One inch of trade. Miles of satisfaction.

Last week, I was speaking to a business school class in Singapore. I asked, "How many people would like to start their own company someday?". In a room of fifty people, only one hand reluctantly went up.

Hell Yeah or No, by Derek Sivers

If Sivers asked that question in Brazil, the amount of raised hands would not be different. For lots of reasons, Brazil is not fertile soil for building new companies. Besides the inherent risks of starting a business, government policies add complexities and bureaucracies that make most people choose to work for someone else's product than for their own. This brief introduction was necessary to better express how happy I was when I got an email last month.

Following the advice given by Jason Fried in his book Rework, I started to "scratch my own itch" in March of this year. I was the Product Manager, the Designer, the Programmer, and the Head of Marketing. Agreements between departments haven't ever happened so fast. After a few seconds of thinking, every issue got solved. Ten weeks later, I put in the market what I called an English Augmented Dictionary. It does everything a traditional English Dictionary does and goes further, automating several tasks I used to do manually.

For five months, I thought that the itch I scratched was only mine. Then, at the beginning of October landed in my inbox an email with the subject "New sale of Typenik for Mac for $9". Gumroad makes it easy for people living even in Brazil to sell software. Thank you so much, Sahil! For the first time in my whole life, I had just sold a product made entirely by myself. From idea to the first sale, everything was made by the same person. Nine dollars may look like one inch of trade, but they brought me miles of satisfaction.