Category: Work

For the past 8 years, I’ve run my own company. A digital product consulting company. Across those 8 years, I’ve launched 3 products of my own that I’m very proud of – while doing interesting client work, that I’m also very proud of.

I’ve also become a father of 3.

As I write this, my third child is nearly a year old. Experience has told me – a newborn in the house is demanding enough – there’s no reason to purposefully add more. Whether that be the demands of launching a startup or anything else. It just makes everything that much more difficult and everyone that much more unhappy. I want more happiness – not less.

Thankfully – I’m able to work in a way that I’m most productive. On projects I’m interested in and still be there when the 5 yr old finds his first toad in the backyard.

This is why I live in Minnesota.

“If you can build a six-figure lifestyle business, chances are you can build a million-dollar business, but only if you want to. How big you build the business is up to you because you’re calling all the shots, for better or worse.” – Corbett Barr

“When you need thirty people to create a company, venture capital is important. When you need three, it isn’t….we’re three middle-aged fathers…we decided that we wanted to make enough money so that none of us had to change our standard of living.” – Dan Grigsby

“I’ve been doing one kind of startup or another for pretty much my entire adult life, so being an entrepreneur is really the only way that I know how to live and that’s with or without kids.” – Jason Roberts

PREFACE: This post was sitting in my drafts since July, and it seemed to go nicely with the co-working post, so I hit publish.

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After we returned from a refreshing holiday weekend¹ at the in-laws, Cooper asked why we came home.

“Grandma, Grandpa, and Papa all have to go to work on Monday.”

“Where is Grandma’s office?”, he replies.

“Remember we drove past her office on the way to the petting zoo and car show?”

“Why isn’t her office in her house?”

I’ve worked at home since before the kids were born. I prefer it to an office outside of the home for a number of reasons. Primarily, I have greater control over my personal comfort (temperature, lighting, chair/desk/table heights) in my home office than I do elsewhere. Secondarily, considering how abstract my work is, having a home office makes me feel like the kids have some notion of what I do² (even if that notion is limited to ‘drawing on whiteboards’).

Related: Merlin Mann’s The Richard Scarry Book of the Future [mp3]

1. Including a late evening pontoon ride, a chilly swim in the Wisconsin River, and a fantastic dinner at the recently opened Red Eye Brewery. I highly recommend all three.

2. My dad’s work took him away from the house for the entire work week – I know my a good portion of my attitudes about work are a direct response to that.

Some of you have been around web design long enough to remember the 4Ds (Discover, Plan, Design/Develop, and Deploy) that were so popular in agency marketing materials in the late 90s.

At the time, I once asked my CEO about them (he wrote the marketing copy)

“Well, we don’t do them on all the projects. Clients actually only care about the last one.”

Um.

So, the rest are for showing how unfamiliar with the client’s domain we are?

A while back, Jason Fried recounted those days:

“In 3 weeks we managed to tell them exactly what they already knew while also burning through 15% of the budget.”

blah.

He continues in the comments

“…you don’t really know if something is right until you do the real thing.” – Jason Fried

On my internal projects (the ones that lead to interesting clients), here’s my process

1. Sketch out the primary screen on a 3×5 notecard.
2. Draw out the database schema (I understand more about an app via its DB schema than a wireframe or UI).
3. Build the smallest functioning app possible.
4. Deploy. Public or not, deploying makes it real.
5. Build the app better.
6. Repeat 4-5 indefinitely.

Related:
Eating your own dog food

“We starting doing release cycles that were only a few hours apart, re-releasing every time we fixed a significant problem. ” – Andy Hertzfeld on making the original Macintosh OS.

“So. We all know we should ship early, ship often. That small, achievable goals are the best. That having something useful and publishable within a day or two or three trumps planning everything perfectly to the nth degree.” – Amy Hoy

Reviewing some year old files, I saw a note on the “third place”, TwoRooms.net. Their idea was to combine a temporary office space and childcare.

Great concept. Alas, like Gate3 before them, TwoRooms is no longer.

Either there’s demand for a temporary office space thing and maintenance is really hard or there’s no demand. I’m leaning toward the latter.

“Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do” – Business Week

The whole article is good.

I continually struggle with the notion of an office outside of the house. It alway feels like so much overhead, separation, and duplication (internet, plumbing, etc). I’m wishing Best Buy the best in this experiment.