sacha chua living an awesome life

When I started my experiment last year, leaving the familiarity of web development at IBM for my own adventures, I wanted to dig into several big unknowns that I had little experience with: the paperwork and accounting required for business, and the sales and marketing that’s even more crucial to business survival. I had tracked my personal finances and prepared our taxes for years, but business finances were new to me. I’d loved reading sales and marketing ever since I could clamber up my mother’s bookshelves, although my understanding was still abstract. So I expected to do favourably, but I was still a little nervous. After all, this was one of the key differences between an independent life and one inside a company. My experiences with this would determine whether I could survive on my own or whether I’d do better within a structure built by someone else. Would the benefits of managing my own business outweigh the overhead? Would the experiment be a long, hard slog, or could I get the hang of the fundamentals?

Accounting and paperwork was the first hurdle. I wanted to incorporate right away to have that separation between me and the company, so that any mistakes I might make wouldn’t bring us all down with it. It was probably unnecessary, but it was good to know that as long as I paid attention to the details, we’d be okay.

For the most part, D.I.Y. paperwork has been sufficient. I filed my articles of incorporation online, registered my company with the Canada Revenue Agency. It took me a while to sort out getting a business credit card, but it was straightforward once I did so. There were a few stressful evenings of forum research and fact-checking on government websites, such as when I decided to cancel my cellphone claims and ended up owing additional taxes. (It turned out to be just a few dollars’ worth.) Reading entrepreneur forums like the ones at Red Flag Deals helped me watch out for common pitfalls, such as the installment payments that automatically kick in after you reach a certain income tax threshold. I’m still postponing the paperwork needed to figure out how to get money out of the company. One step at a time.

I’ve grown to like that separation of saying, “This contract is between your company and my company,” or “The business will invest in buying ____.” It forces me to make decisions: is this worthwhile for the business? I have a trade name now, although I’ve kept the main company as a numbered company so that I can stick all sorts of other experiments underneath it.

If I were to do it again – or even now – I’d love to have an accountant whom I could e-mail questions periodically. I’d still want to keep a close eye on my books, and my transaction volume is low enough that I can handle things myself with Quickbooks. It would be good to have someone doublecheck things, though, and answer my questions.

One of the things that makes it easier for me is knowing that this too is an experiment, and that I can start up a different company with a different structure in order to try out other things. I don’t have to get everything gold-plated the first time around.

That’s the paperwork and accounting part of the business, which is usually a thorn in people’s sides, but which has turned out to be doable and even a fulfilling Friday afternoon routine.

Sales and marketing were other parts of business that I’ve heard many fellow geeks gripe about, so I wanted to find out what both of those were really like. Most freelancers I know have their plates full with referrals and repeat clients, and many don’t actively sell their services. I was lucky to have had clients for consulting and contracting right away, thanks to personal networks and my blog.

In the past few months, I’ve been making myself scale back consulting so that I can force myself to learn more about sales and marketing. Digital conference sketchnoting gave me a great excuse to try it out. Sketchnotes are visual. People have built businesses around this before. Businesses have bought services like this before, although generally in other cities. The sales approach would be to reach out to conference organizers and event agencies, while the marketing approach might involve posting sketchnotes and resources for organizers. Illustration is a complementary service, too, and there are other services I can cross-sell.

Here’s what I’ve come to enjoy about sales:

• I like the process of mapping what I can provide (based on my own skills or including others) to what could create value for people.
  I like negotiating: cutting out the non-essential, adding options that people are curious about, and finding creative ways for everyone to get what they want.
  I like coming to an agreement on value and deliverables.
  I like receiving cheques and depositing them.
  I’m even fine with following up and with turning down clients. Sometimes there’s a better fit elsewhere.

My marketing has been a gradual process of building up my website and sharing more resources. I enjoyed designing a logo and thinking about how to explain what I do. I’m glad I can build my own website and tweak it based on the ideas I have. New entrepreneurs are usually advised to outsource web design and development, but I think there’s value in creating my own simple site and evolving it over time. There’s still so much more to learn.

