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Closing down. Fun times. Good lessons learned.

This last year has been awesome, stressful but super fun. I set out to do something that seamed a bit crazy at first but ended up building it. Though I quickly learned the saying "the more code you write, the more you have to manage" came true for me.

Building a service like this has been super tough on the side with kids and a full time job. I spent a lot of nights and weekends working on it only to realize that it wasn't worth the time I was spending.

Primarily though I felt as though couldn't be as available as I wanted to be. Given that I'm essentially managing someones money (although it doesn't always feel like real money in crypto) I felt like I needed to be readily available to tackle problems that came up in a timely manner, as may affect the financial performance of a portfolio.

Other things were pilling on as well. The service that I had built on was shutting its doors US customers. Legally things have been getting weird in the space as the normal financial world tries to figure out what the hell crypto is and what to do with it. This was creating some legal overhead I was seeing in the short term if I moved forward, to cover my bases.

If I was working for myself as in previous years I potentially could sustain the near term work to get it through, but it just wasn't worth it.

This experience has pushed be to better define what I want in this season and set expectations for whats possible with my time. In general I've started to build a framework to push my ideas through and use that as the base criteria before I work on the next thing.

🍺 Here's to learning, growth and charting a new path forward! 🍺

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    Can understand your pain completely. Always find such stories very valuable. And failory.com has become my go-to place for them.

    I think that your story would be liked by the audience there. You can check it out: https://www.failory.com/interview-failure

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      Thanks I'll check it out, and see about sharing as well.

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    As a fellow husband and father who has shelved a project (after 3 years of nights & weekends), I feel your pain.... #justkeepswimming ;)

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      oy yeah that had to be rough as well. I think in general I tend to be driven by ideas and vision, and not completely thinking through the long term plan outside of code. This causes my to consider or work on things that are not a good fit for my life/time.

      Did you close down yours recently or was it awhile back?

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        closed end of 2018, because I could see the project was just too big for the time I could devote to it.
        Pivoted to remotime beginning this year, which has been much better. After +- 300 hours I have an MVP, and hopefully something that can generate revenue sometime next year.
        When you have that little time, you just have to be patient (and focus).
        I'm still learning how to be more picky on choosing what to work on, and what can wait.

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          Nice. Glad to hear your new project is a better fit.

          Thanks for the encouragement. Yeah that's for sure, learning to focus on the long game.

          🍺 here's to being more picky in 2019!🍺 :D

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    The crypto world must have been a wild ride indeed. What are the biggest things you've learned / that you'll do differently with your next idea?

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      Yeah its pretty crazy and fun for sure. Outside of the huge legal grey area, good security/encryption is paramount to building in the space. Soooooo many people and applications get hacked as bots and scammers are upping there game to steal folks money.

      Biggest thing I've learned? In a word. Plan.

      • Plan out what I want. Build a framework the things that I care about, want to do with my life and let ideas filter through that.
      • Set a plan for the idea, in order to evaluate what its going to cost me in terms of time and money.

      Looking through this lens I could of saved my self a lot of time and money in doing a proper evaluation of the idea and seeing that it wasn't a good fit. I'm a very emotionally driven person and ideas and vision excite me, but I tend to gloss over the finer details, thinking it will just work out :)

      Not one to quote scripture, but feel like this sums up my experience pretty nicely:

      “Is there anyone here who, planning to build a new house, doesn’t first sit down and figure the cost so you’ll know if you can complete it? If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money, you’re going to look pretty foolish. Everyone passing by will poke fun at you: ‘He started something he couldn’t finish.’"
      https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+14%3A28&version=MSG

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        Those are some valuable lessons. I've messed up many projects in the past by not planning properly. Though it's still worth nothing that sometimes not having a plan can work out well. Thank you for sharing!

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