Adam McFarland

I’ve never met a business owner who thought it was easy to take a step back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished.

Businesses always have unique problems, issues, things that are unsettled that stress owners out.  It’s because of this that you either fall flat on your face or develop an extreme sense of optimism and a strong work ethic.  Unfortunately those are accompanied by a feeling of constantly being worried that this problem or that problem is going to crumble your business.  The same things that make it possible for one to succeed in business are the exact qualities that make it difficult to appreciate the hard work done.

For me, this week has been one big crap sandwich filled with twists and turns caused by the growing pains of our business.  It’s seemed like we were completely doomed several times in the past, yet we’re still around.  This is no different - we had a stressful week, but the big picture is still pretty good.  Nonetheless, it’s hard to see that right now we’re already a pretty impressive business, regardless of what the future brings.  Sometimes I even feel guilty for taking a few minutes and telling my partners they did a good job or for taking a moment and admiring what we’ve accomplished.  Not because I think it’s wrong, but because I’ve become conditioned to always pushing towards bigger and better things.  It feels like it’s a sign of weakness to be “content” with the company, if even for a second. Us business owners, we always have something bigger and better down the pipeline.

Then again, my personality is such that I am a pretty genuinely happy guy.  I  am very appreciative for what I have.  I do not lack any of the truly important things in life.  It’s like a personality split that pulls me back and forth.   The drive to do better is a blessing, but the inability to appreciate it when you actually have done better is a curse.  Very frustrating.

—-

Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  I had some good ones planned (or at least ones I thought would be good), but it’s been one of those overly chaotic weeks where even when I do get a free moment to relax or get some work done I’m so frazzled that I cannot think straight.  Not a week where my productive output plan really came into play much, although for all of the other more “normal” weeks I’ve been adhering to it pretty well.

Since January I have been fighting to get a fraudulent account removed from my credit report.  In the time after my initial post about this almost six months ago, I have spent hundreds of hours working to get a $517 collection account for Sprint home phone service removed from my credit report (turns out the guy was from Brooklyn, not the Bronx as I had previously reported).

Over the past six months I have spent time daily doing fun tasks such as:

• Filing online disputes with Experian (3 times) and TransUnion (1 time).  Equifax did not have this charge appearing on my credit report (go Equifax!).
• Filing written disputes with supporting evidence.  These forms usually come after you lose an online dispute, giving you a “second chance” to prove your case.
• Sending certified letters to both the collection agency (3 of them) and to the credit bureaus (1 to each).  Each time I paid about $5 for priority mail with delivery confirmation in case I ever went to court and needed evidence of my mailings.
• Retracing my life for the past few years to gather old bills, pay stubs, my social security card, license, fathers license (to show I’m not a “jr”) and pretty much anything else that I could think of to show that I have never lived in Brooklyn, did not start a home phone account with Sprint in Brooklyn, and that I’m not Adam McFarland “Jr”.
• Talking to our lawyer, who re-assured me that I was doing all that I could.  Essentially no lawyer or company would do much more than what I was doing: file disputes over and over and send supporting evidence to both the credit bureaus and the collection agency.
• Checking my credit report every few days to see if anything has changed.
• Calling the collection company, which I eventually realized was an utter waste of time.  These customer service reps here all sorts of stories all day long.  They have no real power to do anything.  They never let you talk to anyone with real power.  So you pretty much get a bunch of miserable reps whose sole goal is to get you off the phone and be as mean as possible in doing so.  One told me my dispute would take up to 30 days to resolve.  When I called after 30 days I was told it would be 45.  When I called after 45, I was told it would take 90 - 120 days.  Always with a snippy attitude, always with the implication that I was lying.  Enough to drive a man insane.
• Researching this stuff online, which pretty much served no purpose other than stressing me out more.

Finally, finally when I checked my credit report yesterday via Experian’s online console - for which I pay $15/month - the account was gone!  I had almost given up.  When we applied for a business line of credit at our bank earlier this year, the process took about an extra month because the underwriters had to review my situation.   I had figured that whenever I went to buy a house I would have to present the mortgage company with a book of evidence just to get approved.  Alas, it looks like my credit report is back to normal and my score is back to a respectable 747.  Sure, I have some student loans and a car loan on there, but I’ve never missed a payment and the info on there is MINE.

