Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman wrote, published, and launched Just Fucking Ship in 24 hours, using a Trello board and an outline to quickly whip up this short reminder to stop procrastinating and get something out the door. They're halfway through editing it and will post updates through Gumroad, so if you buy the book, you can watch it evolve.

I've sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image to view or download a high-resolution version that you can print or reuse.

The principle I'm focusing on is #7: Start with atoms. I'm comfortable with making small pieces now: an outline, a blog post, a sketch. I'm working on getting better at assembling those pieces into molecules, and eventually I'll be able to turn those molecules into rocketships. Eventually. But in the meantime, I can push more things out there.

I've been sorting out my EPUB/MOBI workflow by putting stuff up on Gumroad, like the Emacs Chat transcript collection. (Incomplete, but that's what updates are for.) This will help me Ship More Stuff.

Today I noticed an opportunity for wordplay. The domain was available, so I jumped on it. Shipped.

It occurred to me that Sketched Book is a fun thing to call a visual book summary / sketchnote. So: http://sketchedbooks.com =)

— Sacha Chua (@sachac) December 12, 2014

Ship. Get your stuff out there, incomplete and in progress, because you'll learn more from the feedback than you will from stewing on it by yourself. And if it flops? Don't worry. You'll do another one, and another one, and another one, and you'll learn.

Want the e-book? You can buy it at Just Fucking Ship (Amy Hoy, Alex Hillman; 2004). You'll get a PDF and updates. (Amusingly, no physical shipping involved.)

Like this sketch? Check out sketchedbooks.com for more. For your convenience, this post can be found at sketchedbooks.com/jfs. Feel free to share – it's under the Creative Commons Attribution License, like the rest of my blog.

(Incidentally, I've quoted Amy Hoy before – see my post on Learning slack for another reflection on writing, productivity, and motivation.)

I've been holding back from experimenting with new businesses. I'm not sure how the next few months are going to be like, and I don't want to make commitments like sketchnote event bookings or additional freelance contracts. Besides, focusing on my own stuff has been an interesting experiment so far, and I want to continue it.

Still, from time to time, I get the itch to build systems and processes for creating value for other people. For example, when I talk to people who are struggling to find jobs or having a hard time building freelance businesses, I want to support and encourage them by helping them see opportunities. Talking about stuff can feel a bit empty, but actually doing stuff–and showing how to do it–is more helpful, especially since I seem to be more comfortable with sales, marketing, and business experimentation than many people are.

So, depending on how these next few months turn out, what are the kinds of businesses that I'd like to build?

• E-books and other resources: I like the way free/pay-what-you-want information makes it easy for people to learn without friction and still be able to show their appreciation through payment, conversation, links, or other good things. I also like the scale of it: I can spend some time working on a resource, and then people can come across it when they need it. No schedule commitments, either.
• Software, maybe?: Someday. The upsides of working on stuff that other people use: feature suggestions, warm-and-fuzzies. The downside: dealing with bugs. I think the first step would be to build tools for myself.
• Visual book reviews?: People seem to like these, and I enjoy reading.

Let me take a step back here and break that out into the specific characteristics I like. If I identify those characteristics, I might be able to recognize or imagine other businesses along those lines. What attracts me?

• Scale: Build once, help many. I don't mind lower sales at the beginning if I'm working on the kinds of things that people will find useful over a long period of time.
• Accumulation: I like collecting building blocks in terms of content and skills because I can combine those in interesting ways.
• Generosity: I like free/pay-what-you-want because it allows me to reach the most people and feel great about the relationships.
• Flexibility: I like minimizing schedule or topic commitments because that reduces stress and lets me adapt to what's going on. Self-directed work fits me well.
• Distinction: I like doing things that involve uncommon perspectives or combinations of skills. I feel like I can bring more to the table.
• Value: I like things that help people learn more, understand things better, save time or money, share what they know, or be more excited about life.
• Other things I care about: I care about making good ideas more accessible, which is why I like transcripts, sketchnotes, writing, and websites. I also care about helping good people do well, which is why I help friends with their businesses.

Writing fits these characteristics pretty well. If I can help friends through process coaching and things like that, I can learn more about things that other people might find useful too. It's entirely possible to build good stuff around just this learn-share-scale cycle. Anything else (spin-off businesses? software? services) would be a bonus.

I have a little more uncertainty to deal with. I can see the timeline for it, so I'm okay with giving myself permission to take it easy for the next couple of months. After that, I'll probably have a clearer idea of what the rest of this experiment with semi-retirement (and other follow-up experiments! =) ) could be like.

