You hardly ever hear of a startup that just goes *poof* one day and suddenly implodes. The more common occurrence are a series of bad decisions by management and/or the founders. This also applies to larger companies too. One of the things I have encountered while building Comp Versions is that it is easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of work ahead of you. Especially when it is now common mantra to get something out as quickly as possible.
Even more especially when you have to be learning programming as you go along, are doing it by yourself and bootstrapping – talk about bad odds. Although I have completed a major milestone (the majority of the Rails back-end is done), I have now started the front-end.
Let me tell you, it is quite daunting when I look at my stylesheet and it is ~600 lines long, and I know that I still have about 80% of the application left of the front-end to complete. This is further compounded when I spend an entire day (or two days) being stumped by some alignment issues of items. Although, I must confess, once I complete that it feels SOOO good and there are cumulative effects – i.e. I will never have that problem again, and the issue is fixed everywhere else in the app that is needed.
Each of these ‘stumpings’ is a cut. If I let this cut stop me, or conquer me, I am doomed to give up. In the cumulative, I am quite scarred (note: not ‘scared’) at the moment and I know I will be further scarred in the weeks ahead.
But I have no choice but to get out my box of band-aids and press ahead. This is one of the reasons why many people recommend going all-in (i.e. quitting your day-job, and giving up everything else). When you are all-in, each cut is a milestone.
So don’t look at it like I am one more cut closer to quitting, but rather – one more cut closer to the 1,000 before I get to launch.
So here is to about 450 more.
Marc Gayle is a tech entrepreneur based in Kingston, Jamaica and creating compversions with blood, sweat and care.
eCommerce11 months ago