It’s that difficult time of the year – the year end whereby like the inevitable march of death you await the new year to start things anew. Also during this week, people like myself cannot be bothered producing epically epic blog posts that we usually produce. Instead, as a great way of generating content, people look back on the year, and as such, the dreaded list post makes it’s appearance. You know, the ones that are good for page views? In my opinion, they’ve been overdone – there have even been “Top 10 Blog Posts about Top 10 Blog Posts” (which is easily my favourite). Anyway I thought I would share a blog post that inspired me this year. But first, a story.
My issue with my freelance stuff (and yes I include this as my “freelance stuff”) is I spread myself thinner than the butter on a Premier Inn muffin. Often I get projects that are profitable and project and projects that are fun. The ones that are more fun (such as You’re Supposed To Be At Home) I spend more time on.
Anyway, Blogging Dojo started as a partnership with a guy on a “Forum That Won’t Be Mentioned”, but after a string of disagreements, the project became solely mine. It lay effectively dormant, as I didn’t really know what to do with it. I had a few ideas, but nothing concrete.
And then I read “How To Create a Million Dollar Business This Weekend” by Noah Kagan of AppSumo*.
I can’t remember exactly what about the post inspired me, maybe it was the competition that inspired me – I like Mexican food after all (and I could be dangerous with $1k of AppSumo credit), so I grafted my bollocks for two weeks to make something useful. It was long nights and constant browsing of Stack Exchange to get it done. After a week, I didn’t want to stare at another piece of code.
But after one week, and about $200 spent, Author+ was finished.
After the deadline of the competition, I entered. I was down $200, but the whole process taught me a heck of a lot of actually creating something for yourself – creating something you can sell, marketing it, dealing with support queries (boy don’t I know about this), iteration and updates, upselling and affiliates.
I sit here two months down the line. Author+ has made a profit now (not a million dollars, but enough to justify the couple of week’s work), and continues to get sales every now and again (averaging about 2 a week at the moment). That’ll do me.
It has inspired me to drag WP Email Capture out of what was effect Development hell with a new lick of paint, a new version (which should get released very soon), and a premium plugin which will hopefully be ready by next christmas. I’ve also got a couple of other projects on the back burner which will hopefully be the focus of 2012.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is get things done. It doesn’t have to be perfect (especially with software – the first version of Author+ was lacking a lot of features and the documentation was lacking and confusing, but it does need to be something you can build on. People are very forgiving, and whatever you decide to make is probably a lot better than the tat you can buy at christmas.
Try it, you’ve nothing to lose.
*Affiliate link, what of it?
Photo Credit – Kriss Szkurlatowski