Experian is supposed to notify the other bureaus so let’s hope that they do and this never arises again.  My reports all have fraud alerts on them so *supposedly* nothing can be added without my permission and maybe, just maybe this is all done.  The lessons from this are hopefully obvious:  protect your SS# and credit cards as much as possible, check your credit report often, and if something does go wrong fight like hell until it is removed.  This was a hell of a battle I had to fight for something seemingly simple, but I’m glad I continued forcing the issue and finally wore them down.  It is utterly satisfying and an immense weight lifted off my shoulders moving forward with my life.

“Without realizing it, we fill important places in each other’s lives. It’s that way with a minister and congregation. Or with the guy at the corner grocery store, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, co-workers. Good people, who are always ‘there’, who can be relied upon in small, important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

And of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend on us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know. Don’t sell yourself short. You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think.”

-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (great non-business book, by the way)

A few days ago I received an email from Adnan, who runs the very popular young entrepreneur blog Blogtrepreneur. The message included the following (reproduced with his permission of course):

This is going to sound random, but I really wanted to shoot you an email just basically saying that your blog has been my favourite read over the past year. Out of the 30-40 blogs in my feedreader, and the many, many blogs I frequent over the course of the day, yours is the one I most look forward to reading.

I wrote back and expressed my gratitude for taking the time to write such an email. Emails like that are why I blog. Hell, getting emails like that are what I live for. There are few things that make someone happier and more satisfied than to hear that they are appreciated.

The world truly would be a better place if we all took more time to share our appreciation with others. For some reason it’s a really hard thing to do (for most people anyway), but that doesn’t mean we can’t work on it. It’s not an easy thing to do whether the person is really close like a family member, or someone you routinely encounter like that person you chat with a few days a week at the gym.

Today I challenge you to tell someone important in your life how much they mean to you. I’m going to start by following Adnan’s lead - emailing my favorite blogger - and then try to carry the momentum over to the rest of my life.

In my Back on Track post I wrote about how I took a day off and hiked by myself in Thacher Park.  Increasingly I’m finding that the more time I spend doing enjoyable outdoors things like hiking and playing basketball, the more relaxed and focused I am when it comes time to work.  Afterwards my partners and I started talking about all of the great local spots for hiking.  Turns out that George and my roommate Gary had never been to Thacher Park, and Mike hasn’t been since he was a kid.

So last Saturday we decided to get everyone together and go.  My favorite part about where I live is that I’m less than 15 minutes away from either being downtown in Albany (a relatively major city…around 60th largest in the country I believe) or being in the middle of the mountains.  George took some amazing photos with his Digital SLR camera.  I figured I’d share a few - we’ve each been setting them as backgrounds on our computers because of how awesome they are.  Here’s a link to the full album on Flickr.

The warehouse from a distance…

 Waterfall off of the cliff…

The SportsLizard (a dead lizard that we shaped like an S, couldn’t resist)…

The waterfall from above…

Waterfall with the warehouse in the background…

The city of Albany off in the distance, with mountains from Massachusetts and Vermont in the background…

And a stream…

Have a great weekend everybody!  We’re rolling out a couple of cool things for Detailed Image next week that I think could increase sales by a lot, so I’m excited to share once they’re live.

Tonight Mike, George, and I will be heading up to Saratoga with some friends for the first time of the year - amazing Summer bar scene and of course I’ll be eating several famous doughboys at Esperanto…quite possibly the greatest food on Earth.  I believe it’s chicken, chives, cream cheese, and mozzarella wrapped in dough and baked.  It tastes even better smothered in hot sauce - my mouth is watering just thinking about one!

As any college student will tell you, scheduling classes is an art form. My first semester I didn’t have much choice and had to take whatever was available. My second semester I loaded up on Monday and Thursday and had the rest of the week off. It sucked - Mondays and Thursdays wore me out and the rest of the week I had to spend 10 hours doing homework. My third semester I put large gaps between my classes so I’d have time to get work done during the day, but all I did was bone around on ESPN.com and AIM.

My fourth semester I finally got it right: 1 - 3 hour breaks between classes, equally spread out throughout the week. I got the same amount of work done in a 2 hour break that I’d get done in a 5 hour break the previous semester. I didn’t mess around and waste time because I was under a time crunch. A 2 hour break really means like 70 minutes of work when you factor travel time and setup time into the equation. You don’t have any time to mess around with 70 minutes: you’re always under a bit of pressure and that’s why you get so much done. You’re focused. This one lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Read the following excerpts and stop and think for a few minutes before continuing the post.

