For my first post as a 34-year-old, I wanted to announce that I am refocusing
my blog’s content. It’s a pivot of sorts as I have been pining over what I
should focus my content on. I have noticed over the last few years of blogging
that my PHP blog not only gets more traffic but also has more mailing
list subscribers. The simple truth is that hardly anyone wants to keep up with
a blog that is all over the fucking place.
To help this along I’ve decided to refocus my blogging efforts on discussing
motivational and productivity hacks for single-preneurs like myself. People
with day jobs, a family and ideas they want to bring to market. People that
struggle with finding the time or even worse, struggling to find the drive they
need to keep on their grind. I’m looking at you, guy on the couch watching TV
feeling completely dejected after “an honest day’s work”.
This shift in voice all stemmed from last year being one of the weirdest year’s
of my life. I ended up in a dark place where I was riding out a downturn in my
journey as an entrepreneur. My network of social sites were doing well but ad
revenue (my primary source of income) took an unexpected (and still somewhat
unexplained) hit. This was compounded by the fact that I had grown very bored
with working by myself as opposed to for myself.
After a few years of doing my own thing, I re-entered the workforce where I
held the two least fulfilling jobs of my career. One only lasted a few
weeks O_o. During this time, I decided that it was time to get the hell
out of Dodge (Tampa, FL) and get my ass out West. I ended up with an offer from
a Y Combinator backed company and just couldn’t make it work with having a
mortgage that was still upside down.
I interviewed at a few other places last year that I thought were cool shops.
Ultimately, I ended up putting the brakes on my search for something fulfilling
after a series of interviews (and coding project) with AppSumo. It
just wasn’t in the cards at that time but communication remained open through
the holidays. The process itself ended up leading me toward quite a bit of
introspection at the tail end of 2014.
As fate would have it, the stars aligned in January 2015 and I am now kicking
ass as a Sumo Dev (install SumoMe on your site, if you haven’t
already). The views expressed on this blog… yadda yadda. I don’t want to gush
too much, but I’ve been following the company since forever ago and really
respected what they were doing and how they were doing it. I am quite fortunate
for the opportunity and we’re gunning to relocate to Austin, TX sooner than
later (still figuring out that upside down mortgage ;).
What ever happened with my network of social sites? They’re actually still
around. They didn’t go to zero but they did see little to no maintenance over
the last year. I have been re-centering efforts around my original site,
SceneKids (with over 120k users), shutting down the smaller sites, and
focusing on a single goal of 100 million page views (by authenticated users) by
the end of 2015.
So that’s where I’m at with everything. Next week will begin a more focused
series of posts on various topics like productivity hacks, time management and
most importantly finding motivation and keeping momentum. The schedule will be
the same since it’s been working for me. Once a week, new posts on Sunday.
Oh, and don’t worry, I’ll still throw in the occasional Linode vs.
DigitalOcean post from time to time 😉