Looking back at this first year of my experiment, I think that the overhead of building my own business has been more than worth it. Many people see paperwork, sales, and marketing as distractions from the fun stuff, the work that they actually enjoy doing. For me, these activities are like programming, although in a slightly different form. It’s like learning more about the APIs (application programming interfaces) of the world, exploring the standards and specifications to find out what’s required from me and what’s possible. It’s like developing procedures, dealing with bugs, and improving algorithms. It’s like playing around with an interface until you figure out something that flows.

I’m glad I started this experiment. It’s difficult to imagine a career path within a company that would shift me from development (which I’m good at and which I still enjoy) to learning more about sales, marketing, and finance (which I’d have no qualifications for, and which I’d probably be terrible at in the beginning). It isn’t optimal. It doesn’t make sense. On my own, I can make that decision to temporarily give up some productivity in favour of building a useful combination of capabilities, and then see where I can go from there. I am less awesome a developer than I could have been if, say, I’d spent a year intensely working with Rails in a boutique web development agency, but this combination of tech and business and creative and communication will probably come in handy someday.

I think this will give me a great foundation for further experiments. I spent the first year of my experiment learning that it’s not that scary to create something and get to the first sale. I’d like to spend the next year getting even better at taking a business from the sparkle in one’s eye to a prototype that people can look at, sign up for, or buy, learning more and more about de-risking ideas. Then three years to see what I can do with those skills, and then my first evaluation: back to the world of other people’s ideas, or onward with developing mine?

I’ll still need to keep working on the fundamentals over the next year, of course. Some of the things I want to learn or practise include:

• Moving money from the company to me (good for replenishing my opportunity fund!)
• Elimination, delegation, and automation
• Identifying prospects and reaching out to them
• Following up with people
• Building a library of resources not just for marketing but also because it’s good to share, like the way my blog has led to so many great conversations over the years

This experiment rocks.

One of the best things about programming is that as you learn more, the possibilities increase dramatically. Each new thing you learn can be combined with so many other things for even more awesomeness. I’m getting ready for my idea-of-the-month experiment, and I’m thinking about the kinds of building blocks I’d like to learn more about and use.

Android development – I can build small apps for myself
Data visualization library like D3 – web-based graphs
Some kind of Javascript/CSS/Rails front-end toolkit that makes it easier for me to prototype rich user interfaces
Evernote API, so that I can improve my workflow
AutoHotkey – finely-tuned timesavers
Rails 4 – prototyping
WordPress backend – building things
WordPress theming – design
Twitter API, for analysis
Meetup API, for analysis
Google Contacts, Google Calendar, IMAP headers – for analysis
OCR, speech recognition – so I can convert, even at 80% accuracy
Arduino, sensors, and motors – for interfacing with the physical world
Emacs LISP – for personal productivity
PhoneGap – cross-platform mobile apps?
Dropbox API – tools, analysis
Twilio or some other text API – communication

For March, I’d love to dig into Emacs, D3, and maybe Evernote. That way, I can prepare for the Emacs conference, visualize my Quantified Self stuff, and dig into my new brain backup system. :)

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:

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?

Ten months after incorporation, I’ve finally come up with a name for my company. I wanted to combine the different aspects that resonated with me and with other people during conversations and events. Consulting was easy to do under my own name and with a numbered company, but if I want to expand to channel opportunities to other people, it would be interesting to see if I can build something bigger than myself.

One of my favourite words for describing what I’m working on is Experiment. I like it because it combines openness and deliberate exploration, where even the challenges are opportunities to learn. Because this is an experiment, I don’t have to over-commit to a single option. I can try something and see what happens.

For this next experiment beyond consulting, I’m thinking of building a business around visual summaries and sketchnotes. The visual aspect of it is fascinating. Somehow these sketchnotes are more engaging than blog posts or talk videos. I think it would be wonderful to see where this goes.

