There’s a local entrepreneurship organization by the name of TechColumbus. They’re the local hub for startups and tend to host plenty of events related to boostrapping, starting up a business, marketing, and all that fun stuff. Zeta Centauri has joined up and will be working on world domination. You know what they say — start local, conquer global. Or something like that.
Even though new product development doesn’t result in any billable hours, it’s pretty useful to know how you’re spending your time. It helps with optimizing workflow, planning for schedules and new products, and is pretty good to know overall. The trouble is, every method I’ve tried has been too annoying and has fizzled out after a bit.
A physical notepad? Sure, I can carry a notepad with me most of the time, but at some point that’s going to require data entry of some sort. This has never worked for me for longer than a week.
Excel? Close, but the fact that it’s a physical file that has to be synchronized across locations and that it’s a little clunky to categorize time has never made this last for more than two weeks.
The only viable solution really would have to be a web-based application.
I asked Google what was available and stumbled into Paymo. It looks like an ideal solution — the interface is clean and streamlined and it’s easy to enter and categorize time. They also have an add-on service that lets you send invoices and bill for time spent on projects. Although I don’t do anything billable right now, it’s pretty nice to have that already in place with the click of a button should I need it in the future. I’m sure at some point I’ll be doing some product enhancements as contract work, so it’s good to know that issue is already solved when it comes up.
It’s only been a few days, but it feels like I’ll be able to stick with tracking time this way. With the graphs and pie charts it’s almost fun to update.
The IBA is an organization that was started here in Columbus, Ohio over the summer. It’s a group specifically for bootstrappers and folks like myself who are building a business out-of-pocket, whether it be part-time or full-time. It’s a nice mix of veterans and beginners with a pretty wide variety of experiences. They’ve already expanded to holding meetings at two locations in the city and I’d be surprised if Cleveland and Cincinnati don’t have their own chapters before long.
For more information, you can visit http://www.bootstrappingassociation.org. It’s not the most sophisticated website, but the magic happens in the meetings. So far most meetings have had between 10 and 20 people attending which is a nice comfortable number.
If you’re curious about the group, you can attend a meeting as a guest and see if it’s right for you.
This week I attended the first meeting of the International Bootstrapping Association as a guest.
The topic of the meeting was “legal issues” and it had an interesting interactive format. It was definitely not one of those “sit back and watch the action” type of things. I had to think and I had to listen, no way out of that. I didn’t learn as much as I had hoped to (I must admit, I’ve probably over-studied legal issues related to business), but I did take home a bit of useful information. The best part was that things were set up in a way where people were encouraged to find solutions to help you with whatever situation you were concerned with.
The meeting was ran by Kevin Gadd from TechColumbus. He makes a great MC and does a very good job of moving things along.
I haven’t yet joined the IBA, but I’m very likely to in spite of the fact that I’ve never been much of a “joiner”. For those curious about the IBA meetings, you do get to attend one meeting as a guest before you have to join up.
In an earlier post I mentioned that some domain ideas just aren’t right for me to develop. They’re not necessarily bad ideas, just not something I have the right combination of knowledge and motivation for. I have a batch of those up on eBay right now. Here’s a breakdown of what they are and why they’re not something I can build:
allpossibleworlds.net: This was the science fiction magazine I was publishing. It’s a great domain name, but I just couldn’t turn it into something else while it was still owned by me. Maybe there’s an interstellar travel agency out there that can make use of it.
champion-analytics.com: This was meant to be an investment analysis site, but I just don’t have the know-how to build it into something that provides actual value for people.
equitysavant.com: Same as above.
forexsavant.com: Same as above.
investor-advocate.com: Same as above.
fmycompany.com: Might as well just read the auction description on this one.
poll-vote.net: I really don’t know enough about what mainstream people are interested in to build a polling site.
veygoth.com: I’ve had the domain for ages, but have no idea what to do with it.
vlacis.com: I’ve also had this domain for ages, but also have no idea what to do with it.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone took one of these domains and built something big and important with it, and I hope they do.
I have just finished creating the Roland JX8P .WAV + Soundfont Sample CD. It’s now available through the Zeta Centauri website and an eBay listing.
The sample CD is a product geared toward people who produce sample-based music. I have no idea how many copies will sell, but it does feel very good to finish and release a product, especially when it required a large amount of effort to create. I’m quite happy with the quality, so I imagine others will be too.
I have other sample CDs in the works, but I want to see how this one does before I finish assembling the others. After all, I may need to refine something in my editing, packaging, or production process.
I hope to release a digital download version at some point, but I have yet to find a good solution for secure digital delivery of files larger than 360MB in size. 5-10 MB is easy. If someone reads this and knows of a good solution, feel free to mention it, but I suspect that I’ll have to build something myself.
Conventional wisdom says that in order to get anything done and to build anything significant you need to have a single-minded laser focus. You need to eat, sleep, and breathe whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. Spreading yourself too thinly means that you’ll only be mediocre at a bunch of things rather than excelling at a particular goal.
In general I believe that’s true. But what happens when you focus all of your energy on something that turns out to be a completely bad idea or something that really wasn’t worth doing in the first place? You fail. Failure isn’t necessarily bad, but it is a little annoying to part with all that wasted time.
