Hitting 1000

Every morning, one of the first things I do when I sit down in front of my PC is to check out the dashboard on my HR SaaS app to see what the overnight activity is. A couple of days ago, I noticed this in the top right of the dashboard:

I won’t lie, I actually had tears of emotion well up when I looked at that. It says “1000 subscribed companies”. That means ONE THOUSAND companies out there that have actually paid money to subscribe to my app.

That is something that I find surreal and have to pinch myself often. This is an app that was formulated entirely out of my head. I have written 99.9% of all the lines of code in it. Designed up almost every screen and field and prompt in the system. I find it hard to grasp that something that literally was just ideas floating around in my head is now in use by thousands of people around the world to help them to manage their teams.

Later on that day, Sarah from our team also posted this in our Slack channel:

And that is another thing that also astounds me. That we are now a growing team, with people working in the team who are also passionate and excited about getting our app to the world.

What started as ‘me’, is now bigger than just me.

I am eternally grateful to my family for their constant, untiring support. I am also grateful to my co-founder for sharing the load with me and for her great marketing skills that have got us to this level. I am grateful for my team and colleagues and friends who have been avid supporters and have stuck with me through tough times.

Onwards and upwards.

Another salute to strong women in my life

With international women’s day coming up again this weekend, I thought it was time to give another shout out to all the strong women I have had in my life. I did do a post last year on some incredible and inspirational women I know, and my intent was always to add to this over the coming years, and do more (badly amateurish) paintings of them.

I’ve told the story of my current business partner and co-founder, but more than two decades ago, I started another business with L, which was quite successful (We were state finalists in the Telstra business awards, which is one of the most prestigious business awards in Australia).

Now, L is also a keen horse rider, and kept several horses on her property. A couple of years into our partnership, she was out riding alone and came across a fenceline she needed to cross. She dismounted and held the fence wire down and tried to lead her horse over it, but unfortunately the horse tripped and fell on top of her, crushing her pelvis. She was stuck in the wild for hours in intense pain and unable to move until she was found much later and taken to hospital.

Her injuries meant that she had to stay in prone position for months, unable to walk, but still she insisted I bring her work to do while she was recuperating at home. I would often visit while she was staying with her parents in town and she would always brush off questions about how she was and dive into anything she could do to keep the business running and keep the customers happy.

We parted ways in the business a few years later, and while the initial separation from the business was acrimonious and emotional, over the years we have forgiven each other and are back to being friends again. It was after we re-established contact that L informed me that she had been diagnosed with Pompe disease, quite rare condition that causes muscles in your body to break down. Now, L was a super fit young woman, so to hear that she couldn’t walk up stairs etc. these days was unbelievable.

She underwent years of treatment, which included regular trips interstate for blood transfusions and stem cell procedures. I believe she now has the disease managed fairly well, and she currently travels the world advocating for several groups who support people afflicted with Pompe’s as well as lobbying governments to speed up research and approval of medication necessary to treat the disease.

I wish L all the best, and am grateful for the time we worked together.

Breathe...

After years of watching my startup bank balance hover around the $2000 mark all the time, it was refreshing to check the company accounts yesterday to see we had $40K sitting in there. This was after paying all bills for the month, including my salary.

Yes, after nearly 3 years of living on savings, I am earning a steady salary again from my startup. That is an indescribable feeling, and also really really motivating.

Having this money in the bank is also giving a new sense of freedom for us. We can look at doing some hiring or spending of software tools, all of which just lifts the burden on the shoulders of our current team. The best bit is, we can feel secure to spend money, yet still see the bank balance rise each month.

For the first time since I began my startup, I feel I can breathe easy again. I am grateful to my co-founder Fiona, and my team, and my family. And to everyone who stuck with me through the tough times.

Goodbye old decade, hello new decade

Hot air balloons rising over the Melbourne skyline on 1st January 2020, taken from our apartment in Southbank. A fitting reflection of how my life is starting to take off right now.

Something feels different about 2020. Every year, I look forward to starting afresh and reaching some of my stretch goals, but it always felt like I was barely keeping afloat amongst the turmoil of life.

The past decade has probably been the least thrilling 10 year block of my life. I lost my Dad, and my wife lost her Mum in 2009, and I guess that sort of took the wind out of our sails, and the grieving process and recovery from that really took a lot of energy out of us, and left me personally directionless and demotivated for many years.

But in 2019, I felt a change in the air. I felt more alive, and filled with purpose that I had in a long while. A lot of things also fell into place to help that impression. My startup began to grow well, I finished an excellent accelerator program with Catalysr, and I had a new, brilliant co-founder join my business as well.

On the personal side of my life, I managed to shed a couple of ‘friends’ who proved to be more hard work than they were worth. You know the ones - who are always only contacting you once or twice a year to ask for favours yet never doing anything to help you move your own life forward. As much as I don’t actually miss them, I wish them all good luck. The mental freedom that has come from not having to care for them any more has given me more brain space to focus on the important things.

We just had the biggest quarter ever for my startup, in terms of customer growth and revenue. I also managed to take a couple of weeks off over Christmas (and so did my co-founder), and things worked well while we were away because we now have a fantastic team who can keep the lights on without us having to be here all the time.

It was a pleasant surprise to come back from holiday to see new sign ups by large companies. We were even contacted out of the blue by a large vendor that we had been wooing for over a year. They decided this week that we were a serious player, and offered us a partnership out of the blue, off their own accord. That was really flattering.

Additionally, I was approached a couple of weeks back for the first time by a VC firm out of the blue asking about investing in my startup. (We declined, but after a long time of me asking and not getting great responses from various firms, it was cool to have one of them reach out on their own initiative). We also have an HR consultancy wanting to resell our HR SaaS and indeed they have even redesigned their website to match our branding as they want to act as a close partner to our company.

All this has set up 2020 to be huge, and I am really excited about where we can go from here. Oh, and I also started earning a regular salary from my startup after nearly 3 years of living on savings. That one fact alone has put me in a better head space as I move to double my salary over the next 12 months.

Onwards and upwards for this new decade. I am excited.