Today is the first day of working for myself since I quit my job with Dell yesterday, after being with Dell for the last two and a bit years. The goal while working with Dell was to save up as much as possible and get one of my projects off the ground to a point where I could sustain myself and hire some staff.

Ever since my internship working for Big Fish Games I’ve felt that the office life was not 100% for me. I love to work hard but be rewarded for the work and ideas I have and have always felt frustrated in a standard work environment. Having had several small online projects which have generated revenue over the years has given me confidence in starting something bigger.

So far I have about 40k in savings to live on and my various online projects bring in approx. 200-500 euro p/m so at least I have a small amount of revenue coming in already. If I live on 1500 euro p/m then I should have enough for 2-3 years depending on how much I decide to spend on advertising etc for my business.

This is not the first time I’ve quit my job for the hope of starting something new and working for myself but this time I have 2 years runway vs last time where I only had 4-5 months runway and had just purchased an apartment. The 2 years in dell have given me massive exposure on how a high performing software team should be run and I now have the confidence that I would be able to lead a software team for a small company.

The goal of the next 12-24 months is to grow one of my main projects to over 100k in revenue. I will be posting updates here monthly where I will give some details on my OKRs (Objectives and key results) and where I am on hitting them.

Current OKRs for the next month:

1. Objective – Get 100 clubs using ClubFlow.
   1. Increase club sign-ups by 10% each month
   2. Improve the club sign-up process/onboarding so we convert 80%+ of signups to active clubs.
   3. Spend 200 p/m to advertise on RowingAdverts & Facebook
2. Objective – Have feature parity with the major competitors in the space.
   1. Finish & test lotto functionality
   2. Add monthly payments for memberships
   3. Add member dashboard to show specific member info

For the last 6 months, I feel like I have been pushing the boat out regarding when I would pull the trigger and jump into working for myself on a full-time basis. At first, I wanted to have 12 months runway, then 18 months then 24 months – fear was driving me to stay “just another 2-3 months” every time. Like everyone else in the world, I’m not getting any younger and have to take the jump at some stage or give up on my dreams. I refuse to give up. I’d rather be 90 and still trying than 30 having given up on myself and what I believe I can do. If the next 2-3 years don’t work out I’ll just be getting another job saving up and going again. Each time I’m a little bit wiser!

Once I hit the 100k annual recurring revenue mark the next step in my plans would be to bring in some staff to manage & grow this business while I transition to one of my many other ideas which I believe can hit a larger audience where the ARR I’d be targeting would be 10 million a year.