Short version

I’m doing a 6 month experiment where I focus 100% on roobasoft and see if I can support my family on the apps I develop.

Longer version

I started teaching myself to program in 1994 and it wasn’t long after that that I knew that

a) This is what I want to do for a profession (software development)
and
b) I want to some day work for myself doing it.

I’ve been doing a) but haven’t quite gotten to b). Yes, I own and operate roobasoft. Yes, I quit my full time job over a year ago. But I’ve been doing mostly contract work in that year. I want to get back to my original plan to invest the majority of my time building roobasoft into what I think it can be. I want to make b) happen in a way that I’m proud of. So with that, I’m winding down my contract work and I’ll soon be focusing 100% on roobasoft.

Why? Isn’t there a middle ground?

I really thought I’d be able to manage contracting and roobasoft apps. Plenty of people have succeeded this way. That failed to be the case for me. It’s not that the time wasn’t there. There were plenty of times when my contract work was slow. It’s the excuse that I believe killed me. It was so easy to say: Well, I can’t do ‘that’ cause I’m so busy with project X or whatever. Yet I never ceased to be able to find time to start a new ‘great idea’.

Determining success

At the end of this 6 months, I’ll either be making enough money to support my family, or I won’t. That’s determining my success or failure [1]. I’m OK with either outcome. I’d prefer success.

Removing excuses

For this to really work, I have to be able to look back and say “Well, I gave it my best.” The things I’m doing to remove excuses are:

1. Mental switch to ‘professional’. I hope to post on this more soon. I think this is big.
2. No distractions. No contracts. No side projects. Focus. I’m picking 2 projects (1 new, 1 existing) to focus all my attention on and any ‘this is a great idea for an app!’ moments that I have will be archived and tucked away for later.
3. Renting and using office space. I currently work 100% at home. I have a dedicated office with a door here, but it butts up against the laundry room (noisy!) and the kitchen (humans!). We now have 3 daughters under age 6. Even with the dedicated office, there are lots of distractions here (of course, sometimes the distractions are really cute). In order to combat those distractions, I’m going to spend at least 3-4 hours for 4 days a week in a co-working space near where we live. It’s a month to month deal, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on whether I think it’s really helping or not.
4. Making use of others to strengthen my weaknesses. The two big weaknesses I have are design and marketing. I’m seeking outside help with both of these.

Now what?

As I mentioned, I’ll be working on one new application and one existing. I’m not currently ready to talk about either, but stay tuned, shouldn’t be too long before I start talking more. I plan to try to write a blog post at the beginning of every month with a review of how things are going.

[1] – Of course it’s not that simple. It may be that I just need to go back to doing a day or two of contract work for a few months while I continue to ramp up the business. Going to have to figure that out when the time comes.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Personal, roobasoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.