Ever have something come naturally to you?
Obviously, the answer is yes. We all have certain attributes or skills that we are born with and that for whatever reason intuitively make sense.
For me, one of those skills was computers.
I was born in the 80s. Personal computers where just starting to reach affordability for most households. I remember the Tandy’s from Radio Shack. The apple II’s at school.
For whatever reason, operating computers always came easy to me. I was instantly the computer person in the family. I was 8 years old and I could navigate around the computer better than anyone else in my house.
Why? I have no idea.
The boxes just made sense to me. When I sat in front of that plastic box I could make it do what I wanted. I’d watch my parents struggle with simple tasks and walk over and do what I wanted in seconds.
Having something come easy is a blessing and a curse.
I was building websites throughout high school, for fun and for minimal profit. But I had a bunch of interests at the time. I loved computers, but I also loved basketball.
Schoolwork, meh. Making a website about me and my friends, heck yeah.
Basketball got me into college. There I thought I was going to major in computer science.
I was good with computers, computer science should be a breeze. Wow was I wrong. Java, byte code, compilers. What was all of this nonsense. I hated it.
Maybe I hated it because it was hard, or maybe I just hated it because it sucked. Who knows. I switched majors to business and didn’t look back.
Post college I started the classic circuitous career path…
Credit analyst > corporate REO real estate agent > ADP Sales > corporate REO real estate agent > real estate broker > real estate SaaS > digital agency > DTC > pool boy > NOW
A bit all over the place sure, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Several successes and many, many failures.
I always leaned on my technical skills, but never fully created a product. I always had a partner, or outsourced the work. This is my chance to do it my way. Right or wrong, it’s all on me.
Given my newly acquired middle age I have done a bunch of reading and thought deeply about what I should do next and why I should do it. Eventually I’ll track down where I got it, but an idea that stuck with me is to look back at what interested you as a kid.
For me the answer is simple. Basketball and computers. Haters will say I can’t do anything in basketball because I am too old. Just wait for the next challenge… You don’t have to be a professional athlete to have a successful career in a sport. There are unlimited ways to win these days.
But first, I am going to go with my other first love.
Computers.
I am going to lean back into one of my natural talents. Maybe I will fail miserably. Let’s see if this an area I was almost meant to work in, but life just got in the way.
The initial goal is simple. Launch a SaaS product. Launching is the goal.
In addition, I am going to build all in public. Here is something else I have never done.
I went ahead and signed up for x (formerly twitter). I plan on sharing daily updates there and I will write a few posts here as well.
As I write this on 8/30/23, I have zero twitter followers, zero traffic to this blog, zero SaaS products and zero SaaS revenue.
Let’s see how quickly we can grow those numbers. Most importantly the SaaS products.
Hopefully, launching this site and this build in public campaign are the first steps in launching my first indie / solo product. Only time will tell.
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