I’ve been collecting different name ideas. Straightforward names like Visualize Business? Something punny, like Sketchup & Relish (turns out there are a few groups by that name)? Visualisto (playing on “alisto”)? Visualysis, referring to analysis? I looked up Latin roots and played around with prefixes.

After turning over all sorts of names in my head, I started playing with this one on Tuesday night: Experivis.

Why Experivis?

I like the way this made-up word lends itself to multiple explanations. Experience –> Visuals is the one that’s the most relevant to this next experiment. Experi- also evokes experiment, and combined with vis-, it’s kinda like saying, “Let’s try things and see.” It’s abstract enough so that I can use it for other ideas, too.

(W- said, “It sounds like a drug name!” I said, “Maybe people will think of experts or experience.” He said, “People tend to think of pros instead of experts.” “Provis?” “Now that definitely sounds like a drug.” So Experivis, then.)

Okay, now what?

I did a quick check to see if the domain name was available, if it was in use on the Web or as a trademark, and if there were any unfortunate meanings or translations. Only two pages of Google results, and no one was using it as an exact word.

Then I slept, because it’s good to give your brain time to play around things like that.

When Wednesday morning came, the name still felt okay. Great! I spent a few hours setting up the domain, registering it as a “Doing Business As” name in Ontario, and putting together a quick website at ExperiVis.com with a custom theme based on Pitch. I disabled the parts I hadn’t built yet, created some pages, imported some content from my main blog, and fiddled with the text. Whee! It’s fun to spin up a website so quickly.

Some next steps

• Explore logo ideas
• Draw the value proposition as a sketchnote
• Add more links
• Write and organize useful content

Level up!

I am, for the most part, a relentless optimist. I embrace my inner Pollyanna. I regularly explore my goals with the Imagine Wild Success technique. Most people know this part of me, because I’m often the first to find the silver lining in any cloud.

Here’s something less visible but also very useful: I also use worrying productively. I plan ahead so that I can make myself a strong safety net. I go through mental fire drills so that I can figure out how to respond to various situations. I use the stoic practice of negative visualization to deal with loss before I have to deal with it.

I use pessimism in order to enable and support optimism. For example, a project pre-mortem is a great way to imagine causes of failure – and think about how you can prevent or address them.

I’m about ten months into this 5-year experiment with entrepreneurship and self-directed time. There are many ways it could fail. The good thing about framing it as an experiment is that even failure can give me valuable information. The main “real failure” is not being able to collect and make use of the insights it gives me. Here’s that and other things that could make this a waste of time:

When I write down my ghosts, they become less scary. Knowing that the potential failures have been written down, defined, and (somewhat) planned for, I can free myself up to think about the flip side: what does success look like? how do I get there?

What are your potential reasons to fail? How can you deal with them?

I finally sat down and transcribed the interview on discovering yourself through blogging, where Holly Tse puts up with my firehose braindump of things I’ve learned. It’s an hour of audio, more than 53,500 letters, and about 9,500 actual words. The words per minute measurement uses a standard of five characters per “word”. This means I clocked in at more than 180 wpm.

I like reading much more than I like listening, and a transcript makes it much easier for me to search and review what I said. After considering the options, I ended up transcribing the interview myself. I even built my own foot pedal. ;) So, here’s what I’ve learned.

I started off by trying to use ExpressScribe and Dragon NaturallySpeaking for automatic transcription. It looks like I’ll need to do a lot of training to get this ready for transcription. The fully-automated transcript was useless. I tried slowing down the recording down and speaking it into Dragon NaturallySpeaking (somewhat like simultaneous translation?). This was marginally better, but still required a lot of editing.

I gave up on dictation (temporarily) and typed the text into Emacs, using keyboard shortcuts to control rewind/stop/play in ExpressScribe.

I took a second look at the outsourced transcription options. CastingWords had raised prices since I last checked it. Now there wasn’t much of a gap between CastingWords and TranscriptDivas, another transcription company I’d considered. With TranscriptDivas, transcribing an hour of audio would have cost around CAD 83 + tax, but I’d get it in three days.

