We Have Takeoff
The fun of this blog is that you'll get my relatively unfiltered perspective on the experience of quitting my job and venturing out as an entrepreneur. You'll also sometimes get technical content marketing pieces, such as the stuff I put in my portfolio page. The last time I really spoke about my life was May 30, and that was also a bit of a soft launch of my DemographIQ prototype. But this post will be much more about me and try to cover all the bases of how everything has been going.
This post is much more of an unfiltered inventory of everything that has been going on in my life. I've been sitting on this post for too long, so I'm going to just start writing and try to not self-edit too much. If you see anything weird or have suggested improvements, feel free to let me know! I'd love any feedback on how this works since it will allow me to just write faster. And, perchance, present things in a less formal / more familiar tone.
Suffering from Success
Earlier posts focused on my lifestyle costs and the earnings percentages I was at along the way. On my own hierarchy of needs, balancing my income and expenses was priority number one. Well much like DJ Khaled, I've been suffering from success these past few months and have the best problem for a new entrepreneur: I'm getting more work than I need! So I've moved on to step two of my needs-hierarhcy: work-life balance.
My favorite part of being an entrepreneur is owning and controlling every part of my working experience. Although I've figured out my income and feel 100% secure, I need to focus my next efforts on work-life balance. These last few months have involved more than several 4AM+ nights where I pushed to get deliverables to clients in a timely fashion. I've also had a few rush jobs, and those are generally pretty stressful and knock my other routines off-balance, most especially with respect to Crossfit and Weightlifting.
Overall, I'm working more hours than I need to meet my budgetary needs. And time is a precious resource that I like to spend doing other things than only consulting, such as building websites, studying music, exercising, reading, and hanging out with friends (to name a few). I do genuinely enjoy my consulting work, which makes it awesome. But there is a good balance, as with all things!
The main lever I will pull to get my work-life balance under control is my hourly rate. I'll be a bit demure here, but anybody can see what I charge for my time on my Upwork profile (and if you're thinking of hiring me, use this link to sign up so I can waive service fees on any contracts we make). That said, making that number go down/up will increase/decrease the amount of hours I work, since I will be more/less budget-friendly and accessible. You know, Econ 101 optimization curve.
Personal Things
Family is super important to me, and I like that it's a lot easier now for me to spend time with family. For July 4th, I went to St. Simon's Island with my family and had a wonderful time. This was the first time our family stayed in a resort for July 4th, we usually do a full rental house all together. But the resort idea worked out well, I got a great tan and relaxed a lot with my family. I also got to play golf with my dad, brother, sister-in-law, and sister's fiance, which was nice!
In my attempt to make adult friends, I joined the Williamsburg Book Club and have made it to 4 meetings so far. People are very critical of books! But it's fun to read something, get confused or upset or love it, and have people to look forward to chatting with. I also do Crossfit for this purpose, since Crossfit/Powerlifting/Weightlifting gyms are much more conducive to befriending people than globo box gyms. And you can talk about the sport and/or the workout you just did, and see people on a consistent basis.
On the training side, I've drilled technical Olympic Weightlifting skills for the past three or so months. In a few weeks, I will test my max Snatch and Clean and Jerk, and also hope to get my first ever bar muscle up. And if anyone wants a genius fitness coach and nutritionist in the NYC area, send me a message and I'll connect you with mine.
Also blending my worlds of weightlifting and consulting, I put in ~6 hours (pro bono) revitalizing certain parts of my gym owner's spreadsheet for his Olympic weightlifting athletes, some of whom compete at the global/olympic level. That was a super fun thing to dive into and learn more about. Spreadsheets are a window into someone's logic and mental systems. It was a huge learning curve, but the way this guy manages his athletes is brilliant.
Get a Good Lawyer
As my business gets more serious, I need to take steps to make sure I'm "doing things the right way." Step one - what does that even mean? To answer that question, I connected with an exceptional small business lawyer out of Brooklyn, Yohanan PLLC, to get my affairs in order. Adam gave great counsel and has since put me in touch with great accountants and business insurance brokers. He's also helped me with some critical legal affairs, like foreign registration (Delaware LLC operating in NYC), drafting subcontracting agreements, reviewing NDAs, etc. I'm sleeping better at night knowing I'm in good hands, and if you are in a similar position not knowing if you're doing everything right, I highly suggest you reach out to Adam. And he does a lot more serious stuff than what I need, but I appreciate that he's available for the small fish like me.
Scared a Client
On the negative side, I lost a client I was working with to develop tax lien investing software. I had developed a scraper for him that pulls all available liens for a specific county in the US. We had agreed and written out some bullets about our go-forward relationship, effectively with me as an independent software vendor and him contributing a licensing fee. I took the agreed-upon bullets to a lawyer, asked her to draft an agreement (and paid for it out of pocket as a kind gesture), and shared it with him intoning that I expected heavy edits. Well, lesson learned - paper freaks people out. I think the misstep was thinking me paying for the legal agreement was a kind gesture, I think it actually came across as a heavy-handed legal maneuver (here's 18 pages of intense language). If I could do it again, I would try asking him to share the first draft, maybe offer to split the legal bill assuming his lawyer's fee isn't unreasonable, and then see how he responds to my edits. But these are those "you have to burn your hand once" sort of lessons, something which you sometimes get sheltered from in a large corporate environment with best practices and siloed fiefdoms.