What would more focused writing or content creation look like? I might:

• Pick a subject people are curious about and write a series of blog posts that I can turn into e-books
• Revisit that outline of things to write about and flesh it in
• Organize blog posts and other content into downloadable resources
• Create courses so that people can go through things at a recommended pace and with multimedia content
  • Ooh, more animations

I think that would be an interesting life. =)

I still want to do something to help all these awesome people I come across who are having a hard time finding jobs or building businesses for themselves, though. It's odd hearing about their struggles while at the same time watching the stock market keep going up – businesses seem to be doing okay, but it's not trickling down? Maybe I'll spend more time listening to people and asking what could help. Maybe I can spend some time connecting with business owners and seeing if I can understand their needs, too. Knowledge, ideas, and encouragement are easy, but there are probably even better ways to help. Hmm… That gives me a focus for networking at events. Looking forward to helping!

I don't sketchnote every book I read or receive, but sometimes it's good to take some time to think about a book even if I don't agree with everything in it.

This sketch (like practically everything else on my blog) is available under the Creative Commons Attribution License, so feel free to download, share, remix or reuse it. =)

From the title (“Conscious” and “Millionaire,” oh dear), to the name-dropping of quantum physics as a way of justifying a “Law of Attraction,” to the membership site that will be $97/month ($9.97/month if you sign up early), this book clearly belongs to a genre of books I tend to avoid. Those kinds of books are great for a lot of people who need inspiration and push. I'm happy for them. Me, I prefer my business advice delivered with a different approach. But I agree with many things in this book, and I'm looking forward to going through the reflection exercises in depth.

I like how Conscious Millionaire focuses on building a business for profit and purpose. I've been thinking about this because of my experiment with semi-retirement. People want to pay me for things like sketchnotes, book notes, visual coaching, consulting, programming, writing, sharing, illustration… It would be easy to say yes, but that often distracts me from the things I want to explore. One way I compromise is through buying back all the time that I spend earning. My experiments with delegation are paying off. In many cases, these systems let me do more than I could do on my own. And in the rest of my discretionary time, I really like this casual, minimal-commitment, flow-based life. I work on whatever I want to whenever I want to, and I still get stuff done.

My expenses are covered by savings and investments, and I live generally unambitious sort of life. Or a differently-ambitious one, at least–I wanted freedom, so I got it. I actively avoid the hedonic treadmill of consumption. I'm not particularly interested in business for the sake of earning more. I am, however, interested in building systems for leverage so that I can make the world a little better. I think of building businesses as taking the kinds of results that people want from me and packaging the processes so that other people can benefit: customers, team members, other stakeholders, and so on. That would be worth spending time on.

So that's what I'm getting out of this book: thinking about building businesses like those would be like, visualizing larger scales, and moving towards those visions with conscious, focused actions.

Before I dig into those reflections, there's a section in here about people who don't charge enough for their services. I want to explore that a little further.

Unfortunately, some amazingly talented and good-hearted people erroneously think they should not charge when they use their passion, purpose, and strengths to help others. … It results from thinking or believing that it is wrong to charge money whenever your actions express your purpose.

I have no qualms about charging high rates for my consulting. For everything else–especially things that can scale up over years, like books–I like using a free/pay-what-you-want strategy. It always pleasantly boggles me when people happily pay $15 for something they could get for free. Don't worry, it's all part of my evil plan. Mwahahaha. It means ideas spread and tribes grow. I figure that if people like all the free awesomeness, we can harness that good karma for something. In the meantime, I'm learning a lot from people in the process of sharing, and I love the feeling of interacting based on abundance instead of transactions.

Besides, the bottleneck for my scaling up isn't time, or even money. If I earned a hundred times as much from online publishing, or scaled up my consulting to have a higher rate or more hours, what would change? I would probably delegate more so that I could help more people create opportunities for themselves. I can already do that with what I have. So I think the real bottleneck is understanding: learning more about what people need, learning more about what I want to share. You can't throw money at that bottleneck. You can only get through by paying attention.

And that, I guess, is why Conscious Millionare might be worth reading. It's peppered with lots of reflection topics and practical advice. If the community and the coaching takes off, that might be worthwhile as a way to compare notes with other people. Like all self-help books, you gotta get out and push. The one-page summary I put together (see the top of this post) might be handy for remembering key points, but you'll get even further if you do the work. I'm looking forward to starting with those three-year visualizations, and then we'll see where this goes from there. If you pick this up, tell me what you think too.

