Taking the plunge again

I’ve decided to take the plunge into self-employment once again! This is a big step, given that I have a 1 year-old child this time around. But, as anyone who has a kid knows, there’s just not enough time to run a business part-time when you have a young child. I wish my new product was a Day Extender for Parents. That would undoubtedly be a hugely popular product.

Also, as Steve Pavlina says, there’s no better way to spur yourself to action unless you really have your skin in the game and take it full-time.

I started my last business just over 5 years ago, back in the dotcom heyday. I spent silly amounts of time honing my business plan and talking to money folk, when I could have spent more time working on my product. That’s a mistake I’m not going to make this time around. I’ve got down to earth initial goals and a plan to meet those goals.

One nice offshoot of starting my own business is that I’m free to blog as much as I want about my work. When you’re playing by someone else’s rules, you always need to be careful. I’m pretty sure that I won’t fire myself for blogging, so expect this space to become its most interesting yet. This blog is not going to become the official spokes-channel of my new business, though. You’ll still see an assortment of politics, music, movies, parenting etc. talked about here. The company website will have the “official” source of info. This will be a good place to find largely accurate rumors, though 🙂

Soon, I’ll have to start firing up the “new company building machine”… need to come up with names for the product and company, have to create the entity (probably an LLC), register domain names, and on and on. (First rule of running your own software shop: don’t plan on spending near 100% of your time programming. That’s not the path to success.)