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.

Coding in silence

This Twitter poll I came across today got me to thinking. I know Kelly asked about podcasts here, but I have a lot of friends and colleagues who listen to music while working.

Here is my secret. I can’t.

Those of you who know me are probably saying “But you LOVE music! Heck, you played in several bands, you have a son who is a rising musician, you create and produce music on a regular basis, you tour the world to see bands and musicians in action regularly… How can you not listen to something that is so close to you while you work??”

The honest truth is that I love working in complete silence. Music and talking is a complete distraction for me when I am in a flow state.

I think it is probably the same reason that the poll responders above cannot listen to a podcast while working. To really get the most out of a podcast, you need to actually listen to the words and ideas being put forward by the speaker. It is of no use as just background noise. You might as well be working in a coffee shop if that is what you need (or use a background noise generator).

For me, listening to music is a bit like that. As a former keyboard player and guitarist in a band, I find that when listening to music, I go a bit deeper. I will generally isolate one particular instrument in the mix, even to the extent that I imagine playing that instrument in real time. My musician brain is constantly questioning note choices or picking out interesting chord changes or progressions. My producer brain is thinking about how everything is sitting ‘in the mix’ and listening for reverb and delay tails. There is a whole process of analysis that kicks off in my brain that means the music is a really interactive experience for me, and not just a soothing background lull.

For that reason, I cannot hold a complex programming concept in my brain or wind my way through complex logic problems while listening to music of any sort. It seems the synapses in my brain can only deal with one set of complex universal puzzles at a time.

All luck to those of you who can do both though. My own sons seems to traverse the world these days with earphones in and listening while interacting with other or carrying out day to day tasks. Sometimes I envy them. Often I don’t.

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.

Side motivation

I recently obtained a second 27” monitor for my iMac. This one is off to the side and rotated 90 degrees so that I can look at long bodies of computer code easily without scrolling up and down.

I also use the ‘Mission Control’ feature on macOS, which allows me to have several desktops preconfigured, and to jump between them as needed. I have Spaces set up for communications, programming and web browsing.

On the communications and programming spaces, I have apps set up on both screens for maximum productivity. But on the web browsing space, I used to have the second monitor showing my social media pages while I browsed other pages on the main monitor.

This was less than optimal, because I would routinely find myself getting distracted by my Facebook or Twitter feed all the time. The question was - what to put on that second monitor as a semi-permanent display.

The answer was actually pretty simple. I now have the page for my SaaS HR Partner showing on that screen all the time when I am browsing the web. I absolutely LOVE what our UX designers have done with the website, and I enjoy looking at it all the time. Additionally, I enjoy looking at the customer testimonials and new customer logos that are getting rapidly added to that site. It is hugely motivating and helps me to stay focused on our mission of building the best possible HR system for small to medium businesses worldwide.

What is your ‘go to’ static display screen that you would like to have in the background all the time?