• Affiliate links (some commission): Conscious Millionaire, paperback – Kindle (seems to be $2.99 at the moment)
• Non-affiliate links: Conscious Millionaire, paperback – Kindle

Disclaimer: I received a review copy from the author, who is an actual millionaire from things that are not books about how to become a millionaire. He started with a trucking company, so that's a point in his favour.

There's a lot of information on how you can build an online business by selling what you know. Many people are looking for that dream. It feels a little weird to me, and I want to figure out why. I guess one of the things that rubs me the wrong way is that a lot of people talk about becoming an expert in some crowded topic, and building an audience somehow. I don't want an audience. I don't want students. I want peers and confederates: people who learn, act, reflect, and share.

Another thing that makes me uncomfortable is that there seems to be very little expectation of action. There's a lot of talk about it. But when I go and follow up with people on the results of the advice I applied from them, they're boggled that I actually did something. One person I talked to said that 80% of the people he talked to don't end up doing anything. 20% is still a good number, but still…  Steve Salerno wrote in Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless that the people who buy new self-help books tend to be people who bought a similar self-help book in the past 18 months. I don't want to give people something that just makes them feel like they've made progress instead of helping them actually do things.

I think part of my hesitation comes from this: People get stuck for lots of different reasons, but it's rarely for lack of reading. I don't want to pitch information as the magic pill, the silver bullet, the shortcut to making things happen.

When I read, I skip platitudes but dig into reflections and lessons learned. I like processes and workflows. I want what I share to be similarly useful. The stuff that helps me get unstuck tends to result in thoughts like this:

• “Oh! That's the name of what I'm looking for. Now I can dig into the details.”
• “Hmm, what I'm dealing with turns out to be fairly common. I can try what other people have done.”
• “Oh, I see, I was missing that particular piece. Let me try this now.”
• “Interesting question! Let me explore that…”
• “Okay, that's less intimidating than I thought. I should just go for it.”
• “I had no idea you could do that! Oooh…”

What can I write or draw to help people get those moments? How do I help people get unstuck – or better yet, how can I help them accelerate or expand their learning? And since I can code and tinker and dream… What can I make? Ideas are one thing, but tools are another. I'll keep an eye out for places where people are consistently getting stuck, and I'll see which ones lend themselves to automation.

As I explore packaging and publishing more, I want to focus on stuff that people can't find in a gazillion other blogs and e-books out there. Keep me honest. =) I like making things free/pay-what-you-want, since it helps me act from abundance, widen the conversation, and make room for people's generosity. I'll also share the processes and tools I'm building for myself. If you find them interesting, tell me, and maybe we can find ways to tweak and expand them to accommodate your idiosyncrasies as well as mine. I like the conversations that grow out of this, too.

Some of my technical role models have published books (both self-published and traditional). I can see how that saves a lot of people time and helps people learn. They work on open source projects and commercial systems too. I think that's the sort of information work I want: stuff that helps people do things.

Hmm… Aha! Maybe that's it. If I focus on helping fellow geeks solve problems or try interesting things (mostly tech, some lifestyle?), then I don't have to worry as much about wasting people's attention. We're used to trying things out and testing them against our own experience, and we're used to telling people “Hey, that didn't quite work for me” or “That saved me a few hours of figuring things out! Here's something to make it even better.” =)

(No offense to life coaches, motivational speakers, and self-help authors. Hey, if it works for you, great. =) I don't have the experience to give good, well-tested advice in that area yet.)

Technical guides, I think. My long-postponed book about Emacs. Short guides about Org Mode or automation or Evernote or information management. There's a lot to write. These aren't books people read for inspiration and the vague desire to do something someday; they address what people want to improve now. (Well, maybe Emacs is a little on the inspirational side. ;) )

It's easy for me to connect with people who are already travelling similar paths. I can share my notes. I can reach out and ask questions. What about helping people who are just starting down those paths? Maybe that's where packaging what I know can be useful, especially if I can help people accelerate their learning and diverge to follow their own questions. My selfish desire is to learn from other people's perspectives. I don't want to make people dependent on me, the way that people seem to become fans of one motivational speaker or another. I want people to learn from what I've learned, but I also want them to translate it to their contexts, test it against their lives, and add their own insights. I'm happy to spend extra time helping beginners who do stuff, think about it, and then go on to ask different questions.