If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9 and 5, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available. It’s understandable.

Most entrepreneurs were once employees and come from the 9-5 culture. Thus they adopt the same schedule, whether or not they function at 9 AM or need 8 hours to generate their target income. This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.

Since we have 8 hours, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and suddenly need to leave work in 2 hours, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.

Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Workweek, pages 73-74

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

One of the misconceptions about ROWE is that it’s a work-from-home program. It’s not. If you want to work in a cube, that’s great. If you want to work from a coffee shop, then that’s great, too. The question in a ROWE is not “where is everybody?” but “is the work getting done?”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss

The United States leads the world in two categories: work and waste. American employees put in more hours and take fewer vacations than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and our individual ecological “footprints” are much larger.

Coincidence? I think not. The way we work drives our habits of consumption and waste. The more we work, the more we drive, the more energy we burn, the more styrofoam to-go containers we use. At the end of the day, we’re so tired, we devour more takeout and TV, often falling asleep in front of the latter. If we want to accelerate the recent trend of reducing waste, it may be time to consider the radical step of, well, relaxing more, consuming less, and living fuller lives. May the Wall Street Journal editorial board strike me down.

Naturally, most businesses blanch at the notion of giving up any competitive edge in a globalized economy. But it’s not as if moving to a four-day (or 32-hour) workweek would simply lop 20% off the economy. Cutting hours may actually raise per-hour productivity. France, home of the 35-hour week, creates more GDP per work hour than the United States ($37 versus $34, as of 2003). Norway spanks us too ($39), and Norwegians work 26% fewer hours a year than Americans. It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term. In a recent survey by Salary.com, workers copped to wasting about 20% of the average day Web surfing and gossiping. Sound familiar?

Companies can take the first step by reinventing the workweek. Then it’s up to us to devote our increased leisure hours to activities with low environmental impact — and not to driving around gas-guzzling cars or booting up power-hungry electronics. Then we could enjoy both continued wealth and improved planetary health.

David Roberts - Reinventing the Workweek, Green Business Practices - Fast Company: May 2008

OK, soak those in for a second…got it? Here’s what I think when I read excerpts like that:

The Logical Thought

So if I’m not an employee, and we’re in long term growth mode (past the start-up phase), and 9-5 is completely arbitrary, and it’s shown that less time working will make me more productive per hour spent, and if I’ll be healthier/happier by spending more time on things outside of work, and it’s better for the environment, why the f*ck am I working so many hours?

In the startup phase there’s a “cavalier” attitude that you have to have. Life = work and work = life, and that’s OK. But I’ve been doing that for two years and I don’t want to become that guy who works 24×7 for their entire life and misses out on everything else. I enjoy new experiences and new people. I enjoy experiencing life. A large part of that is being an entrepreneur, but there’s also a lot that has nothing to do with running a business.

I spent a lot of my engineering days in college, on internships, and in the work force working on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing projects and always thought to myself “why can’t these principles be applied to areas in business outside of manufacturing?” What 4HWW did for me was validate that increasing effectiveness and efficiency not only can be applied to all areas of a business, but in all areas of life too. Like everyone else I have become conditioned to 9 -5 and needed a little push to realize that I didn’t have to stay a part of it.

What I Want us to Become

I badly want us to become a model of efficiency and effectiveness. I want it because it makes us a more valuable company. I want it because removing the mundane and repetitive improves the quality of our lives.

In my head, all of this starts with our business processes. Unless you’ve got a ton of money (we don’t) you need to do the equivalent of hiring people by automating anything that is repetitive and can be done without human input. It started with our shopping cart software that automates inventory and shipping (side note: we had the owners of a large e-commerce store that’s been running for twelve years come visit us recently. The founder turned to George and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside). It continued by moving all of our data to the web and automating backups and with George automating his accounting. In the future we’ll automate more of our marketing - while things like Google Base submission are automatic, niche newsletters based on customer behavior aren’t quite there yet…but they will be.

Once the business processes are set we can move on to us. We all want to work less hours. Some tasks - like packing and shipping - cannot reasonably be automated with technology so the way you “automate” them is to hire employees. I feel that by the end of ‘09 we’ll have the 2-3 people in place that we need to allow us to work 20 hour workweeks. That’s my personal goal for each of us - the other guys might be thinking less or more, but that’s what I’m pushing for.

