Day 585: Reflections on the Road

personal

At the beginning of last year, I started this daily journal with a core theme: Authentically share my journey building a bootstrapped business from scratch.

As I wrote in the inaugural post, I had the main principle of “Share everything I learn” with the following guiding principles:

  1. Authentic over awesome: Share the crappy parts as well as the good
  2. Incremental over monumental: Treat daily entries as rough drafts rather than polished posts
  3. Consistency over quality: Write every day, even if I don’t feel like it or the post feels like garbage

Thanks to these principles, I’ve been able to come back day after day. And now, 584 days later, I’m finally breaking the streak.

The Road Thus Far

One of the main reasons I wanted to write this journal and make it public is that if someone ever asks me what it’s like to go down this path, I can point to this artifact and say “here!”. (This is actually pretty silly given no one in their right mind is going to read through nearly 600 posts, but I guess they could go through random posts or the monthly reviews to get the overall picture.) The hope was that they’d come away with the impression that while it’s not straightforward, the path of building an independent business on your own terms is possible for anyone willing to try.

I don’t think this journal quite achieves that because I’ve yet to grow a successful business, and this journal isn’t exactly inspiring given it’s filled with me (1) whining about not getting enough sleep (2) whining about how I’m coding 24/7 and not marketing like I should or (3) whining about how I have no idea what I’m doing. 😅 But in the past few weeks, I’ve started seeing some promise for completing the fabled road to ramen:

As small as is it, I’ve finally created a business that’s profitable. And hey, $171 per month comes out to $5.70 per day, which just barely covers eating this cup of vegan shin ramen for every meal ($10.92 per 6 pack = $1.82 per pack = $5.46 per day assuming one pack per meal). Sure, I may not be able to pay rent, but I’ve got ramen, babyyyyyyyy!!!

Anyway, I’m more excited about where I am on this journey now than I’ve ever been because it feels like things are finally coming together and I know what I need to do to forge ahead. Even though I’m still grappling with business-existential questions like whether I’m building a product for developers or for non-technical people (or both???), there’s enough promise here that I’m extremely confident in this working out. DK from day 18 wasn’t sure whether my optimism would fade after 6 to 12 months — well, 19 months later, he’d be glad to know that I’m as delusional optimistic as ever.

The Road Ahead

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be partaking in a 2-week ayahuasca retreat in Peru where I’ll be completely offline. The reason why I decided to go on this retreat now is because this feels like a turning point in my indie making adventures. Once I start acquiring more customers, I wouldn’t feel comfortable going on retreats like this until I’ve ensured that everything won’t crash and burn while I’m gone. Right now, no one is running their core business processes on Browserflow so that’s not a major concern, but that’s about to change very soon (I’m literally running a trial with a customer to test out automating critical workflows using Browserflow during the two weeks while I’m away).

And to be clear, the entire point of building this business for me is so that I can take time off and go on these sorts of retreats. When I finished the three-month meditation retreat back in 2018, I knew that I wanted to build a lifestyle that would allow me to prioritize meditation and spirituality and continue incorporating these retreats in my life. Being a salaried employee isn’t quite conducive to that (most managers won’t exactly be thrilled to hear about you disappearing for 3 months) and while freelancing would work, I wanted to try a path where I’d no longer need to trade time for money. Building a business seemed like a fun way to do that, so here I am.

Thanks to everyone who’s read this journal and followed along in my journey thus far. It’s always such a warm surprise when a reader reaches out over email or someone I talk to mentions that they’ve read posts from here. Given that I treat this as my little intimate corner of the Internet where I share my life as openly as possible, readers feel like guests that I’ve invited in my home.

I plan to continue writing when I return from the retreat, although I intend to change it from daily to weekly and write posts with the intention of developing the craft of writing and sharing ideas rather than simply dumping whatever’s on my mind. Whatever form my new Internet home takes, I look forward to inviting you all back. ❤️