So, what would the processes look like if I figured this out? I'd have a good balance of thinking, learning, doing, and sharing. I'd be able to work top-down from outlines, anticipating the questions people might have. I could work bottom-up from questions and blog posts, too. I might not notice that I have enough to publish, so I could establish triggers to check whether enough has accumulated that it needs to be chunked at a higher level of abstraction: Q&A or sketches into blog posts, blog posts into series, series into short books, short books into longer ones. I'd harvest all the generally useful Q&A from e-mail and conversations to make sure they're captured in the pipeline somewhere, even if it's an item in my Someday list.

Onward!

The other week, I focused on exploring ideas and becoming my own client. Last week, I focused on the systems I can set up in order to keep on sharing while I'm distracted by work or other needs. The other week felt happier and more self-directed, but on reflection, last week is great for long-term learning and growth as well. I just have to keep tweaking the balance. Some weeks might be more exploratory, and some weeks might be more focused on packaging things and building processes. I'll probably spend more time on consultinfg going forward than I thought I would two weeks ago, but I can see the benefits of investing the extra income into building up my delegation skills and experimenting with business ideas. (Besides, my clients are nice, and I want to help them do well.)

Thinking about this balance reminded me of this conversation that I had with Ramon Williamson, who has been thinking about the differences between artists and entrepreneurs. He's coming to terms with the fact that he wants to focus on just speaking and coaching, and he doesn't want to deal with a lot of the other small things that are part of building a business. It's like the way my dad focused on just photography while my mom took care of running the company. Ramon is looking for someone who can manage him. I think a lot of people are like that, even the ones who have been self-employed for a while. That's why partnerships often make sense, and why people often struggle with self-employment or self-directed learning.

I think of entrepreneurship as learning how to build processes, then systems, then businesses. It turns out  actually enjoy doing this. I stayed up until 1 AM Sunday morning interviewing an applicant for a writing gig that I posted on oDesk. She seems fine, so I hired her and walked her through what I'm looking for. I'm excited about the possibilities. I briefly thought of agreeing to experiment with managing Ramon and using that as practice for developing my systems, but I've committed to doing public work that builds up my life brick by brick. So I'm going to invest in building up my processes and skills, but I'm going to do that with my own content. That will also encourage me to develop my “artist” side: writing, drawing, coding, sharing, and so on.

Does it always have to be a partnership between an artist and an entrepreneur, or can you do a decent job at both? It seems like artists need to partner with entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs with artistic bents can sometimes pull things off on their own. I think it makes sense for me to focus on developing those entrepreneurship-related skills first. It might mean growing slowly as an artist, but I think processes can scale up art so much. For example, becoming really comfortable with delegation will allow me to imagine things that I can't do on my own. This seems to be something that lots of people struggle with. Most people I talk to have issues with trust, perfectionism, and other barriers. That means that it probably doesn't take that much effort to get good enough to distinguish yourself, so if I can get to that level, that would speed up my growth even more.

People's interests and skills are unevenly distributed. In some areas, it takes a lot of effort to get good enough. In some areas, a little effort goes a long way. It reminds me a little of how one strategy for playing role-playing games is to be a munchkin: to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses in a way that allows you to exploit the rules of the game. While that can lead to games that aren't particularly enjoyable (unless you're playing a game that makes fun of munchkinry), in life, a little of that strategy might be interesting. So, in the areas where I have unfair advantages–and in particular, unusual combinations of unfair advantages–I might be able to recognize opportunities for uncommon contributions.

This enjoyment of building processes and systems is one such unfair advantage. Coding is another, and delegation is almost like a people-version of coding. Frugality lets me take advantage of compounding interest. Reflective learning helps me take advantage of figurative compounding interest, which is enhanced by speed-reading my way through other people's experiences and insights. Satisficing and optimism allow me to avoid the dangers of perfectionism and make it easier for me to experiment and trust. Self-direction lets me use these advantages to my own ends instead of being limited by someone else's imagination or by a job description.

It is a handy combination of advantages. You should be out there, Ramon said. Joining the ranks of infopreneurs (many of whom seem to make their money by telling other people how to be infopreneurs). Making things happen. Living the life. I'm a little meh about the idea. I'll grow at my own rate and at my own time. Plus, I like the free-and-pay-what-you-want model so much more than the buy-my-training-course-for-$X-hundred-dollars. I like the way it engages generosity and acts from abundance, both on my side (here is a gift!) and on other people's. (Here is some totally optional appreciation! Make more stuff like this.) I'll either figure out how to make that work, or I'll eventually come around to setting prices. In the meantime, I can focus on building up those unfair advantages at the same time that I'm building up the things I want to make with them.

