Starting a business

AKA my bookshelf is all over the place

I want to start a business

I’ve been wanting to start my own company for years at this point. I’ve read every book by Simon Sinek (bit of a fan boy), most of Adam Grant’s, The 4-Hour Work Week, and the list goes on. Not necessarily all of the “traditional” business books, but much of what I’ll call the “new age” of business. Some of these are really about running businesses or operating as a team, or even more along the self-help category, but not strictly about starting a business. For that, I’ve generally followed various YouTubers and podcasters that talk about business (Codie Sanchez, Diary of a CEO, Alex Hormozi, and others), but particularly bootstrapped startups (Rob Walling, 37Signals, Startup Therapy, etc). My professional experience is entirely in software companies, so that’s generally where I lean. I’ve been a part of three venture backed startups at this point, one of which that recently decided to close, and I don’t know if that’s the path I want to take. Something about the bootstrapped startup just sounds more appealing and less risky. You don’t have to meet certain metrics to please the investors and board of directors. You just get to solve problems for people. On the other hand, it is a lot harder trying to build a company while also maintaining a day job. Which brings me to one other experience I haven’t mentioned, the coffee roasting business.

My business experience

Wait you have a coffee business? Well, “had” actually. We recently decided to close shop (which is not the startup I mentioned that failed). We just weren’t getting the traction we wanted and had been running it for a little over three years. Honestly, we (mostly me) weren’t putting in the time we needed to grow it. We didn’t pay for any marketing or advertising. We were doing it entirely by friends, family, and word of mouth. Not a great strategy when you can’t even get most of your coffee-drinking friends and family to order consistently. So as far as running a business and learning things go, it didn’t provide much to aid my desire to start my own company (I know it was technically half my own company, but just wasn’t quite what I’ve been looking to do). I’m sure I learned a few things that will be applicable in the future, but not nearly as much as I should have. That’s on me.

So what else have I done to learn about starting a business? Well, I co-hosted a board game podcast for almost three years. That was quite a while ago at this point, but I learned a ton in that time. We were doing a podcast before they really exploded. We could have rode the wave up, but we burned out. We stopped it just months before the COVID-19 pandemic, which turned out to be great timing since it would have been hard to really continue making good content without being able to play games together. It was a fantastic time, but now the podcasting landscape and tooling has changed. I spent hours editing our episodes, and AI can now edit your podcast for you basically. Sure it probably can’t cut out awkward portions where you said something stupid, but those “ums” and “ahs” get obliterated. This was all just for fun though, which is what made it such a great learning experience. We weren’t trying to squeeze everything out of it to make a living for four people (or even one of us for that matter). We were making a little money on Patreon, had a niche following, and made some new friends along the way. I mostly learned about content creation/marketing and audio/video editing. But being comfortable on a microphone was probably the biggest gain moving forward.

As you can tell, not nearly enough experience on most fronts. Ask me to build a product and I can do a decent job. I’ve done enough leadership to feel comfortable managing people and operations, but I’ll still have a lot to learn. Anything else though and I’ll struggle. I don’t really know sales and marketing. Sure, I’ve worked with good people in those departments and picked up some knowledge, but not nearly enough to feel confident right out of the gate in a new venture. Ultimately, I’ll just need to figure it out and get started with something. Which I’m kind of already doing, but more on that in a few months.

The engineer in me

On the other hand, I recently picked up Writing an Interpreter in Go by Thorsten Ball. I want to up-level my engineering skills and it really seems interesting. As I said previously, I also want to learn go, and this is a unique way to do that. I’ve also read Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal and most of An Elegant Puzzle - Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson. One about open source software and the other about building engineering teams from small to large. Bit of a conflict of desire isn’t it? Strong desire to start a business but also to get better at engineering. Sure, I could pursue both, but there are only so many hours in the day. One possible solution I’m considering is actually already in my wheelhouse, content creation. Weird I know, but hear me out. Creating content around my own journey towards becoming a better engineer is a way to start my own thing. It’s a very different kind of business than I’ve ever really been a part of, but kind of checks most of the boxes. Whether it is a blog (well, a second one), a podcast, a YouTube channel, or something else, it’s an opportunity to become a better engineer, teach others, and learn other parts of business along the way.