My Plan from Noob to Founder: Cope or Not?

Since you asked for bluntness explicitly in your post, here's what I think :

1. Your 1st year goals are all over the place. From experience, when I have too much on my plate, I tend to get distracted and don't end up doing any of them properly. I have since then made this approach of keeping only 3 things on my TODO list, whether its one week, one month or one year . Anything that doesn't fall in that top 3 is not a priority for me.
2. Goals should be measurable. Statements like - building a large scale project that should be useful to others, is not really a goal, it's just a dream imo.
3. I wouldn't set reading a book as a goal. I would set the expected outcome of reading the said books (ex: investing in stock market , building a startup) as my goal. Reading a book is a habit, which I would make into a system. Instead of saying I would read 15 books in one year, I would tell myself, I would set a system of reading a book for 1 hour everyday for the next one year.
4. Last but not the least, I would not have only monetary goals like selling my saas company for $xx million or make $yy million in 10 years etc. I would perhaps rephrase it to say, reaching 1 million users in 5 years or reaching 10 million users in 10 years.

50% is done with the planing! Great job.

Skill can be learnt and Experience is overrated.

Experience is a measure of time of course you will be less experience than any 40 year old doing the same thing. But that does not means he is better than you. If experience is as important as it is said mark zuckberg will be 50 year old when he started facebook.

You just need enough experience to get started and you will gain experience while doing it. Talking about experience will do nothing and the only solution for experience is doing something.

If you want to have experience in starting business, starting a business will be the only way to gain experience thus making experience rather useless when starting.

My recommendation just start and learn along the way. Upskill and move , upskill and move. The most important thing is the habit of failing, learning and moving. If you sit around and think about it you will not move and no habit will be formed.

You can checkout this article : Experience in Business: Doing, Not Just Thinking, it might help you.

And also if you want to start blogging and want to automate seo, keyword and trend research I would recommend you to try out creativeblogtopic.com . A tool that enable you to automate seo research specific for you business blog.

This is great stuff to be thinking about! I honestly don't think your five and ten year goals are important right now, except as a reminder that success can be sweet. More important, in my view, is gaining the programming skills. The projects seem like the right idea, but I think I might go ahead and try to get at least a couple of them to be revenue generating. The tricky part in business is finding some people out there who want your thing, whatever it is, enough that they'll part with some money for it. Everybody posting on IH is, first and foremost, struggling to get that part.

Hey man,

First of all, congrats on being in a position to have done so much and have such goals. I really like the fact that you did car flipping. That has probably prepared you more for your success than the others.

Your goals are ambitious and reasonable. You can totally get there.

I like your one-year goals better. They have an appropriate level of detail. Your 5 and 10 year goals should also include details like, what you will be doing day-by-day. "Having a SaaS company" is vague and unnecessary detail. Will you still be learning programming? Or will you just count the money?

My other comment would about this
-- Complete 5 large scale projects (goal wouldn't be to monetize them but they will definitely useful to others besides myself)
It doesn't matter if it's "5 large-scale projects". The key criterion should be the value these projects bring to their users, not their scale. In other words, even a single, small-scale project that delivers significant value could be more meaningful than multiple large projects. The ultimate test would be whether your users would be disappointed if you were to discontinue the project.

Good luck! Keep us posted :)

Ambitious goals given the timeframes! How do you plan to do that? Would you need VC money?

It's good to have goals :)

Pedro

This is so good .

I do think you have done excellent. I am trying to get there and I have lot of technical experience but not much in business. I am going to launch a Matrimonial site (Dating/marriage site), so I am looking for any advice to price it and market it. Thanks for your post.

Hi Darwin, first of all, it's really impressive to have worked out this plan and to have this level of maturity at the start of this type of journey. It's absolutely essential to keep this state of mind.
I'm a serial entrepreneur myself, I've created 2 companies in the last 8 years and I've also created several products/games in parallel. The first thing I'd like to tell you is that everything will never turn out the way you planned:

• Entrepreneurship is indeed about the will to succeed, but there's a big element of randomness that you can never control. It's good to have numbers in your head, but don't forget to try and do what you love most, otherwise you'll get bored in the long run. For example, I once sold one of my businesses and it didn't make me a millionaire, but it still felt like a huge success, mainly because those years were so great!
• Entrepreneurship is also about perseverance. Know that it will take time, and that just because you don't reach your goals one month doesn't mean you haven't made progress.
  => To begin with, I advise you to learn by doing. It's important to read books, but there's no better way to learn about entrepreneurship than by doing it yourself! Start building and impressing your network, take part in events to promote your idea and gather feedback.

I'm glad you have your own plan, which is very good.

What are FLF posts? 😓