Around my internet, there’s been a recent meme concerning dedication to starting your own business. It’s not unique to our time, but over the past week it feels like everything I read, watch, or listen to is talking to me about the need to devote yourself fully to whatever it is that you believe your business to be, otherwise it will likely never get done.
Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann talked about it on the latest episode of their podcast Back to Work, Jim Coudal implored us to build your beer cozies today, and… those are the only two I can remember right now, but it feels like I’ve been pestered with these messages for the past week non-stop.
Listening to these smart, successful exemplars in my industry, I realized that I had essentially followed their advice. I spent all of 2010 as a full-time self-employed freelance programmer, and now, in 2011, I work a “corporate” job while relegating projects of passion to my off-hours. What happened?
Some backstory:
When I finished my Master’s degree (you don’t have to call me “Master” if you don’t want to) at the end of 2009, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to take my 2 current freelance (programming) clients, find a few more, and eventually hire employees and sit back while they make me lots of money. I was even going to expedite the “retire on a tropical beach” part of it by setting up my business in Porlamar, Venezuela. By my back-of-the-napkin calculations, between my current meager freelance income and Edyta’s doctoral scholarship, we would live quite comfortably in relative solitude and peace in the tropics, given the expat-favoring pricing in Venezuela.
The plan was to stay there for 1 year. We lasted 3 months.
Then, 6 months after we moved back to the U.S., I was looking for a “normal” job.
What happened? Why?
Well, our general reason for leaving Venezuela was that we couldn’t get a reliable internet connection — a vital tool in both of our fields of work.
But in general, I found that while many of the aspects of freelancing were empowering, other aspects were putting my brain’s anxiety receptors on high alert. You’ve heard about the empowering aspects already — no boss, working on what you want, etc. — so I’m only going to explain how the empowering aspects lost out (for the time being) to the anxiety-inducing aspects.
- I loathed searching for new clients. I would stare for hours at the 37signals gig board (defunct) and the Authentic Jobs freelance listings, thinking to myself that I couldn’t possibly sell myself as capable of doing those jobs. Or maybe the jobs had weak descriptions, making me wonder if the clients would be flaky.
- Lonely. That’s what I felt while working in my home office on sites with no designers or programmers other than me. When we moved to New York, I had no excuse not to put myself out there at hackathons or conferences, but I convinced myself that sitting at home working was time better spent.
- Once you’re locked in at an hourly rate, it’s hard to raise your rate. I had almost 30 hours per week of work to do, but I was still charging my cheap college-student rates to my most trusted clients. Not a good thing when you consider my lack of new clients.
- You still have to find time to do the things you love. Despite having the luxury of setting all my own hours, I still found that I had to make time for my projects of passion outside of client-work time. If you’re not working on your startup full-time, then you’re just not working on your startup full-time. Not much different than working a “normal” job and coming home to startup work.
Overall, these things (and other, less explainable things) contributed to my anxiety over running my own business. And this doesn’t even get into the anxiety of an exciting startup project turning sour (another post, another time).
So I suppose this is where I put in a little warning to all the would-be self-employers out there. Be as aware as you can be. Which is probably not enough. You can do it if that’s your goal. But the alternatives are not so bad, if you ask me.
This post was graciously edited by Marc Ubaldi
