A Little Failure From the August Nights

I stop to look up. Milky Way crosses over the whole night sky, stars are light as lanterns, and the air is refreshingly cold. I rush back to the house when I see a huge falling star flying across the sky. "What could I possibly wish for? I think to myself .I have everything I could dream of." I eventually wished strength for Mother Nature to survive humans, and run back to the house.

I am deep in debt, unemployed and unemployable, I had failed every possible business in my career... And yet I thought I had everything I could dream of. How could this be?

Because I was doing the thing I do best—building yet another web business in my summer house. The very house I am dreaming, would become my home one day—today an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere with no running water and common utilities.

Sunday

My girlfriend left back to the city at noon, and I decided to use the alone time to realise an old idea of mine—a website to bring together students and businesses to create practical research.

I figured this idea looks a lot like a job board, and so I bought a full-functioning career page template for $80, but soon discovered that it had too much functionality, and the core features (the business model) was not matching with my vision. I cleared the whole thing, asked for a refund and went to sleep.

Monday

Woke up, brought some water from the well, made a fire in the fireplace, had breakfast, and got back to my computer. I need to keep it simple. I re-installed WordPress with its default template and started building on top of that.

Around noon, I get a phone call from a corporation I was applying for a job—they made me an offer. My first job offer over ten years as an entrepreneur, perhaps third in my life.

I promised to get back to them by the end of the week.

This was getting real—I might actually go to a real job. This fueled me to get to back to work—perhaps this is the project that could save me, that could start paying my bills so I wouldn't have to get a real job. I had to hurry up if I wanted to get the project live by the end of the week.

I worked late till the night, and managed to get the majority of the features ready.

Tuesday

The website was working, but it looked awful with its default theme. It was time to change the design—I discovered it was quite easy if you had followed WordPress architecture and guidelines. I could test different designs while the content, pages, and posts stayed the same. I played around with designs, then chose one and modified it a bit.

Wednesday

My final day in the summer house—my deadline to launch. I still had final details to arrange—terms & conditions page, design and bug fixes. These small things often tend to take most of the time. I was constantly fighting with my inner perfectionist—"this is just the MVP (Minimum Viable Product)“ I told to myself.

I got everything running by the evening, and created a fake email account to send out some emails—I couldn’t risk sending them under my own name—after all, I had no idea what the representatives of the universities think of the platform.

I sent a few hundred emails to different companies and went to sleep.

Thursday and On

Had to get back to the city. The emails had had no effect yet. Over the day, I scrapped more emails and sent out dozens of new emails to different organisations.

I discovered that Universities are actually already doing this internally. A bit of market research fail from my side—I had been looking for the wrong keywords and phrases when I did my Google search.

Over the weekend I finally showed what I had built to some of my friends, and even my girlfriend. I didn’t get any purchases and made the platform free of charge at the beginning of the next week.

I declined the job offer as it was really not for me—I would be dead inside within a few months. There has to be something better for me...