Come for the Ride…

We just added some RSS feed buttons to this blog. I’ve actually been looking to do it for awhile but surprisingly, Blogger doesn’t have a native function to post em up.

Anyway, if you haven’t figured out where to pull the XML file for this blog, we’ve now made it easier to feed you our tales.

Many of us, whether we work for ourselves or someone else, want to make what we’re worth because well… we deserve it. After all, what’s the point of spending a 1/4 to a 1/3 of our lives learning if we can’t take what we learn and pay back all the debt we accrued while learning?

So for many of us… after years of school and years of working for someone else, we come up with the bright idea to start our own business. But what is a business exactly and how does that differ than just working for yourself? Both jobs have clients (hopefully) and both jobs have long hours, so why the change?

The difference for me is the light at the end of the tunnel. One has the promise of one, while the other is… not so promising.

A business is like a child. You conceive it, you nurture it and after watching it make a few mistakes and stumble, you hope that one day it will be able to self sustain and reward you for your efforts. A good business will stay afloat and make you money while you’re on vacation and a bad one will cause you worries while you’re gone. Will lil Timmy meet up with the wrong crowd and destroy your home? Quite possibly. However, if you’re lucky and have the right leadership, you may even see your business married off to some other successful businesses and throw a giant party to celebrate. Ahh… such is the life of parenting gone right.

Self employment on the other hand is a bit different. For me, self employment is the dream of technicians when they are tired of the sh*t from their former boss. While you may be successful performing a particular task or trade to warrant self employment, there rarely is an exit strategy that will allow you to throw that giant party at the end. Unless you have good business acumen, self employment may generally lead to long hours, anxiety, nausea, vomiting, stress, and irregular bowel movements. Sounds like one of those drug commercials don’t it? It feels like it too.

So to sum up. Have a good business idea? Great! Have a goal to be self employed? Think twice. Remember:

Self employment - A job or business that wouldn’t exist or make money without you. (Think of the missed vacations!)

A Business - A job that could exist and be profitable without you (but wayyyy down the road). Though, an exit strategy that doesn’t equal your death exists!

Enterprise - A space ship in the future.

An Empire - Something that requires a lot of technology and possibly even the force to be on your side.

I’m a control freak at times. I like my HTML a certain way. It’s got to be pretty (readable) as well as functional and if it’s not, I don’t feel as though I’m doing it right. This leads to me never really trust people when programming up web pages. However, I’ve got to say I’m pleasantly surprised for some very readable and usable code. I’ve finished up programming the car details page and the car search page. With the code I wrote in Python-Django, I just plugged the HTML into my templates, made sure some loops were formatted properly with the pre-generated code and within 30 minutes I had the pages up. The majority of the time was to determine where to put the CSS files, image files and how to link them up in Django’s framework.

Now, granted, my XML feed formats are messed up and need a reworking of the model as to allow for some null fields I’m now finding, but that shouldn’t be more than a days worth of work.

That’s not true.

At least it’s not true almost all the time. Very few of your prospects literally can’t afford it. What they are really trying to say is, “it’s not worth it.” As in, it’s not worth reprioritizing my life, not worth the risk, not worth what I’ll have to give up to get this, not worth being in debt for.

The blog title and the quote above were pulled from Seth Godin’s blog. Although he was talking about selling a product or service, I’ve actually received a similar response recently while talking with my friend about starting a company.

For me, it’s always been “you can’t afford not to…” after all, life’s too short not to try. However, my friend’s response to my question on why he hasn’t started a venture when that’s all he reads and writes about, really baffled me; until I read the quote above.

Even though many entrepreneurs have the courage to just go-for-it and take it for granted, there are many others out there who just can’t seem to do the same. If you guys have any good advice on how to release the fear, I would love to hear about it so I can pass on the encouragement.

Edit: Releasing the fear is just the first roadblock of many to pass through when jumping into the world of entrepreneurship. However, everything else including money, technical skill, resources, etc. can all be resolved once a person set their mind to it. So the question is, what would make an entrepreneur climb over that first wall so s/he would learn that they can in fact think creatively and scale any wall?

As a desperate measure to gain some control in the matter of no communication, we decided to do a couple of things to resolve the issue of the missing designer.

1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn’t to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.

If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.

www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page

One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you’re doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.

2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what’s left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.

Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.

Fancy that…

As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he’ll get it this time.