Entrepreneurship Journal, 12/17/2018

It’s been a very long time since my last Entrepreneurship Journal post. Here’s what I was up to last time:

  • I was about to put on my first paid online workshop
  • I had just given my first- and second-ever conference talks within a short period of time
  • My podcast was going well
  • I was continuing to work with my new client

Here’s what has happened since then:

  • I sold $400 worth of tickets for my workshop
  • I got accepted to my first national-level conference
  • I had some big guests on the podcast
  • I visited my new client in person, and realized over time that our project is a bigger and more important project than I had originally thought
  • I started writing a new book

I’ll discuss each one of these items.

Workshop sales

I sold tickets for my October workshop over two launches. On the first launch I sold 3 tickets which were $50. When I did the second launch I wouldn’t have been surprised if I hadn’t sold any more. But I did sell more, 5 more. I was pretty surprised and happy about that.

The workshop itself went pretty well. It took place over a Saturday and Sunday. Given that it took up my whole weekend, $400 of revenue wasn’t a great return on investment time-wise. That’s not the point, though. Putting on the workshop showed me that the answer to the question “Can I get anybody at all to buy tickets to an online workshop I put on?” is yes. It doesn’t matter that the number was small this time. I can do this again and do a better job of everything.

As a mental exercise, if I double the price to $100 and I’m able to sell 16 tickets next time, that would be a revenue of $1600 instead of $400. Maybe I shift the delivery to be more self-serve and less live time, too, making my effective hourly rate higher. Eventually maybe I could get to the point where it’s almost fully automated and revenue is a few thousand bucks each round. We’ll see.

I’m putting my workshops/courses on the back burner for the time being, though, due to certain other things I need/want to work on instead.

Conference talk

On December 5th I got an email saying my talk proposal to RubyConf India had been accepted. So I’m going to India next month. I’m bringing my wife and kids with me and we’re planning to stay for two weeks.

This will be my first time speaking at a “national level” conference as opposed to a regional conference. It will also be my first Ruby-focused conference. I’m excited to be able to add to my bio that I’ve spoken at RubyConf India. Speaking at a conference like this has also been kind of a goal of mine for a long time. The conference itself happens on January 20-21.

I actually got accepted to another conference as well, PyTennessee in Nashville in February. I don’t know much about this conference yet.

Podcast

I had some relatively big guests on the podcast including Michael Hartl and Ben Orenstein. That was pretty cool.

I also had someone reach out for some Rails testing consulting help, a CTO from a Y Combinator startup. We had a call about it. Somewhat surprisingly, after the call, my prospect said he was going to go with a certain gem instead of seeking outside help for the various problems his team was having with the test suite. My suspicion is that the reality is that he just wasn’t that impressed with our call for whatever reason. Oh well. It’s cool to have generated a consulting lead via the podcast anyway. Hopefully I can expect this sort of thing to continue happening.

Having said that, I plan to take a break from the podcast for the next couple months. I’m getting kind of tired of it and I don’t want to burn out. Preparing my RubyConf India talk and preparing for India travel will take most of my available time and mental bandwidth between now and the end of January.

Consulting client

Things continue to go well with my new (relatively new now) consulting client. I had originally thought the project would only last perhaps a weekend. Then I thought it might last a few months. Now I think it may well last 10 years. I visited my client in person just before Thanksgiving and I was very impressed with him as a person. And I’m not just saying that because I know he might be reading this right now.

Book

Some time ago I decided to write a book. Recently I pulled the trigger. The book will be called Rails Testing for Beginners.

All I’ve done so far is set up the plumbing for the book (I’m using a tool called Softcover) and write a few paragraphs. My decision to write the book came right around the same time my RubyConf India talk got accepted, and things have been kind of crazy since then. Getting everything in order for traveling to India is a surprisingly large amount of work, even though I’ve flown internationally three times before (Nigeria, Bulgaria and the Netherlands).

Plans for the next few months

My plans for the next few months are:

  • Prepare and deliver my RubyConf India talk
  • Ditto for my PyTennessee talk
  • Get a good portion of Rails Testing for Beginners done
  • Continue putting out blog posts and videos the whole time at roughly the usual pace
  • Continue working for my consulting client as normal

That all should be enough to keep me fully busy. Then, perhaps sometime in the spring, I’ll start turning my thoughts back to the podcast and paid workshops. I’ll certainly want to start the podcast back up before I launch my book (it will be a good way to get the word out) but I think I want to wait until after the book launch to start the workshops back up again.

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