Well Hello There

On my recent absence from contributing to this blog, I had to go to the well and quote Willie Nelson:

“Well hello there
My, it’s been a long, long time
And how am I doin’?
Oh I guess that I’m doin’ fine

Well, it’s been been so long now
But it seems now, that it was only yesterday
Gee, ain’t it funny how time just slips away?”

I can’t believe it, but it has been nearly a year since I left to venture out on my own.  At that time, I began developing an application that would help B2C communication on Twitter.  I thought that this was the million dollar idea, and it may very well have been, except I was unable to sell it, I ran out of money, and Twitter (being in eternal beta) kept changing causing my code to crumble.

During this time, I started iPhone development on the side.  That led to making a lot of friends in the mobile development community, working with developers oceans away, and contributed to the belief that anything is possible.

Unlike overnight success stories, my dream ended up not working out.  I ran out of money and  ended up taking odd jobs (I tried to start a house painting business (which also failed) and tutored SAT prep to inner city high school students) and ultimately had to return to the working world.  Extremely humbled, but grateful for a job, I returned to work with the company that I had left eight months earlier.

Four months have passed since rejoining the professional ranks, and I have never been busier.  After realizing how hard it is to make and sustain a revenue stream, I have worked hard to do what’s best for my company.  I have completed every task/project that has been given to me with the highest quality.

Additionally, as I vowed in a blog article at the beginning of October, I continued to create on my own.  Any person with a full time job with entrepreneurial aspirations on the side will tell you that this is difficult.

You come home drained from working 8:00-5:00 and then you have to continue to produce.  Documenting ideas, making mockups, performing QA, giving feedback, coordinating developers and artists, staying up late to talks with developers, trying to line up sales and composing emails is incredibly time consuming; this is especially true if you are trying to have a relationship, other interests, read, and still have fun.  This shit is tough.

But, I have to admit that it is worthwhile.  I have never been happier.  I have absolutely enjoyed the past four months and have learned so much.

Currently, I am working on a Facebook Picture Game, a Foodie app for iPhone/iPad/Android, a special application for Feista/Easter for the iPhone/iPad, an update to Second Take, and building out a platform for museums to use to deliver mobile guided tours (we just signed up the San Antonio Museum of Art as a client for the Missing Peace exhibit!).  This has all been exciting, and consequently, taken me away from writing.

I have a couple of articles that I will be interesting in publishing over the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned and actually check back in with this blog.  I know that it has been rather uneventful (in fact, I would love for someone to scrape a huge sampling of blogs and find out how many of them have articles in which they apologize for not updating!), but I look forward to writing on different topics soon.

I will leave with some questions for any of you indie developers (please leave comments because I would love to get some feedback!):

1)      If you have a “professional job” as well, why do you devote time to development?

2)      What gives you the energy to create even after a long day?

3)      What are some projects that you are working on/blog where I can read about it?

4)      For you guys that are off on your own, when did you realize that you could sustain yourself on your own?

5)      What inspires you and gives you the energy to keep on going?

Always enjoy hearing from devs/entrepreneurs so please leave comments!