Category: Growth Series

On Friday night, I had pizza and beer with a couple of friends. One of them told me that he spent an afternoon trying to get ChatGPT to code up a simple interface. He gave it a detailed spec for a file upload widget and it failed miserably. But after some trial and error, he figured out its limitations and learned how to form effective prompts. By the time he took a break he had something pretty close to workable. The gap between junior dev and senior dev just got a mile wide.

When I was a kid, adults would tell me that I needed to go to college or the military in order to get a decent job. When I graduated high school, this was amended to a technical trade in the military. By the time I finished my four years in the Marine Corps, the college degree had been amended to a master’s degree. After a couple of years of college, that too was amended to specific kinds of bachelors or masters degrees.

This is all progress. As society progresses, it becomes harder and harder for people to contribute value because technology provides leverage.

Last month, I was incredibly busy in and out of work. An objective that I’ve been working on was pushed back multiple times and wasn’t completed.

When it comes to planning, we tend to plan with abstractions of the real world. The components are too perfect to be reliable. They assume:

• Our employees won’t get sick.
• There won’t be a market change.
• A customer won’t have an emergency.
• And etc.

But you can’t predict the weather. Invariably, new information is going to affect your plan.

The trick is to account for it.

We just launched a free video gallery plugin for WordPress. The goal is to develop it into a multiplatform software product.

Last night, I woke up with an upset stomach from drinking a couple of ciders and lay in bed thinking about its startup costs. We developed the free plugin in 50 hours with an average cost of around $38.50 an hour for around $2,000 invested.

At some arc in time, we’ll start to get a return on this investment. That might be 500 hours invested ($20,000) or a thousand ($40,000.) Or it’s possible, we’ll get to 500 hours and still see little opportunity and kill it.

In fact, years ago, we put over 500 hours into a WordPress product and sold just a handful before realizing the support costs were going to eat up what little revenue we had.

There are a few popular ideas that address this problem:

Thursday morning, at 7:55 AM, I stood on the sidewalk of a busy street and warmed my face in the morning sun. I was outside a freshly painted restaurant facade with a brand new neon side that said “OPEN” in the window. At 8:00 AM, the sign blazed to life, the door to the restaurant opened, and the owner of the restaurant, my friend James, stepped outside and shook my hand. I followed him in and ordered a coffee and a breakfast sandwich.

As part of my payment, I handed him a dollar and said, “You might want to frame that.”

I was James’ first customer for his new business, a counter-service cafe in our neighborhood.

Right after Christmas last December, James landlord evicted him from the space he leased for his coffee shop when negotiations over the next leasing period broke down. In the following six months, James found a new spot in the neighborhood and designed his next iteration.

He ran an online campaign on “Mainvest,” a micro-investment platform for small business and I was one of his first investors there too. His aim was to raise $40,000 to get the new space outfitted and ready to serve customers. He achieved that goal in around 10 days.

Five years ago, James started his business as a coffee cart at Saturday markets. He grew to a coffee shop and a roasting business and has now replaced the half-day coffee shop with an all-day restaurant.

Most of the people who invested or visited for his soft launch are relationships he built along the way. When I walked by the cafe this weekend, I was happy to see it as busy as it was when he opened the doors on Thursday.

I don’t think he could have started with an easy investment and a clientele like he did. He built all that good will over years of interactions. It’s a good reminder that the quick growth we often see has roots that stretch back years.

What are you building the foundation for in your interactions today?

James campaign is still open, check it out here: https://mainvest.com/b/denizens-cafe-portland?inNetwork=true

Featured image is the facade of Denizens.

The last couple of days I took a sailing course in the San Juan Islands (Intro to Cruising.) We sailed across Bellingham Bay in a 44′ sailboat and spent the night in a little cove on Lummi island. We were just four students and an instructor and so we all got to know each other. There was a couple on the boat that made their living as apartment landlords.

“How’d you get into that?” I asked them.

“Oh we just sort of fell into it,” the husband replied, “We were flipping houses and had a couple of close friends that were flipping them too. After doing that for awhile, we wondered what it would be like to fix up an apartment complex. So we bought a shabby apartment complex and did it. Our next piece of property was a lot nicer and it just went up from there.”

Right before I hopped onto the boat, we got our first lead under the new positioning for my agency. It’s not a homerun, but still a good fit for us. I didn’t put that much effort into getting that lead. It came from a day’s worth of research and cold outreach.

Four years ago, I tried to position our agency under a different brand name into the same market (member based associations.) It took us two years of effort on a wide variety of marketing tactics before we got our first lead.

I’ve wondered about the differences in the two efforts. The first time around it took two years, this time it took a couple of weeks. Why?