My 1st Entrepreneur Year

Tweet It occurred to be me yesterday that it has been 1 year since I started my entrepreneurial adventure. I quit my job on the 2nd of October last year, with a lot of hopes and aspiration and the thought that I could go back to my previous lifestyle if things didn't work out.

A lot has changed in that one year, and happily everything for the better.

A quick summary of what happened, some of these dates might be off:

October '06 - Tony and I quit our jobs and started work on our original idea, a property website. We never really chose a name for it, but lets just call it shadymap.com because we had bought the domain and we were close to using it.

Mid-October '06 - After working on shadymap for a short time, Tony and I decided that for various reason the idea was not going to fly. We started on our first iteration of revmap.com

Mid-November to December '06 - Revmap was initially going to be a yelp for the UK except much more map based and feature-full. In the end we changed our idea because we had a competitor show up on the radar and also we realised that we would probably end up making something that we had no intention of using. We switched gears and started working on what revmap.com eventually became.

January '07 - Revmap was launched to great applause.

Jan - April '07 - Revmap hobbled along, it took a very long time before I was happy that we had all the things we required (and I am still not happy). The marketing never started, the viral growth never came and the motivation evaporated.

May - August '07 - Joined Peter and Pete to do Clickpass.com. Went through Y Combinator and the rest is the present.

That turned out to be more of a story of Revmap than anything else. There is an underlying story that would probably to intricate and subtle to articulate about the friends I made, the things I learned and how I improved as a person.

(On a slight aside; right now I am reading a book and I am finding it hard, to not write this blog post in the style of book, lol)

One of the turning moments for me this year was the point that I came to realise with reasonable certainty that I would never have to go back to a normal job again (excluding acquisitions). After interacting enough in the tech world I came to realise that:

• They (we) are all human, with few exceptional skills apart from some common traits like adaptability and "out of the box" thinking.
  
• The fact that I was good at programming and studying CS made my talents relatively rare even amongst entrepreneurs.
• I knew enough people I respected and wanted to work with in the future
• Once you immerse yourself in this world coming up with ideas stops being the hard part. The ideas are trickling all around me, if I can't come up with one, I can probably speak to 10 people who have their own ideas that they don't have time to do or need an another person to work with them on.
  

With no shortage of ideas and people, and with the skills that I have. Its pretty clear that I don't need to go back to a job. I also don't see why I would ever want to.