Repurposing this blog was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing for me. Especially doing so in the middle of the night, right now. But I wanted to share. I don’t even mind too much if nobody ever reads it and I don’t really plan on it getting popular or sharing it with anyone or… really, I don’t have plans at all.
But I decided to go for it and see where I get to (this way you always succeed – in seeing where you get to!). That’s exactly the same thing I did with the topic I decided to restart this blog with. But to get to the topic, I need to do a bit of an introduction into it.
I have been into several things in the past. And when I am into something, I am deeeep into it. I do believe I know more than most people about cats, fitness and nutrition, dog training, psychology, mental health, to name a few things (and these are mostly things I have been into after I stopped being active on the blog). I might even elaborate on these on some other occasion. But lately I have started really confronting my personal financial situation and of ways to improve it. I got past the saving and budgeting – got this under control. No wild loans either, got it. So how to improve the situation even more?
Entrepreneurship.
Me! I had never thought of myself as the entrepreneurial type. I always kept my head down and did how I was told and I was pretty good at it. Actually, I recently did a small survey among people who know me best, about what I am best at – and the only thing that came up universally one way or another was my being good at sacrificing myself for others by taking care of them and putting their needs first (although they used less passive aggressive wording)… But I digress…
I entered the field of software development and then software analysis through luck and circumstance and I was proud of doing my work and keeping out of the contracts, management. marketing, finances, sales. I couldn’t avoid them entirely, but I did my best to remain technical software analyst. And I believed I would always be a good worker bee.
But even so, I always admired those sparkly-eyed entrepreneurial people who had some great idea and made it happen somehow. I was horrified to hear the stats about how small number of them are still in business a year or so later. In fact, they say that there are most businesses created for providing beauty services, and these are the least likely to be successful. I felt sorry for them, I wanted to help them. Just like I always wanted to help all those I have sacrificed for in the past… But I digress…
In my endeavours to teach myself about personal finance I came upon the realisation, and material to support it, that to really get out of the rut, one needs to offer value to others in the form of entrepreneurship. It seemed logical. It opened my eyes – yes, I knew it before, but somehow it never clicked before. Yes, this is what I will do!
And how better to do it than to use my passion to help others to benefit all those entrepreneurial people who couldn’t manage their business, have trouble finding customers etc. How would I do it? Well, I’ve been in software business, I’d do a software for them to help with their work. So how to help them? Create a website where they would find their customers and they could sell their products/services. And also provide some small fee for me, I don’t need much, and if there are many of them, each wouldn’t need to pay too much.
I fantasised so much about it that I couldn’t stop myself from starting when I saw in a FB group people sharing their little businesses before Christmas so we could support each-other by buying presents from each-other. What a great idea, this is so much in the spirit of my idea to build that I took a weekend off all other things (I even skipped my dog’s training class, sorry Musti) and set it up. Very basic at first.
Shared it there… Silence… Shared it in another group where they had the same idea going on… Silence… Manually put all of those shared in those two groups in there… Silence… I had like 50 people visit the site, 5 clicked through to links to providers’ pages.
Well, I understand, there’s nothing much there, no way for the people to edit their own texts or anything… I continued developing on evenings and weekends to get to the point where they could actually do something on the site so it would be a bit more useful, so it could get started.
I am getting carried away with the tale as I was carried away with the just doing it. When I tried to figure out how the legal flow would be to get in contact with the providers that had been shared on my site I found out sharing their information on my site was illegal, as none of them had given their agreement to be there.
I had to take their information down.
I had failed.
And the most embarrassing thing is, I failed where I was strongest. Analysis should be my forte, but I was so focused on the parts of my new undertaking that I knew I would be weak at (sales, marketing, finance) so I did not put much thought into the work I usually do without much problem. The realisation hit me hard.
So, what do I do now? Analyse.
I will not give up. I have taken down the information I had on the site illegally, but I still have the site and the wish to benefit those people. I will find a way to make this legally. I will find a way to get them there when it doesn’t appear to be full of vendors. I will figure it out. It is a strange nut to crack, but I’ve had complex problems ahead of me before this, although in different fields, but this actually IS my forte. This is what I do for living. When you think there is no way to do it, there still is some way to do it. This is actually where it really gets interesting, although it unhinged me for a bit to get this answer.
Or if this really is impossible for some reason, I have the design and framework in place and can focus on implementing some other idea. I did have a few others as well.