We just rebuilt our entire model:
Time for the quarterly-ish update on Miniware. (This one ended up being way too long, so I'm breaking it up into parts – hopefully it works, thanks for bearing with me) Almost a year ago, I had the conversation with my partner about starting a company. I'd freelanced before, but this was different – freelancing is flexible, and you can stop whenever you get a job. But an organization, that might have employees and other orgs building on top of it, is a longer term bet. Most businesses don't survive their first three years, in fact many die in their first 12 months. In that time founders can rack up debt, burn savings, and meanwhile take up all the time they have. Marnie and I agreed I could have one year to try it, before we had kids or got married (April 🎉), while I could still put real time, focus, and savings into something like this. I figured, even if it didn't work out, I could die knowing I tried. So now we are here, a year later. I'm very happy to say: ➊ I didn't lose money ➋ We did great work that helped other people work better (shoutout to DJR and Tem for being early, encouraging, and flexible) ➌ After looking at the past year and future possibilities with my partner, I get to keep doing it! But things are a little bit different now. I've had a whole year of looking at the company as a product, gathering feedback, testing, and fixing bugs. And as of December, Miniware has an entirely new business model. (Learn why in Part 2: https://lnkd.in/e79CAM3u )