About 4 years ago, the gears of the Corporate Machine finally ground me down. I’d had enough, and I said “f*ck this, and f*ck you too” to not just my boss, but an entire way of life.
It just wasn’t for me.
I was terrified though. I had 3 kids, a brand-new baby girl, and a lovely wife at home (in a bloody rental) and I just couldn’t run around quitting cushy office jobs like that.
I’ll never forget what she told me though.
I was as close to showing signs of anxiety as I ever get, flustered and floundering about, when she held my chin in her hands, focused her intense green eyes into mine, and said, “Hey. No matter what happens… we’re not gonna starve.”
That moment forever changed me and how I approach my business. Because it was at that moment, that my business was officially born.
I loved Web Analytics. I love the idea that you can have numbers that show you what people are doing on your website. I love that you can find out how many people from New Zealand went straight to your “Contact” page from your home page during the month of March. I love that shit.
But nobody wants it.
Or rather, nobody knows enough about what it is to know how much they need it.
People know that they need SEO though.
Well, they’ve been told that they do, by an industry of used snake-oil salesmen.
People know enough to Google “SEO” and see what comes up, so that’s what I did. It was what people were looking for and it was something I was good at. I figured, “Meh, it’ll pay the bills.”
And it did. Poorly, but still. I also had other time to build some cool Keyword and Competition tools, ROI trackers and Link Analysers, Rank Checkers and AdWords Reporters. I also went to the park with kids a LOT. And played guitar a LOT.
Now, there’s just too much bullshit. I’m tired of it, and I never really liked it in the first place.
SO… I’m shutting it down. My company is going on a hiatus, a holiday, a Paid Parental Leave, so that I can focus primarily on my soon-to-be-here beautiful baby boy… and how to revamp my company.
I’ve also got some other projects I’m going to be spending some time on. I’m going to:
- Finish building Page Buoy, a website for writers to connect with other writers and be able to polish their works-in-progress while they’re still in progress.
- Build Have a Good Website, a website that’s just that, all about helping you to have a good website. Tips and Tricks, advice from pros, everything from where to put your logo to how many characters you should have in your meta titles.
- Revamp this website. I’m going to move pictures and family cuteness to another, very similar, website, and I’m going to focus on my novels and writeryauthorness here.
- Revamp my business website. As well as finish building all of my neat Web Analytics Reports so that you can log in, sign up, and have them sent right to you every week (mostly for FREE). I’m building this in PHP/MySQL, with the Google Analtyics API, using a Windows-based program to take thumbnail screenshots, that then generates a PDF, which gets emailed to you on a scheduled CRON job. Uffda! That even makes my head hurt.
- Revamp my offshoot, Jex Solutions website. This one was a FAIL as I tried to get people to sign up and use all of the neat SEO Tools that I’d built. People did, but they’re not me, and didn’t know how to use them. That’s alright though, because I learned more from that colossal failure than I would’ve by some partial success.
- Help my good friend Patrick Dub-T with DollarDonation, a website that lets you donate a dollar to all kinds of charitable organisations. We’re all kinds of stoked over this one.
- Revise and publish my first novel. It’s ready, it’s just been resting.
- Finish my second novel. I’m just about halfway through it now. Wait… okay, now.
- Oh, and clean up and organise my house while helping gorgeous lovely Wifeage look after Little Boy Blue and our 3 other yardapes.
So there’s a fair bit on my plate. I think I’ll play lots of guitar in there too.
And watch some footy.
And drink some beer.
Wish me luck.
Looking forward to Page Bouy. :-)
Good luck with everything.
… and a line of t-shirts/coffee mugs/mouse pads, etc. screen-printed with ‘Jex Appeal!’
@DK – I’ve never actually thought of that before. Do I owe you royalties now for every time I use it?
PS – I’m actually serious, I’m SO using that.
PPS – SERIOUS.
HAHAHA!! just the pleasure of knowing you like it is reward enough for me … seriously!