How did I come up with 20 hours? In 4HWW Tim Ferriss asks the question “If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?” He asks the question to challenge you to think about what you really need to do to successfully complete your job. However, he bases this on the premise that you don’t like your job and want to work as little as possible. That’s not me/us. I love this stuff. One of the things I really want to do a lot this summer is white water rafting - I’ve been twice and it was fun as hell so I want to officially make it one of my hobbies. I’m pumped. But I equally want to expand upon an email marketing system that we recently launched (right now we send follow-up emails to everyone who makes a purchase asking them to review their products on the DI blog or TD forum, but there’s a ton of growth potential there). I also equally want to hike every state park in the Albany area. Of course I also equally want to bulk up my AJAX skills and improve the user experience on our cart.

Clearly I love our company as much as I love non-work related things. It’s a good place to be in life. 20 hours limits you just enough so that you get excited to work. If I can only work 20 hours the intensity in which I work will be multiplied many times over. I’ll also really look forward to those few hours a day instead of letting my mind drift to things that I might rather be doing.

What I’m Doing About it

I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.

What counts as “work” you ask? Good question. I’m counting everything that is related to running Pure Adapt with the exception of:

• Commuting time
• Blog posts on this blog
• Time spent reading business books or business magazines
• Time spent learning (for example, I have a few AJAX books that will take a lot of time to work through…those don’t count)

Everything else is fair game. I purposely waited until the end of Thursday to do this post because I wanted to test my limitation this week. This week is the perfect test week - if I can do it this week I can do it 95%+ of the time. Being that I got NOTHING done last week with our server mess, my to-do list was backed up a ton. On Sunday night I took all 20 action items and split them up equally among the days of the week. In my head I said to myself “you’re only going to have 6 or 7 hours to do all of this, so you better be focused”. It has worked. Every day I knocked each item off. I am getting at least as much work done in far less time. Some days I worked right up to the last second and others - like today - I was done early. Thus far here are the hours I’ve worked:

• Monday - 7 AM - 2:30 PM (7.5 hrs)
• Tuesday - 7:30 AM - 4 PM (8.5 hrs)
• Wednesday - 7:30 AM - 1:30 PM (6 hrs)
• Thursday - 7:30 AM - 1 PM (5.5 hrs)

That puts me at 27.5 hrs through Thursday. We each have four days at the warehouse and one “off”. My off day is Friday, so I generally do the most work Monday - Thursday. 7.5 hours for Friday - Sunday sounds just about right. I’ll probably work about 4 hours tomorrow, 3 hours on Saturday, and just check email on Sunday (Indy 500 baby….anyone else pumped!?!?!).

This past four days has been the best of my life in terms of work-life balance. There’s nothing outside of work that I wanted to do that I didn’t. That’s huge for me. I’ve also stopped doing work at home - I do most of my work at the warehouse and the rest at Starbucks/other local coffee shops, which helps me mentally unwind when I walk through the door of my apartment. Continuing this schedule will go a long way to ensuring I get the fulfillment I’m looking for out of both work AND life.

I’ll definitely continue to post updates as this unfolds…should be interesting.

Last week was supposed to be a laid back week for me.  I moved to a new apt the week prior so I just wanted to take some time to settle into the new living situation.

Obviously with our server issues that didn’t happen.  The stress/frustration caught up with me and - despite the site move going relatively well - I was on the edge of being burnt out.  Obviously it was a cumulative thing that accrued over the past 2+ years and didn’t just start last week.  I was trying to look at the summer and my move as a chance to regain a little balance and have some more fun outside of work, but last week almost sent me over the edge.  I wanted to be spending my nights playing basketball, having drinks with friends, watching the NBA/NHL playoffs, and catching up on sleep…not doing something I’ve never done before under extreme pressure and with a lack of sleep.

I took Friday completely off and spent the day hiking by myself at Thacher Park.  I’d say I hiked a good portion of the 12 miles of trails.   It rained a bit, but I enjoyed chilling out in the cave next to the waterfall on the Indian Ladder trail for a while.  That’s kind of “my spot” where I go to take stock on shit and regain balance.  Ironically, despite being almost 30 minutes from the warehouse, you can get a crystal clear view of the industrial park because of the elevation.  Other than that though, the thought of work didn’t cross my mind and I was temporarily refreshed.

