One Year Young

One year ago on this very day, I founded my company. It's called Web Inspect Inc.—a small web development agency for hire.

Honestly to say that it's one year old is a bit of a fib. In all honesty, I've been running a company for years now, but it didn't really "grow up" until last year.

This article is dedicated to all my friends who think I decided to start a company one day and found success right away... prepare to learn the truth. Ready to learn exactly what it takes to start and run a one-man-web-dev company? Alright then. Let us begin. This is the history of Web Inspect.

2011 — QBobble #

QBobble was founded in 2012. It was my first venture into building my own company. It was a partnership with my cousin, a very good friend of mine, and we decided we were going to build iPhone apps for clients. (sidenote: NEVER start a partnership with a 50/50 split. It went well for us, but we are the exception)

Never mind that neither of us had successfully built an iPhone app before. Never mind that neither of us had done client work before. We dove in and tried to swim.

I don't remember how we found our first two clients, probably through family members. My cousin was the actual iOS programmer, so I was the people person. I wrote contracts, I did some design work, I sent a lot of emails, I set up a bank account, and my cousin did the actual work.

It was a good time! We grossly undercharged, but still made a few thousand dollars, and built some decent pieces of software. Inevitably we eventually ran out of clients (after only two–ha!), and had to close our doors. It was a fun time, and we learned a lot, but it was very short lasted.

2012 — NMotion #

After our high stakes gamble with self employment, my cousin and I entered and won a programming contest. We were hired by and worked for the company that hosted that contest for a year, then we left and got picked up by NMotion.

NMotion is a startup accelerator. They help build companies. I briefly flirted with the idea of building a startup, but I didn't have a great idea for one, so my cousin and I were hired as hackers-for-hire instead.

This was a very fun summer. We worked for seven different startups, doing whatever the heck they wanted us to do. We built website, we built iPhone apps, we built linux apps—whatever people wanted, we did. It was a very busy but fun summer. This time we made a few thousand dollars each, which felt pretty amazing. Sure it was a full summer, but again it was a cheap education into what it looks like to run your own business.

We got to sit through all of the classes that the startups sat through. We basically got a world-class education in startups, and we were getting paid to do it. It was a great deal.

This is also where I learned that I didn't want a startup. The startup culture is very intense, and requires an almost exclusive focus on growing the business.

I probably shouldn't admit this, but business simply isn't that important to me. Business is fun and important, but it doesn't replace all of the other meaningful experiences you can have in this life. I wasn't willing to put my life on hold to build a business. So I shrugged shoulders, decided a business was too much work, and went to get a real job.

I was very fortunate, and got a job at Firespring, one of the best startup-y businesses around.

2013 — Firespring #

I loved working for Firespring. It was a great company that felt like a startup with none of the insecurity. I showed up early, left late, and greatly enjoyed my time there. I also learned more during this time than any other point in my career, hands down. Firespring is what made me into the programmer I am today, and I will forever be grateful for that.

Firespring gave me hope for startups. People had good boundaries there. Sure we would work long hours and even holidays at times—if the job demanded it—but that was the exception rather than the rule. People worked hard and they played hard, and it was that balance that I truly admired.

I also fully believe that this balance is what made their performance truly tremendous compared to most agencies in their peer group. They have something that is truly special. I also stayed here longer than any other company in my career so far, almost four years of work for them.

2015 — Within the Fold #

Starting My Own Company Take Two. A friend of mine from Firespring wanted to start a crowdfunding T-Shirt shop, and I told him that I would help.

This was an exhausting but exhilarating time, and probably the closest I've ever come to owning and operating a true startup. My friend was a designer, and had a lot of designer friends, and I was the programmer.

We formed a partnership, but I made sure my friend had more shares than me. It was his idea, and I wanted him to have greater rights in case we ever disagreed, which is at least a slightly smarter way to do a partnership than I did before.

