Every Project Was Going to Be the One

I've been thinking about getting additional storage to have at home to store our media: photos, videos, audios, etc. Combined, my wife and I have dozens of terabytes, and it is currently spread across multiple external hard drives (SSDs) and across clouds (iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Drive). As part of my research to get the right amount of storage for this network attached storage (NAS) device, I did an inventory of our media. This is how I ran across an old folder from a backup on my previous laptop. This folder contained multiple projects, all abandoned in one way or another. Of all of those, only two remain active, this website and TodoTax.com.

Throughout the years I've started several projects, some of them I ran for years, and they were moderately successful. Others, not so much, or maybe I just didn't stick with them long enough — I'd never know.

In my first essay I said I was going to build my way out. What I didn't say was how many times I've tried before.

For example, I ran a meetup called the Co-Founders Meetup, where the goal was to reunite people with ideas and a business sense with people with technical knowledge. These meetups were successful if we consider attendance and participation a metric for success. The meetup attracted over a hundred people since the first meeting, and it was for the most part a good balance between business people, software engineers and designers, recruiters, and angel investors. I wasn't following my passion, I was doing what everyone else was doing with the hopes of starting the next big thing. When I moved on from this meetup, it had over 3,000 members.

From this meetup another project was born, The TechMap. The idea was to bring the same type of individuals and connections online. A place for people to share their startups and themselves, with the idea that they could connect and help each other. The map itself was a welcome feature, a lot of people really liked it and many people and businesses signed up.

Another project I spent some time on was Developer Stash, a list of curated tools and resources for programmers and people interested in software development.

Moving my domain names from Google to Porkbun also forced me to see a list of all my domain names, which unsurprisingly, there are many. For years, the first thing I did after thinking of an idea was to get a domain name for it. I know some of you can relate to this.

There are many more projects, I am thinking of adding a graveyard page to my site and list them all, with descriptions, URLs, etc.

Every single one of these projects had a goal, they were the thing that would get me out at different times in my life. I chose them because they seemed like good business ideas, not because I couldn't stop doing them, none of them were really a passion of mine, and perhaps, that was part of the problem. I picked projects thinking they would generate income, not projects I was already happily doing for free, for fun. I see now that the only thing I continued doing, consistently through the years, was writing. Never with the expectation of earning money, but using it sometimes with the idea to promote what I was building.

My professional life took off while I was in Austin, TX, and being surrounded by so many people building and wanting to build things was contagious.

My passion since I can remember has been going to new places, capturing them with photographs, write little programs that are helpful for me, and creating web apps that I wish existed. I wasn't doing any of this, and although I am not suggesting you should follow your passion, the truth is that I didn't and this probably contributed to me not sticking to any of my projects, especially when they weren't bringing money right away. However, I started writing in my blog around this time when I moved to Texas from Minnesota, and I haven't stopped since. The data said: you write. Everything else, you abandon.

Writing is for me like walking or taking photographs. I enjoy doing it, I feel better when I do it, and it has never occurred to me I can make real money from it. I've gotten paid before for writing and photography, but it was nothing planned, I stumbled upon a few opportunities and I took them. For example, back in 2005, I was reading a now defunct programming magazine (asp.netPRO), and decided to write to the editor about a better description and example for an article. To my surprise, someone responded to my email and asked me if I could write a similar article myself about a different topic, I responded with a draft, and after some suggestions to make it fit their guidelines they accepted it. I didn't know what that meant at the time, until I got a check in the mail for $500. After that I submitted two more articles and they were also published in the magazine, each paid $500, which for me was a lot of money and couldn't believe someone was paying me to write about programming! I stopped. I don't have a good reason. But I kept writing on my blog — for free, for no one.

I am taking writing seriously now. For years I used it to promote whatever project I was excited about that month. This time the writing isn't the marketing, it's the work. What I'm trying, what's working, what's failing, shared candidly as it happens. I don't know where this leads yet, and that's okay. The point is the documentation, not the conclusion.

I don't see my list of past projects as failures. They're the data set that got me here — and the data finally said something clear enough to act on.