One week to go before I leave IBM and experiment with building something on my own. I realize that I’m drawn to something familiar about this experiment. It’s not freelancing that interests me, although that seems to be a decent way to create value and make money. It’s entrepreneurship. Looking back, I can see how I’ve experimented with it before, and I want to see if I can make it work outside too.

I started with my blog posts, presentations, shared files, and wiki pages. I found out that if I invested a little time into sharing what I knew, people could learn on their own, even while I slept. For fun, I added metrics to my yearly business results: how many people had viewed my presentations, how many people had downloaded my files. On Slideshare, my presentations have been viewed more than 400,000 times. (Holy cow.) I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations of my ROI, considering the cost of my time and the probable value received by others, considering the thank-you notes and links I’d seen. The numbers were pretty good.

I like writing code and I hate doing repetitive tasks, so I wrote myself a few timesavers that turned out to be popular. As part of a consulting engagement, I needed to analyze the forum posts in a community, so I wrote a tool that extracted the information from the Lotus Connections ATOM feeds. This grew into the Community Toolkit, which eventually helped hundreds of community leaders create newsletters of updated content and export information from their communities.

I wanted to send personalized thank-you notes to people who participated in these community-based brainstorming sessions, so I wrote a mail merge script for Lotus Notes. I blogged about it, and it turned out to be really useful for other people too.

So I guess I’ve had some experience in creating value outside the direct equation of time = money. This experiment, then, is about figuring out if I can do that for non-IBMers, and if I can make a good living and a good life along the way.