Let me tell you a bit about what I'm doing
This irregularly-kept blog thing is getting so irregular it’s almost regularly irregular. Lest you fool yourself into presuming any ability to predict when I might write here (i.e. “never”), let me thwart your erroneous notion by serving up this rambling missive, unexpected and with neither warning nor warrant!
Take that, predictability! Chalk another one up for chaos.
I live in Austin now, or at least, for the moment
In summer last year, I moved from London to Austin. My other half had already been living in Austin for two years, and I’d been flying back and forth ever other month or so, but 24 months of that is quite enough, and so I bit the bullet and gave up my London life for Stetsons and spurs. It’s been quite an adventure so far, although I do miss a few people back in the UK.
We don’t know how long we’ll stay here, but for the moment I’m enjoying the weather immensely. You might think it’s a balmy summer in London when temperatures regularly reach 20°C, but during Austin’s summer the temperature never drops below 20°C, even at night. Can you even conceive of that?
Farewell Go Free Range, Howdy Exciting
Leaving the UK also marked the beginning of the end of the Free Range experiment for me. Ever since I started kicking the ideas for Free Range around in late 2008, I’ve always considered it an experiment. I wish I could say that it had been a complete success, and it was very successful in a number of important ways, but if you’re going to pour a lot of energy into trying to make something for yourself, it really needs to be moving in the direction you feel is valuable.
I wrote a bit more on the Exciting blog and the Free Range blog. I could say a lot more about this – indeed, I have actually written thousands of words in various notepads and emails – but I’ll save that for another time; my memoirs, maybe. It takes a lot of effort to keep a small boat moving in a consistent direction through uncharted waters.
So: I’ve spun out a lot of the projects I was driving into a new umbrella-thing called Exciting, and that’s the place to look at what I’m working on.
Right, but what are you doing exactly?
Well, I’m still doing the occasional bit of client work, and I have some tinkering projects that I need to write more about, but this year I have mostly been1 working on Harmonia. Although it was built for Free Range, it’s still both a product and a way of working that I believe lots of teams and companies could benefit from. I’ve added a fair bit of new functionality (more calendar and email functionality, webhooks, Trello integration) and fixed a whole bunch of usability issues, the lion’s share of the work has been in working on how to communicate what Harmonia does and how it could help you.
I really cannot overstate the amount of effort this takes. It’s exhausting. Some of that is doubtless because I am a developer by training, and so I’ve had to learn about design, user experience, copywriting, marketing, and everything in between, as I’ve gone along. It’s very much out of my comfort zone, but it’s simply not possible to succeed without them.
You can build the best product in the world, but if nobody knows it exists or can quickly determine whether or not it’s something they want… nobody will ever use it.
The good thing is that the web is the ideal medium for learning all this, because you can do it iteratively. I’ve completely redesigned the Harmonia landing page four times since it became my main focus, and each time I think it’s getting better at showcasing the benefits that it can bring. It still needs more work though; as of writing this I think it’s too wordy and the next revision will pare it down quite a bit.
Going solo
It’s also a real challenge to keep up this effort while working alone. It’s hard to wrangle a group of people into a coherent effort, but once you succeed then it provides a great support structure to keep motivation up and to share and develop ideas. Working by yourself, you don’t have to deal with anyone else’s whims or quirks, but you also only have yourself to provide motivation and reassurance that what you’re working on is valuable, and that the decisions you’re making are sensible.
What’s more, it can be challenging to stay motivated in a world seemingly filled by super-confident, naturally-outgoing entrepreneur types. I don’t operate with the unshakable confidence that what I’m building is awesome, or that my ideas are worth sharing, or that they even have any particular merit.
Confronted with the boundless crowd of what-seems-typical Type A entrepreneurs that fill the internet, prolifically, with their reckons and newsletters and podcasts and blog posts and courses, I often wonder about the simpler life of just being an employee; of offloading the risk onto someone else in exchange for a steady incoming and significantly less crippling self-doubt. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way, whose skin crawls as yet another service or blog post or person is cheaply ascribed the accolade “awesome” when really, I mean, really, is it? Is it?
But… there’s still a chance that I might be able to carve out a niche of my own, and maybe build another little company of friends working on small things that we care about, and investing in our future collectively. I still believe that’s a possibility.
Anyway, so that’s what I’m doing, mostly: crushing it2.