Got a Looot more Clients
I have been blessed early on with a combination of good clients who found me through Upwork, and referrals from old colleagues (and directly working with old colleagues as well). Don't discount the value of your own network! If you're considering doing something like me, don't hesitate to reach out. But the punchline is you will be surprised where you find support, and people who you did right to in the past will remember that and want to keep working with you in the future.
Hedge Fund: So, let me dive into the work I've been doing. First off, I completed ~30 hours on a rush job with a major hedge fund. Unfortunately, I had already planned a romantic getaway to Atlantic City, so I had to basically do the entire job right when I got back without sleeping much. But I got it done, they loved the work, and as a byproduct, I helped build them some new models for their underwriting processes. And now I'm working for one of their portfolio companies as well!
REIT: This hedge fund client came through the recommendation of an old colleague who works with one of their portfolio companies. And actually I'm about to initiate a contract with the PortCo now, mostly because the hedge fund appreciated my work and gave the green light for him to use me now. Pretty excited for this one. I love working with old colleagues, especially the ones who were the absolute best to work with.
Construction CFO: Another old colleague also reached out and has already established a pretty significant relationship. They're a construction firm, and this project is much more on the coding side. They have some legacy payroll data stored in inconveniently-formatted pipe-delimited text files. I'm helping move this data into a modern PostgreSQL container and build easy controls for their executive team to build reports using various input parameters. I built a full-stack containerized application with a lightweight front-end UX for the full ETL of the 2GB pipe-delimited txt files into a Postgres database. For my coders, the stack involves: FastAPI, test-driven development via Pytest in a separate container, Postrgres for the DB, and NextJS for a lightweight front-end.
Industrial REPE Fund: Through Upwork, I've been consulting pretty heavily with an upstart REPE shop specializing in industrial. I helped them build full investor materials for a retail redevelopment (outside their typical deal type). I also rebuilt their industrial acquisition template Excel model. The goal is to get it to underwrite a deal in less than 10 minutes. I'm making heavy use of Dynamic arrays, which I've come to realize are fast and helpful for certain things, but can have a significant performance impact on sensitivity tables.
HNW SF Sharpshooter: One of my most frequent clients is a high net worth individual investing as a sharpshooter in the SF market. I'm doing a lot for him, such as building development models, negotiating waterfalls, drafting investor memos, and sharing my thoughts on the deals themselves. It's really cool watching this guy operate as a much more fully-fledged entrepreneur and build meaningful connections in his market.
Work With Me: Finally, I'd love to start working with driven and talented people as subcontractors. So if you or someone you know has a skill set similar to mine and would be interested in a long-term relationship, let me know. Business would come the same way I get it, on a contract-by-contract basis. I would also expect their pricing to be as dynamic as mine, probably starting a bit lower at first (like I did) then ramping it up to find the sweet spot for their skill set and contracts they like the most. I really enjoy the freelance contracting value proposition, because you at least know you're always getting your market rate. It's just on you to figure out what that market rate is.
DemographIQ
Yes, I am still self-developing a website. The challenge is that I need to prioritize growing my consulting business, but I can't neglect the website so much that I forget the code and have to relearn my codebase every few weeks just to make incremental improvements. For the short term, I'm fine accepting that I may not progress as quickly on DemographIQ as I'd like.
But that said, I have accomplished a great deal on my own, including the login and authorization full-stack. So basically you can securely create an account, reset password, login, logout, and edit your profile picture. But beyond that point, there isn't much else. I'm currently integrating Stripe (i.e., payments, products, credit cards, etc.) into my application so I can build my product and checkout pages and test user payments and subscriptions. There's a lot to wrap my head around, and long-term I would ideally pay people to take care of these things for me. But as part of my fiscal prudence, I don't want to put any significant capital into this idea until it generates first revenue.
Other Endeavors
I have been slowly training a few overseas virtual assistants to support my businesses. One is learning full-stack development and essentially just building some basic scrapers using a template (FastAPI, Selenium, Postgres, NextJS, Minio) that I setup for him. He's been making slow and steady progress figuring out how to build web scrapers using open source full-stack technologies all on his own. I'm essentially paying him to study coding with the medium-term goal of building web scrapers for me. I'd like to cut him in on the profits as a way to provide fair compensation and motivation to continue developing the application. Ideally he can make a lot of money off this, but until then, I basically just pay his asking hourly rate.
I also invested some small dollars into another VA's side hustle selling cosmetics for a 35% return over 6 months. She is a very high integrity and honest individual, and beyond that the money is nothing that would hurt to lose. She's already fully cleared the first round of inventory she bought and is re-investing the sales proceeds into more product. If she can actually achieve a 35% return in 6 months, I'm curious how quickly this scales. Best case scenario, I help empower someone to change their life and make a crazy return myself. Worst case, I lose a pretty immaterial equity check. And regardless of what the contract says, if the 35% is unsustainable, I'll work with her to find an appropriate set of terms that are sustainable for her business long term and not worry too much about getting my exact dues on the first investment (though I haven't made this much explicit to her, it's not my intention to be a vulture here)
Conclusion
My life these past few months has been great. I love the control that I now have over my time and business affairs. And outside of the projects and accomplishments, I have been enjoying an egregious number of daytime walks in the park next to my apartment. I have also been frequenting my local restaurants and spending more time with and around people, trying to make more meaningful connections with book clubs and such. Life isn't always a walk in the park, but I feel a deeper connection to my daily affairs that feels good and right. If you're thinking of taking the leap like I did, from where I currently stand, the only thing I can do for you is to highly recommend it. Embrace the uncertainty, it keeps things fresh!