Stupid Startuper

Hello dear readers,

In this post I would like to share the reasons why I am coming back to the same old idea of bloging. Also to let you know what you can expect during the upcoming month. Or more.

After reading the blog post by Rokiškis Rabinovičius I have caught  myself thinking: why irrationality stops the growth of JobRely. Afterwards I have started an intensive self analysis and understood, that:

• If something is not changed by me I will loose control of my current life (scary, huh?)
• Finances will become a big issue for me soon if I continue working on JobRely.
• Personal life will become fucked up and afterwards it will start rolling down the hill.
• Distraction comes too often to my daily work.
• Quite often I do work (tasks) about which I am not happy.

So what can I do? First I must agree that to solve problems I need to make unpleasant actions. And afterwards accept the outcome. While thinking what motivates me, empowers to collect all the strengths, accumulate and use the power inside towards the goal I understood the same old thing I had understood from time to time before:

– friends and (loudly) made promises together with ability to review what actually had been done.

Yeah, these things motivates me. So I made a pact with my self and you, my dear readers to do the following:

• Each morning I plan my time to have a “3 days work”. This means that I plan works which can be done in 16 hours. And I don`t rest on Saturdays and Sundays (which is actually happening). And my plans goes public here (with some hidden info under the ****ing stars).
• Each evening I share what have been done during the day. During the sharing you will here more about the JobRely!
• In addition to sharing what have been done I`ll add some stories, lessons learned, interesting insights for me.
• And finally I will force myself to evaluate my daily performance.

So now it is the time to start sharing a lesson I`ve learned today:

While I was walking and thinking how to overcome this situation I faced the wall most of startups are facing: the lack of financial resources.

(Some pre-history: As some of my readers might know, we were really close to the agreement with some venture capital company, but decided to reject it (might share the reasoning on future posts).  Anyway, as an outcome we decided to be self funded or in other words to sell our time, resources, waste savings so we could have a better starting position. And we are doing this successfully. The product development is really close to finish, we financed the development process by ourselves.)

From my personal perspective (for each team member the situation is different) the financial income was generated from freelancing activities. I did (and still do) coding, analytical and related jobs which were payed well. How ever the payments compensated the bills, not the time needed for JobRely. And the revenue wasn`t high enough so from it I could keep myself and pay for some other person to do the job I wasn`t fast(=didn`t have time) enough to do. The end result in my case was that I was not focusing enough. I was wasting my energy. And I acted stupid.

While walking I came up with the idea to have a clear separator what is being done when. As a separator I identified lunch and decided that before lunch (in the morning) I`ll be focusing on the payed jobs, after the lunch only on JobRely matters. Also my #1 priority is still JobRely, therefor first hour after lunch will be dedicated for the project financial sustainability. F.e. before it was that when/if I have payed task – I am working on it till I finish, afterwards returning to the JobRely. If I feel pity about Jobrely I am rejecting the job and not earning money. After some time I need to regain my finances again. Shitty circle of unbalance under which the rope is hiding. The rope that is on your neck and which is getting tight. And either you will get into it (I didn`t and I never thought about the suicide. Tho I love black humor and dark jokes^^) or some of the activities will have to be shut down.

By combining all the information I come up with two conclusions:

1. If you have not enough for project to be done – don`t do it or you will be forced to leave your comfort zone
2. If you are crazy enough to do that – have a plan how to generate income and clear line between your main job (startup, obviously. If it`s not the case for you – you are working on a wrong idea) and the job that generates income.

To close this post (and have some space to write about tomorrow) I would like to ask a favor from you: instead of giving thumbs up, supportive words, other sweat shit be critical, point at mistakes I make (including the grammar) and share the interesting resources for reading;)

Vytenis