The Business Project
Date Posted: September 5th, 2010
A few weeks ago I alluded to a project called “Bweesness for Blogging“. To quote:
Last week I thought of a way to get some valuable experience for this blog. I’d love to be able to tell people to go out and start a business doing what you enjoy doing, but as of today I’ve never actually had a side business of my own. So, I think I’m going to start one… and blog about the experience. The one caveat being that I’m already feeling overwhelmed. How can I take on more?
Also that’ll mean my life will consist almost entirely of money making or potential money making activities. I don’t know how comfortable I am with that. :-/
Still this is a good thing.It’ll be valuable life experience if nothing else.
I’ve decided to do it. Now, to tell you about it.
The project
The idea is pretty simple. I make stuff and then I sell said stuff on the internet and maybe sometimes in person. While I’m building the business I blog about the experience in as much detail as I can.
This idea isn’t new. Lots of bloggers blog about building new businesses. The difference here is that I’m starting literally from the bottom. I have few readers right now. I’m not leveraging the traffic from my successful blog to jump-start my new project because there aren’t readers to leverage. Months from now, assuming the business is successful, people will be able to come here to read about how it happened as it happened, mistakes and all. That will be cool. And valuable. 
What the project will mean for the blog.
On Wednesdays I’ll post something about business building. I’d like it to be general articles on the process or background information about my particular business, but if I don’t have an article ready, I’ll post an update on what I’ve done with the business since the last update.
On Fridays I’ll still have the weekly check-in, but I’ll include a busines update too unless I’ve already written one on Wednesday.
So once a week there’ll be an update on what I’ve done for the business and about once a week there’ll be a post about business stuff in general.
I may have an off-topic post on Mondays. Maybe.
It’s an ambitious schedule, and we all know how well I’ve been able to stick to a writing schedule so far. It’s practically a given that I’ll stumble along the way. That said, I’ll do my best, pick myself up when I fall, and analyze why I fell in the first place so it hopefully won’t happen again.
How the project fits into the mission.
The normal thing to do in life is to go to school and then get a job working for someone else. If you start a business you’ll most likely fail, so you probably shouldn’t try, and if you do succeed it’ll eat your personal life. Also you’ll be a bad person because you’ll have to get people to buy things they neither need nor want.
I grew up with this belief (and from I can tell, so did many of my peers), and after doing extensive reading, I’ve come to realize that this belief is probably flawed. There are plenty of examples of people who run successful businesses who spend less than 40 hours a week working on it and don’t have to compromise their ethics to do it. Assuming these examples are true, then these business owners have found a way to live that’s better than conventional wisdom. [1] They’re walking the path less traveled, which is what this blog is about. So this project decidedly fits into the mission of TPLT.
Yay big projects!
[1] That said, I don’t think that business ownership is the right path for everyone, or maybe even most people. (Aaron, for instance, loves his job, and I can think of plenty other people too.) I just have a hunch that there are a lot of people out there who would be much happier running their own business and aren’t doing it because they believed what conventional wisdom had to say about business ownership. I think I’m in this category.
I’m trying not to feel too guilty about it.