George and I then went out for dinner/drinks at the chic Avenue A in Albany on Saturday night, which again gave my mind some time away from “server server server”.

Sunday I looked at my to-do list from last week and realized I did 0% of it.  I slowly started chipping away at a reasonable plan to get it all done this week while still working “normal” hours.  Today I got my work done in a reasonable six hours or so (more to come on this - I’m fairly certain that I can work less and accomplish more. I’m planning on placing a work restriction on myself to show that…and give me the dual benefit of retaining my sanity).

Oh, the best part - we nearly made up all of the lost revenue by having a MONSTER weekend and beginning of the week thus far.   From Friday night until Monday morning orders were off the hook - we ended up shipping out 60 orders this morning, easily a record for us.   Average order value was well over $100, so needless to say we’re feeling pretty good about things.  Monday is also the only day where we all work together in the warehouse, so it’s nice to get a little of that energy you get from feeding off the synergy we have as a team.

As usual, never a dull moment.

The long hours and constant stress of running a business are offset by the fact that after working a 12 hour day George and I can go back to the warehouse and play a fierce game of warehouse hockey at 10 PM…using our shipping dock as a goal.

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The word sacrifice is often associated with entrepreneurs. Young business owners like myself often get peppered with questions about making less money or living with their parents or spending less time at the bar with friends, all in the name of their company. As you get older you usually have to deal with paying a mortgage, balancing a marriage, and spending time with your kids.

It’s easy to second guess your decision to start a company. One truth that has always helped me: it is not humanly impossible to have everything in life. There are always tradeoffs with every decision you make, every day, large or small. Some people might look like they have it all together - they don’t. I’m sure you envy Michael Jordan for all of his fame and success…but I’m sure he envies you for being able to take a stroll in the park with your girlfriend without getting mobbed.

We’re in an interesting position with our company right now in the sense that our large development projects are done and DI/TD sales are good enough that we can all take our foot off the pedal just a little bit. From this point on I think we could each work a 40 hour work week (or probably a little less) and the company would still grow. In the 2+ years since I left my job I’ve never quite been in this position. It makes you really, really think about your choices and how you spend your time.

Adam Gilbert did a series of posts about How to Tell if Someone is Full of Shit a while back. His way of finding out what is really important to someone: take a look at their calendar. We all have a finite time to spend on earth and how we spend it tells others what we truly care about.

A lot of people always talk about what they want to do, what they want to accomplish, what they meant to do, their intentions, how they want to change the world and on and on and on.

It seems as though everyone has intentions of doing big things. Clearly, sadly and unfortunately, that’s not the case. Most people are talkers, rather than doers. Let’s face it. It’s a lot easier to talk than do.

In a world where people are moving a million miles per minute how can you actually tell what someone really cares about?

Look at their calendar! It’s that simple.

Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our strategy. Your calendar knows what you really care about.

I never understand people who work 20 hour days yet preach about how important their family is to them. Really?

I’m not trying to say that running a business isn’t hard or doesn’t require tough decisions (read any random five posts on this blog and it’s evident we’ve gone through our fair share of struggles as a company and that I’ve had many of my own personal frustrations). My point is this: stop saying “what if?” and “I wish I did that”. Think really hard about what’s important to you and find a way to spend time doing that. If you factor that into every decision to make, there’s no reason to second guess yourself. “Failures” are learning experiences just as much (or more than) “successes”.

Every once in a while I ask myself “what if” about an array of topics (business, sports, life, relationships) and I always come to the same conclusion: I’ve spent my time doing what I love most, each and every day. Several times I’ve even written out my “ideal day” on a sheet of paper and each time I realize that it pretty closely resembles my real day right now…how cool is that? Sure there are other things I’d like to do. Sure I’d like a little more work-life balance. But how can I call what I’ve done “sacrifice” when I’ve gained so much in return? Just because what I do is different from what most people do in their twenties doesn’t make it any harder or any easier than the norm. As I age and priorities change, my ideal day will change and in turn so will my real day. In the meantime, I’ve met so many great people and had so much fun building our company that I can’t imagine anything making me happier.

One of the more challenging aspects for us with Tastefully Driven so far has been managing the Lifestyle Blog.  Being that it’s a group blog it can take on a different life than individual blogs like this one or the one I run over on SportsLizard.  Both of those blogs have my personality infused into them and I think one of the reasons that they “work” is because there is a consistent voice.  With TD, in one sense it’s tougher because you have different writing styles each post…but that same potential downside is also a huge upside:  you get posts from all four of us (plus one guest writer right now) and each person has their own unique writing style that contributes differently to the community.