I built the whole site, based off of designs that my friend made. I'm still pretty proud of it, even though it no longer exists: I built my own custom WordPress plugin that would allow people to "pledge" to buy a shirt by entering their payment details, and if enough people pledged, we would print and ship the shirt.

This project worked extremely well, and we sold hundreds of shirts, and made over ten grand for the company. We also payed our designers much better than other websites that did this same thing, thanks to a lot of penny pinching done by my co-founder. We probably could have taken this idea further, but honestly it was a lot of work, and we didn't know how to scale it. We weren't making enough money to hire someone to do the shipping for us, and the shipping got overwhelming really fast.

In the end I talked to my partner, and we ended up disolving the company. It was a great experience and we learned a lot, but in the end it wasn't as scaleable as we would have hoped.

2017 — An Interlude on Moonlighting #

Somewhere in the middle of all this I started getting requests to moonlight for a couple different companies. I was flattered, and knew that I had a little extra time here and there, so I said yes.

This was, as it turned out, a dangerous decision! Little did I know this at the time, but this eventually panned out to become the business that I own and operate today. I did very good work for an affordable rate, and as I result I soon ended up with more moonlighting work than I was able to get done. I was spending many evenings coding, and I got tired of it—time to do something about that.

2018 — Web Inspect, Inc. #

So moonlighting took over, I quit working for the company that employed me at the time, and went full-time freelance.

I started going to an accountant a few years before, and she advised me that I should create an S-Corp for my new venture. This way I could pay regular old payroll taxes for myself, instead of having a hefty self employment tax at the end of every year.

So incorporation it was! I hired an attourney to handle the paperwork, and I'm glad I did: I did that paperwork for both of my previous companies, but I was always worried that I did something wrong. Honestly that's a big reason why I was so willing to let both of them go, I was always secretly afraid that I did the paperwork wrong, and the IRS was going to eventually find out and sue the pants off of me. I paid him $800, and the peace of mind alone was worth far more than that.

This underscores one of the most important things I've learned about business through all of this: do not try to do it alone. Even if you're a one-man company, you need to have a solid team of professionals around to dig you out when you need it. I have an accountant, an attourney, a financial advisor, and a business advisor. If you want to start your own company, this is a good place to start. Don't risk it unless you have these people in place first, it's much easier to get this stuff straiht at the beginning than it is to dig yourself out of a hole later.

The First Year #

I won't say that the first year of running my own business has been easy. It hasn't. I have dealt with a lot of doubt, a lot of unknowns, and many days of fear and anxiety about all the things I'm doing that I've never done before.

Running a business requires far more skills than I knew when I started. On any given day, I'm juggling at least five different things. Every week I have to deal with contracts, designs, accounting, filing, project management, client communication, keeping receipts, paying bills, marketing, writing, and to think that none of these things are actually what people hire me to do, which is primarily programming.

You have to be a world-class renaissance man and wear tons of hats to make a company like this work. You also have to wade through very murky waters and deal with a lot of unknowns.

The benefits frankly would not be worth it for most people. Sure I get to schedule my own day. I get to work from home. I have no commute. I get to be with and spend more time with my family. I have more energy during the day. These are all very good things, and I like my life this way. But in return I have as many bosses as I have clients, I wear a million hats, I don't get paid for at least 20-30% of the work I do, and vacation... Well, vacation doesn't really exist. These are the facts of running your own business, at least when you're a one-man shop.

To you entrepreneurs out there #

Remember that my story is not your story. I have found a way to support myself and my family on my own ventures. It's not glamorous, and it's a lot of hard work, but it's worth it for me.

If I can do this, you can do this. Remember that it might take many years, and take many many failures before you find your way. There are no overnight successes, not really. Anyone who stumbles into success overnight inevitably fails because they don't know how to handle it. Take it slow, enjoy the process, and don't get too attached. Companies are fickle, and they fail all the time. Don't let that deter you.

One lesson I had to learn the hard way was that your time is company time, and even if you run the company, you still need to be held accountable to not wasting it.

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