides value. I’d like to share some of the things I’m learning about as I develop businesses and figure out how on earth to be an entrepreneur. Perhaps you’ll be able to learn from both the good decisions I’ve made and the mistakes I don’t want to make again.
• This is the place where announcements will be made about Codora’s products and services. You’ll be able to hear news about Soapbox and any other products that Codora makes in the future.