For example: delegation. I like framing my work as something that people can flexibly do more or less of, depending on their schedules and energies. It's the same freedom I have with consulting, and I think it makes it easier for people who work for me as well. So it's not a fixed “You must work 20 hours a week” thing, but rather, “Here's a board with all the different tasks waiting for someone to work on them. Pick something you want to work on. You can work more hours on the weeks when you want to, and you can work fewer hours on the weeks that you need to. Just tell me if you need to be away for a while, so I can make sure that work gets reassigned.” I'll check in with my virtual assistants to see if this is working for them or if they need deadlines or set times for focus and motivation. Eventually I might work up to asking for consistent time slots so that I have an idea of turn around times, but the system seems to be working so far.

I've been adding more people to my virtual team. There's a range of rates (anywhere from $2-12/hour), and I'm working on gradually getting more of my assistants to deserve and totally justify higher rates. I proactively give them bonuses and raises, even. Instead of micromanaging who works on what in order to maximize cost-efficiency (approach A: different people for different skills; see diagram below), I'm experimenting with putting all the tasks on Trello and letting people choose from the tasks based on their skills and energy. If I've got good enough rapport with the team, then people might focus on the stuff that really justifies the value in their rate. I want to get to the point where people are generally cross-trained, so people can take the task and see it through end-to-end (approach D). I remember from Toyota's lean method that this makes work better (versus the assembly line, where you only see your small part).

I'm also working on chunking higher-level tasks – the delegation equivalent of going up a level of abstraction, writing procedures that call other procedures. (See my list of processes) For example, I started with separate tasks to extract the MP3, add metadata, upload to archive.org, transcribe the audio, etc. Now I'm testing the task of posting show notes, which includes all of those. Maybe someday I'll get to object-oriented programming!

I started by mostly working on my podcasting flow, but I'm also experimenting with delegating other processes to support learning or sharing. For example, how can delegation support my drawing? My process is pretty efficient at the moment (aside from some cross-referencing data entry that I don't usually get around to doing myself), but if I batch things up more, maybe other people can help me tag my sketches and turn them into posts.

Writing is another good candidate, too. Podcasting and drawing help with writing, so it all comes together. I want to get even better at pulling stuff out of my head and out of other people's heads, and getting those ideas into a form that other people can easily learn from. That's why I'm experimenting with getting writers to help me pull out ideas from Q&As in transcripts and from all these thinking-out-loud self-reflections that may be a little too long and rambling for most people to make the most of. For example, a reader-focused tips post based on this might just focus on building systems and omit the role-playing games references. The end goal for that one would be to have a blog that mixes shorter, focused tips with long behind-the-scenes notes, and to have e-books (and maybe even physical books!) that flow well. That way, it's good for people who just want a burst of inspiration so that they can get on with applying the ideas to their life, and it's also good for people who like seeing the verbose tracing messages as I think and learn.

It's a bit strange investing so much in the processes and output without yet building up the kind of audience and demand that justifies it, but I think it's the Right Thing to Do to have transcripts and follow-up blog posts and all that jazz. If I grow sustainably and keep an eye on my finances, I'll probably get to that take-off point right when I have the skills and systems to support it – and more importantly, the community. I figure it's much easier to build great relationships with confederates/tribe people (Hi!) and provide useful resources for searchers while I'm not distracted by the mainstream yet, and I might not even bother with going mainstream. I'm just going to focus on you, and maybe you'll find it so awesome that you'll bring in a few people for whom this is also a really good fit.

That seems to be the general pattern of how I'm learning about entrepreneurship. I'm investing in the capabilities now rather than waiting for demand to completely drive it – almost like my own little MBA. Still cheaper than $80k+ for an MBA at Rotman, and you'll get better value out of my “class projects” (like this free PDF/EPUB/MOBI of my No Excuses Guide to Blogging guide). At some point, we'll figure out a proper business model. Maybe it's sponsorship. Maybe it's pay what you want. Maybe it's membership, although we'll need to find something that doesn't involve just exclusive access to content, since I like making ideas as widely spread as possible. Maybe more of a coaching program? If you want me to sell to you, tell me how you want me to sell to you. (Comment, tweet, or e-mail me!)

