I’m just waiting for a video to finish rendering for YouTube, so I thought I’d write a quick post.

We’re at order #999. Since we launched this business 20 months ago, it’s been the craziest journey of my life (and I’ve had some pretty crazy ones!).

It’s incredible to think how much life can change so quickly. Not even a year ago it felt weird to me to leave my computer during the “working day,” and I felt guilty over the smallest things. Some weeks have been amazing, and some weeks have been really difficult.

Now we’re reaching the stage of preparing to hire a full-time employee, which is a new and scary thing. I’ve quickly learned that there are always new and scary things in running a business, and that often the scariest things are the ones said in one sentence by people who have never done the thing you’re doing. They mean well, but holy crap it’s a different situation when you’re doing it yourself (look ma, no hands!). Progress over perfection, and all that.

Sometimes it still doesn’t feel quite real – I was talking to a friend the other day who said, “I think you see yourselves as still building a business. You’ve haven’t, you’ve built one.” That in and of itself feels scary.

To be honest, there are many days where I work scared, and that’s because I care so much. There are many days where I’m anxious (since starting a business my depression has become close to non-existent, but my anxiety is regularly at an all-time high). This isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, as long as I push through it or use it in a good way to get things done/prevent potential issues. The important thing is to keep going, and that’s something I can do. I just want to keep creating things, and that’s what I need to focus on.

A big part of what’s difficult is other people – people who aren’t customers, potential customers, or friends, or even necessarily competitors, but people who cause us unnecessary work or take time away from what we want to be doing and love doing (making things, helping people, chatting, planning new stuff etc.). This has really blown up as we’ve got more known in our niche (even though we’re still very small!), and it comes in a lot of different forms. One of the biggest ones is our customers and affiliates recommending us and random people who’ve never used us replying with sarcastic/critical comments.

I think it’s broadly because a lot of people think we’ve come out of nowhere and they could do what we’re doing so we’re nothing special. I agree with the latter, and I’d love to see more small, honest companies in the space. What I think they don’t really see from this side is that it’s absolutely relentless and 24/7 at this size, and I’m not sure that everyone could (or would want to) hack it. We’ve given up our whole lives for it and we love it, but there’s no way in hell we could take 3 hours off to see the new Avengers movie, for example. At least until we can hire someone and train them, which realistically is going to take a while…!

The former is completely untrue; we haven’t come out of nowhere. I started blogging in 2001, using WordPress I think in 2005. I worked in hosting for close to 10 years for other companies. Joe has a computer science degree and years of web dev experience under his belt. In the first probably eight months or so after we launched, I was absolutely relentless in creating and nurturing sales. I probably spent a good 12 hours a day just doing that, and for the first few months our sales were absolutely pitiful. No one had ever heard of us, and it takes a lot to trust someone with your website. It took so much showing up, day in and day out, and the motivation to keep going. When people ghosted towards the end of a sales chat or it took me 11 hours to make $11.99 or I finally convinced someone to buy and then someone else would cancel because they decided they didn’t like WordPress, it was incredibly tough. Life is much, much easier now we have amazing people recommending us, but it took a lot to get there in the first place. I’m still humbled every day that even one single person chose us.

People are talking a lot about “taking a break” at the moment. As lovely as the idea is, that just isn’t possible, and to be honest I get antsy when I’m away from things for more than an hour or so. I’m just obsessed with all of it! Longer days are really helping though, because it means I have more hours to be out and about in the sun instead of planning to go out but then it getting dark or rainy before I get a chance. I had a great day yesterday which involved a picnic by the lake with friends in amazing sunshine, and I’m determined to have more of the same this year :D

(And in the time it me to write this post, we had a random spate of orders and now we’re up to 1006!)