The holidays were great for me, exciting to say the least. I’ve had time to reflect on the past year. I had time to think about what I accomplished, what I didn’t accomplish, and what I want for next year.
My biggest challenge in the year ahead is building Engine of Progress in to a profitable business. I build my first product last year and I’m ready to start selling it. I also have a few more products I plan to build. The challenge for me is doing this without investors, while continuing to consult, and having no clue what I’m doing.
I don’t want investors because from my perspective they don’t really solve any problems – they just introduce new ones. Plus at this point an investor would expect to get a huge chunk of what I’m building at a pretty hefty discount. To me money isn’t the problem – I can get money. Knowing what to do is the problem. Specifically – how do I advertise/promote Grinder in such a way that people start buying it? How do I get people to show up at Engine of Progress’s web-site just to read about Grinder? There are a few other problems, but if I cannot solve the marketing problem the other problems are mute.
A related problem has to do with my consulting. Historically, I have always worked through agencies that took care of finding work for me to do. I want to do away with the agencies. They are a hugely valuable asset to me today. But their only real value is the relationships they have with my clients. This year I want to learn how to get and maintain those relationships myself. Doing that will require some significant changes in my behaviors. I’ll have to get out of my office and actually interact with human beings. In some ways this is a similar problem to the one above. Ideally, I would use this web-site as a marketing and promotional tool that would bring my customers to me. But I suspect that I am also going to have to go out and actively find my customers to get things started. I’m also going to get more active in the development community.
In March I’ll be doing a presentation on Visual Studio extensibility. I’m going to dig in to how to build your own templates for Visual Studio so you can have all your boilerplate stuff done and just reuse it on every project.
So the green flag has dropped and the year has started. It is easy to feel overwhelmed with it all. It would be so much easier for me to just grab another contract and do what I’ve always done before. Believe it or not the old results didn’t suck, but I want something new. I want to own the company; I want to build products that help developers do their work. I still want to build applications for customers, but I want to change the way that happens too. Looking forward to this time in 2009 I think I’ll look back on 2008 as a transitional year. I’m not sure how exactly I’ll accomplish everything but I know I can do it. Just don’t expect it to be graceful this first time around.
Here is to a new year - it is going to be fun.