Self Doubt vs. Vision

It’s the 4th day of me working on my own business, and my self doubt is rearing its ugly head.

I don’t expect overnight success, and yet it eats at me to know that the journey ahead is so long and uncertain.

Here are the current unknowns that we need to work through:

  1. Will anyone find the content I’m producing and actually want to watch it?
  2. Once they find the content, will it be helpful to them?
  3. If it’s helpful to them, will they actually buy the things I’m selling?
  4. Once they buy the things I’m selling, will it have been worth it to them?

I’m firmly in step 1, and that’s not surprising. I’ve only made two new videos, and the oldest one was only put online two days ago. I’ve done barely any marketing, because I’m still working on establishing my content research and production process, and I don’t want to try to drive people to unpolished content, or content they don’t actually want.

All that said, the feeling of publishing something and only seeing a handful of views, nearly all of them from myself or my wife, really sucks.

But I do believe in the vision. I do believe in the mission. I do believe in my plan.

And come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve put those online anywhere yet, so here they are:

Vision: To help 1000s of people across the world become smarter and more productive by selling them the learning resources and software they need.

Mission: To provide for my family by producing video courses and software that makes programmers more productive.

Simple rules:

  1. Create 15 minutes of draft video a day.
  2. Help 1 person a day.
  3. Find and solve real problems that real people have.
  4. Engage in community.
  5. Do everything in public.
  6. Always be teaching what I’ve learned along the way.
  7. Don’t be afraid to charge money for the valuable things I have made.
  8. Launch early, iterate often.

The rough plan currently is:

  1. Stay in touch with various online communities that I can find so I can get an idea of what people are looking to learn, and what they’re struggling with learning.
  2. Produce free content to build an audience, and to maximize the number of people I’m helping.
  3. Create a paid TypeScript course, and then another subsequent course (Angular?) that goes in depth on the topics that I know will resonate with people.
  4. Eventually aim to create something like Go Rails for JavaScript developers after I’ve built up a bit of an audience, and proven that people are happy to pay for what I’ve created.

All of this while hopefully creating an income that will support me and my wife sooner rather than later.

It’s a big chunk of work. And a big chunk of uncertainty.

Hopefully we’ll get there.

Whatever happens, may God’s will be done.

Amen.