I’ve had quite a few ideas for a while about the way forward. But I’ve been hesitant to commit to any of them until last night when I realised I just had to burn bridges behind me so I had to move forward. This is a small reference to a chapter in Think & Grow Rich, which I read a long time ago. Shortly put, you have to burn your bridges behind you so there is no source of retreat. You either win or perish.
In my case, I’m not going to fully perish (hopefully), it’s just that I have given myself a hard deadline of October 2025 since that’s when my available money is going to run out. At that point, if nothing has come of it, and it really seems like I am up against a brick wall… I will concede my entrepreneurial dreams and go work on a funny farm. Or more probably, I’ll go back to employment.
Client Work Gets In The Way
So in the next eight months, I’ll avoid as much client work as humanly possible. I have mostly reduced my commitments, but there are two projects that I’ve made a commitment to support and don’t want to give them up. I potentially will do consultancy in the interim to get some cash in, but ultimately the main challenge over the last few years is the balance between client work and having an entrepreneurial seizure. Client work is always the easier route to putting bread on the table but the time and mental energy it takes to do that, is taken away from the singular focus you need to build something yourself. So I’ve made the mental decision to allow myself to focus just on building, and use up my financial reserves to keep on living. I will be pretty much broke by October 2025, but that’s half the fun!
Public Commitment
When I realised this idea last night, the main theme of it was making a public commitment to going down this route. So I’ll be making a story out of it on LinkedIn, in combination with this website, and across social media. It’s somewhat daunting, and I’m sure plenty of people are going to have negative things to say; and many will expect failure; but it feels right to do this. I expect to make a YouTube video each day on my findings, and then put that out on LinkedIn daily. It’s a bit up in the air at the moment, but I’ll figure it out as I move on. Will also need to get on Insta and Twitter but will deal with these later on.
Team
I do have some really good people around me, and have been chatting with them recently on starting something up. Various ideas swirling around. But I realised that I needed to take the lead and march/bumble forward, and if they want to join me on the journey then that’s great. Some of you reading this will recognise you are in that group of people. Up to you to see if you want to join. For the moment it’s just me.
AI will take my job if I am not aware
I’ve used AI helpers in programming for a few years now, and quite frankly it’s been an eye opening process. I’ve programmed and worked on the web in general, starting as a hobbyist, then professionally, for 29 years now. To see most of my knowledge advantage now annihilated by AI, and to realise that my programming career is all but over in its current form … this took a while to get over the sadness of it. And I’m certain almost everyone is going to be affected by the rapid onset on this technology. If you aren’t aware and looking into it, and you work in the knowledge or information service industries, you will be washed away.
Once you get beyond that, it’s pretty amazing the superhuman skills it can give you. But I’ll leave that for some of the forthcoming videos.
I’m aware that I am completely up against a wall
Companies have insane amounts of funding pouring talent into this sector. Many people are way ahead of me technically. Younger minds have more neuro-plasticity to adapt and less junk stored from the last 30 years of the internet. At 41 I am aware it’s a good age to start again as a new CEO, I’ve got experience and wisdom that I never had twenty years ago when I started a small web agency. But it’s still tough to constantly keep up to date, constantly reinvent yourself, and still find time to actually live life as its meant to be (i.e. not behind a computer screen).
I have no product market fit currently. I have some ideas but nothing approaching something that fixes a real world problem. I have only enough funding to afford to cover me up until October. And I have zero market advantage. I am basically starting from zero knowledgewise, I have very few major connections, no social media profile and not much codebase to go on.
And I’m up against the worlds best with all my weaknesses. So, it’s a big ask but screw it you only live once. I have given myself a hard deadline to build something within 7 months.
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