That’s why I think it’s OK to keep trying new things until one thing becomes “sticky” enough to focus on. That’s what I’ve done with the significant number of domains and ideas I’ve experimented with — each one of them was really a marketing test. Then again, the wasted time for that approach might be about the same as just running full speed with one idea would have had.
It’s also interesting to think about the fact that there is a “zoom factor” involved. Does working on one thing mean only building one business at a time? Or does it mean focusing on one exact thing at a time to the exclusion of all others, such as getting the CSS perfect for a web page?
I think the point with the conventional wisdom is that once you find something good enough that it will work on a larger scale or with a greater intensity you should run with it. I’m pretty sure it’s still OK to experiement with more than one thing at a time until you know what works.
My name is Jason Champion. I am the founder, CEO, software architect, and chief bottle washer for Zeta Centauri, Inc.
Zeta Centauri came into being in September 2006 while I was developing software for a government contractor. There was a pretty huge cognitive dissonance brewing because I was not working on anything I wanted to be working on.
I started by trying to build a science fiction and fantasy magazine, All Possible Worlds, but it took a year of effort and two issues to realize what a sustained negative cashflow that would be. Like many creative endeavors, most science fiction publications are run in the spare time and spare cash of people who work for a living. I’m pretty proud of the two issues that came out, but it’s not the type of thing that I had any chance of being able to do for a living.
I also released a handful of audio applications — AlgoRhythmia, Vorbital, CheckBeat, the Proxima Controller, and SpaceTheremin. Those apps were generally well-received, with SpaceTheremin winning the Shareware Music Machine editor’s choice award. Being mostly-free, they generated quite a bit of appreciation but no real income. It was very satisfying work, though.
Starting in March of 2007, I left the military contracting company and started working full-time on the magazine and also started pouring a lot of effort into building content-based websites. FreeWaveSamples.com, FictionClassics.com, and SoundProgramming.net came into being at that time.
I spent the next four months doing everything I could to to work on the magazine, the websites, and a small amount of software development. Eventually the money ran out, so I learned C# and took a job with a home automation company.
The job was pretty fun at first, with lots of fun and exciting projects to work on — routing infrared signals over ethernet and interfacing with various fancy electronics. I ended up being promoted to management and given my own team after about a year. Then it started to get really boring, like jobs are wont to do, and I started to burn out quickly. I’m still there, but likely not for much longer.
The whole time I had been building sites and working on small applications, like RoboBlather, the Champion Stock Chart Viewer, the ZetaTag Auto-Renamer, SampleTrigger, and the Zeta MiniBrowser. The apps were just little utilities — I really didn’t spent much time developing software outside of work — and weren’t really income-producing creations.
However, some of the websites have ended up being fairly popular — mainly FindMUD.com, FreeWaveSamples.com, and SoundProgramming.net. They’re not “live-off-of” popular or even “take-money-out-of-the-company” popular, but they do cover hosting, domain renewal, and state taxation expenses with enough left over to buy a cup of coffee or two every month. If I didn’t enjoy living indoors and eating food I’d be all set.
So that brings us today. Over the past three years I’ve bought about 50 domains, with 30 of them being sold, expired, or otherwise discarded and 20 still around. Each of those 30 defunct domains was an idea that I started to run with that either fizzled or failed. Maybe the idea wasn’t that great. Maybe I wasn’t the person to build it. Maybe I built enough of it to realize that nobody cared. Either way, you can count each of those 30 domains as a failed business idea. The remaining 20 are active ideas, with most of them having active websites. Only about 4 of those earns more than the yearly domain registration fee in revenue.
I’ve also sold a small amount of software. I believe the total revenue has been around $250. Much of what was good enough to sell was given away for free.
So, here’s a summary of some of what I’ve learned over the past 2.67 years:
- Drupal. I’m moderately skilled with it at this point since I’ve used it for most of the sites I’ve built.
- It’s nearly impossible to build a real business based on avertising-supported websites.
- CSS. I’m no master, but I know my way around.
- C#.NET. I’m something of an expert at this point. I even have two MCTS certifications — .NET 3.5 Windows Forms and .NET 3.5 ADO.NET.
- wxWidgets. I haven’t used it since I switched away from C++ in 2007, but it’s a very handy toolkit.
- OpenAL. It’s basic but it gets the job done.
- DirectX audio.
- Python. I’m only intermediate-level, but this is what I’m spending most of my “brain time” on lately. I’ll be an expert soon.
- Django. It goes hand-in-hand with the Python learning. I’m a bit of a newbie at it, but it’s sinking in fast.
- Options Trading. This has nothing to do with Zeta Centauri, but I have gotten the hang of the options markets. Since I’ve been active in the stock market off and on for the last 8 years, I was bound to get into options at some point.
- WordPress.
- Nginx, a fast and lightweight web server that is a great alternative to Apache.
- How to set up an Exim4 mail server.
- What a great startup and tech community Columbus, Ohio has if you know where to look for it.
- How to spot a dead-end idea reasonably quickly.
- Search engine optimization. It’s not really that hard if you know what you’re trying to accomplish.
This may not be enough, at least not enough for all the things I want to accomplish, but it is a good start to build from.
All of that was just a long-winded way of getting to the point — this blog is to be a chronicle of a new phase of building, the one where Zeta Centauri becomes my vocation, not my avocation. Check back regularly for news and insights.