Before I signed up for the service, though, I thought I’d give transcription another try – particularly as I was curious about my DIY foot pedal.

I told myself I’d do another 15 audio minutes so that I could see what it’s like to transcribe with my foot pedal. I ended up doing the whole thing. I used ExpressScribe to play back the audio at 50% speed, and I set the following global shortcuts for my foot pedal: center-press was rewind, left was stop, and right was play. I ended up using rewind more than anything else, so it worked out wonderfully.

Discovery: Listening to myself at 50% makes it unfamiliar enough to not make me twitchy, although it can’t do anything about me being sing-song and too “like, really“. That might be improved through practice.

90wpm input was pretty okay. Faster, and I found myself pressing rewind more often so that I could re-hear speech while catching up.

Assuming sending it out to a transcription company would have cost CAD 95/audio hour and transcribing the entire thing myself would have taken 3 hours (including breaks), doing it myself results in a decent CAD 30/work hour of after-tax savings. Not bad, even though doing it myself meant I procrastinated it for two weeks. It might be cheaper if I hire a transcriptionist through oDesk or similar services. With a infrequent transcription needs, though, I’d probably spend more than two hours on screening, hiring, and delegating.

Hacking together an Arduino foot pedal was definitely a win. Transcribing with it was okay, but not my favourite activity. I might send work to a transcription company if there’s enough value in a shorter turnaround, because it took me two weeks to get around to doing this one. Good to know!

2011-08-31 Wed 21:45

Skip my VistaPrint review and go straight to the giveaway

Last week, I thought: hey, what would a Canadian Christmas card look like? After a few quick sketches, I ordered a set of thirty cards from Vistaprint. It was an inexpensive experiment that complemented our ongoing project to be more social. Even if they arrived late, I could always use them for holiday cards next year. Who knows, the experiment might even help me get into making geeky greeting cards and other things.

After a bit of coupon maximization, the 30-card set was CAD 24.47 (with the picture upload and linen upgrade),  shipping cost CAD 11.62, and HST was CAD 4.69, for a total of CAD 40.78. This worked out to CAD 1.36 per card (including shipping) and an incremental card cost of CAD 0.82.

The box arrived this Saturday, even though I chose the lowest-cost shipping method. Yay! Early Christmas indeed.

The print quality is great. The red scarf is vivid. The lines are crisp and clear. The image is centered, too. Next time, I’ll remember to remove the border line before uploading. The linen is a bit lighter-weight than most cardstock I use, but it isn’t floppy, and the pre-creased paper is easy to fold.

VistaPrint includes a small ad on the back of the card: Exclusively from Vistaprint, www.vistaprint.ca. I think you can pay extra to replace the back with your own design, which presumably includes a blank page.

The free photo Christmas cards I ordered weren’t as awesome, but that could be a combination of low-resolution photo files and me being fascinated by the novelty of seeing my drawings printed in full-colour.

Would I order future designs of greeting cards from Vistaprint? We don’t have a colour printer, so I’m happy to order from them if I have a design that needs colour. Alternatively,  I might look into getting an inkjet printer, or trying local print shops. I want to experiment with printing black-and-white designs onto cardstock with our laser printer first, though, because black-and-write drawings can be quite expressive as well. (And I can always break out the crayons!)

I can’t wait to send these out. I’m resisting the temptation to redo some of the other cards in my outbox, and to send seconds to people I’ve already sent cards to. Although I’m going to send second cards to my family, so that they can show it off to others. ;) Whee!

GIVEAWAY

In fact, let’s share the wealth. I’ll give away five cards so you can use them to send to your other friends. Leave a comment on this post suggesting other geeky greeting cards you’d love to see. I’ll pick a random commenter by next Friday (December 17), get the mailing address through e-mail, and send the cards by express mail. No guarantees on when you might get it, but I hope it’ll be in time to send this year! =)