Eliminating Distraction
These days, I'm putting a lot of efforts in Grawl, a side project I had left aside and decided to revive. You can read more context in my previous post: On My Way to 100 Paying Customers.
The main difference with this new project is that I've decided to do it alone. No other developer, no designer, no marketer, no seller, etc. I have to do it all by myself.
While it has a lot of advantages, doing things alone require a lot more time. Especially when I'm doing tasks in areas where I'm less comfortable, like marketing. Also, because I'm alone, it's tougher to make decisions, because I'm the one asking and answering the questions.
As it's still a side project, and freelancing is still where my income comes from, I have to minimize distraction in order to keep things moving.
Selling My Shares of Signsquid
As you may know, I'm one of the cofounders of Signsquid, an electronic signature SaaS. We first created that application around 2011. We were 6 cofounders with a lot of enthusiasm. To this day, I still had my shares in that project, which means that I had to do some level of support.
Lately, it required more and more support time, and I did not believe that the team, as it was before I sold my shares, would be able to bring that SaaS to a level where we can say it succeeded. I did not consider that the time I put in support was an investment. So, I decided to sell my shares to the other guys. Which in turns, motivated other cofounders to rethink their involvement in the project and also sell their shares. The new team is now much leaner and in a better place to succeed.
On my side, I feel really relieved of what became a burden.
I can now focus on my current projects, which have more chances to succeed, and are also much more fun.