(Although to be fair, there's probably a lot of demand already out there. People have been asking me for an Emacs book for years. Look! I've started drawing maps and other Emacs tips. It will happen. I just need to sit down and share more raw material. This means you need to sit down and ask me questions about stuff I'm taking for granted.)

Maybe it's a weird sort of entrepreneurship that I'm growing into, but I think it will be fun. How can I use what I'm learning to help you?

The first year of my five-year experiment is going well. I learned how to set up the structures for five different kinds of service businesses:

• web development contracting
• social business consulting
• illustration
• conference/event sketchnoting
• public speaking

and two kinds of product businesses:

• writing e-books
• selling used books

… and I got to my first sale (and often beyond!) for each of them (WOOHOO!), which is a thrilling milestone to reach. In addition, I brainstormed more than a dozen other business models that might be interesting to explore, and listed even more ideas for things I wanted to see fixed.

I learned a ton from events, books, and conversations – and what’s even more fun is that I finally got to put into practice some of the things I’ve been learning about entrepreneurship and negotiation. It’s true! You learn things so much more deeply when you actually get to use them.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine any better way I could’ve used that time. Leaving the relative certainty of a corporate environment was definitely the right thing to do. Gradually learning about business through a combination of familiar skills and new opportunities – that was a good thing to do as well.

Seven(!) micro-business experiments in almost a year works out to a business experiment roughly every two months. Let me look at the pattern more closely:

Business	First sale
Social business consulting	March
Illustration	April
Used book sales	April
Web development contracting	May
Writing e-books	June
Public speaking	August
Conference/event sketchnoting	December

What could happen if I experiment with trying to build a business every month? When I first started considering it, I thought: “That sounds intense!” But looking at this past year, it’s almost like taking that first sprint of March to August (six businesses in seven months) and extending it just a few more months. What could I learn and share if I had the capability to test an idea every month? How could I learn how to structure it so that my co-experimenters – people who are interested in being part of this, and the clients who are part of that first sale – get the value they want without being burned by the nature of the experiment?

I think that would be an interesting book – something along the lines of Start-up of the Month. I’d love to read it. I could wait for someone else to write it, but I’m not sure how many people have the time and space and combination of skills to go ahead and try it, so maybe I can write it.

I’ll start in March, because I want to make sure that my current consulting clients are totally happy and that they transition well to being independent. There are lots of things I can do to prepare for that. Part of that preparation includes imagining what it would look like and feel like if I had this smoothly running machine for generating and testing ideas.

Being super-good at building a new thing each month means being able to:

• Generate business value propositions, perhaps picking common markets/personas so that I can get transferable insights and good lists for validating ideas
• Quickly validate problems and solutions through interviews (maybe through Skype – a community of early adopters who are willing to let me pick their brains?)
• Create visual mockups and sign-up pages
• Test pricing and get payment
• Build minimum viable products using popular APIs and toolkits
• Do a whole bunch of businesses and then evaluate which ones to invest more time in, or even spin them off as people are interested

To prepare for that, I can:

• Add more business ideas to the list of  things
• Flesh out more business models
• Start building my tribe of co-experimenters (people who are interested in the journey? potential customers?)
• Map how the different business models relate to each other, so I can organize them in a logical sequence
• Develop my prototyping skills (mockup, design, MVP)

The risks:

• Creating new businesses as experiments can be risky – why should people buy from a pop-up business that may not be around later on? Maybe I can draw ideas from software lifecycles: each month, there’d be a business in startup phase, a business in go phase, and a business in maintenance phase, and I’d build processes or open up the possibilities so that people can take over the business if it promises to be interesting.
• Supporting previous businesses can distract me from creating new ones. Again, processes can help here.
• Business start-up costs can be high; will I see the return on investment? Possibly, if I stay laser-focused on creating that first customer with a minimum viable product. Also, I’ll get a lot of value from the learning.

I think this will be an excellent use of my second year of the experiment, and a good foundation for the other years. Exciting times! Whom should I learn from? Who wants to learn with me? How can we get started?

In Running Lean, Ash Maurya recommends that you document your “Plan A”s – sketch out many possible businesses and business models so that you can rank them. I spent some time on January 1 sketching different business ideas, which I’ve shared on my experiment blog. Here they are as a quick gallery.

I’m planning to print these out, prioritize them, and figure out how to derisk the most promising ones. Do any of them stand out to you as particularly interesting?

See my sketchnotes of Running Lean for more tips from the book, or check out my experiment/business blog for other business-related thoughts.