Anyway, we’re averaging about a post a day and overall I think we’ve covered a broad array of lifestyle topics in the past month and done a pretty good job of it.  If you haven’t been subscribed, here are a few of my favorite posts:

• The No Excuses Workout - a 20 minute exercise routine that requires only a few feet of space and uses your bodyweight for resistance (video of yours truly performing the exercises included in the post).
• Audio, the Quest for Individual Nirvana - a series of posts by our guest author (and speaker expert) Robert Wayne about the extensive process of choosing a home stereo system.
• 2008 NFL Mock Draft - Greg did a fantastic job of breaking down each teams needs and potential picks for this weekend’s upcoming NFL draft.
• Whey Protein vs. Casein Protein - a post breaking down the differences between the fast-digesting whey protein and slower-digesting casein protein.
• How to Clean and Maintain Your Laptop - a short post and video of how to keep your laptop in pristine condition.
• How to Read 72% Faster in 20 Minutes - the results of a little speed reading experiment I did.
• RSS Explained:  the free technology that will change your life - everything you need to know about RSS.

Enjoy!

It’s a weird feeling that I always get around this time. Every single time I’ve launched a new site or project I’ve felt the same thing, best described by a post I wrote back in 2006 just after the launch of iPrioritize:

From my limited experience as an entrepreneur, I’ve come to the realization that the day after the launch of a new business or product is a weird one. The initial excitement and relief of the launch has been replaced with a realization that you have exactly zero customers. Now, maybe for some people this doesn’t happen the next day, but I’d say something’s wrong if you are still celebrating your launch a week later.

I woke up in a weird mood today. I had that “holy crap, how am I going to get people to start using my site and eventually buy my service” feeling, despite the fact that I have a well-thought out marketing plan to execute. I suppose that I get this feeling because marketing is such an inexact science.

For the past week I was in sort of a post-launch-work-life-funk. All day long I’ve felt anxious and unsatisfied (not typical at all for me) and I’ve questioned if I/we have done everything we could have done to make the site great.

The difference this time is experience: I’ve felt this feeling before and it’s always gone away as soon as things start to pick up and I realize that our months of development were justified. Tastefully Driven has been shipping out 2-3 orders a day, which is fantastic for a nine day old site. I’ve got to remember that we’re in this for the long haul and we don’t need $50k months right off the bat to be having success. I knew this all along - it was part of our plan, but I still got the same anxiety. So I started asking myself WHY.

I think I was wrong back in 2006 - it’s not at all because marketing is an inexact science. It’s because you downshift yourself from going balls out to launch a site to a more steady, long-term marketing strategy. It’s a massive life change that’s akin to switching from being a sprinter to a marathon runner.

For months I was pushing with everything I could to launch the site. Since I knew it was a short term thing, I could work 15 hour days and push aside other aspects of my life. The “rush” was always there because I saw us rapidly achieving goals that brought us closer to the ultimate goal: launch.

Now, I’m doing a mix of things that will bring some sales right away (PPC, product syndication, etc) and things that will bring in sales months/years from now (blog posts, forum posts, videos). Programming goes from exciting features to mundane maintenance, with the occasional exciting feature a few times a year. The ultimate goal is thriving over a period of years, something that’s much harder to get motivated for.

I KNOW from experience that what we’re doing is right and will work. I also know because nine days in things are going about as good as they possibly could (from a sales standpoint and from other important metrics). I feel like a puppet-master who knows exactly what strings to pull at exactly the right times - a skill that only comes with experience.

That said, it’s still a major life change and those take a while to adjust to no matter how confident and prepared you are. The rest of my life that I set aside for a few months now resurfaces and I’ve got to deal with the things that will allow me to live a more balanced life so I don’t burn out - I’ve got to ensure I finish the marathon and that means working a bit less and doing a bit more for myself.

After about a week I feel like I’m getting into a new “groove” and am beginning to find my place. But man, I’m happy we aren’t planning on starting any new sites for a while - even though I knew this funk was probably coming it still sucked.

I’ve never actually heard another business owner talk about this, but I’d imagine it’s a somewhat common feeling for anyone that sells out for something for a short, intense period of time.