Around this time last year, my savings were depleted. I had not been earning anything for the preceding four or five months, and was now out of savings. Needless to say, I was very good at saving my income when I had it, something I deeply regret until now. But at the time, I remember telling myself, it will only take a few weeks to get some money. I am sure of that. Well, let me be honest, that few weeks has turned out to be an entire year now. An entire freaking year, of barely scraping by.
Anxiety is an understatement. Think of it this way, imagine you have no idea where you next meal is coming from. Imagine you have no friends or relatives around you to help you because of some tragic incident that led you to be separated from each other. Imagine still, at the same time you are healing from a traumatic experience, and so most of the time, you are generally isolated without friends. Now imagine that you run out of money, your lose your job, and have no one to turn to. What do you do? Go back home to your toxic family that you swore you were done with? Sell everything you have to offset your losses? Pray until your knees hurt that God will open a way?
Well, I did none of that. Instead, what I actually did was grow. In the three or four months that I had not been working, I was trying to improve my video editing skills. So guess what I did, I started editing videos for a friend who was in the music industry to make enough to make rent. Not for long though, because as my toxic family will always find out what I am doing and interfere, they did and I lost that gig after about 3 months of barely making it to the next month. I barely had enough for food. But guess what the upside of this moment was, I learned a lot, and I quit smoking coz I was too broke to even afford cigarettes, which were actually my highest expense in the pre-draught era.
Now that I could no longer edit videos, somehow, by the grace of God, I had to learn something new, or find a new client asap before I run out of money. So I started going out to bars and restaurants telling them I could do social media marketing for them. But then I met this guy who had a problem with their QR menus, in that they wanted to have a menu that users could scan and see it appear on their phones. So he asked me if I could do it? I couldn't and did not even know the slightest thing about how to do it. But I got the gig. It would give me food for a few days, so yeah, why not.
So I went back to the house and in two weeks, taught myself the basics of HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript. Needless to say, I managed to provide the service that the guys wanted, and got myself enough food for a week. But I did not know how else I was going to make money after the week was one. But now, I knew how to create QR Code menus, and so I went on a selling spree marketing the new product to as many restaurants as I could. I got two more offers. Way to go, I had a few more restaurants that actually wanted this product. So I made it, and improved various aspects of it, regardless, and got better at front-end development. All this time I was just winging it. Then, I got a content writing job that could help me stay afloat for the next three months. Way to go. Way to go. In this period, I did not look for more potential business. I was thinking that my writing gig was back in business and I could make enough now. So instead I started learning programming more intensively.
But after the three week grace period was over, I was out on my ass again. But now, I had learned something. "You don't really need friends, you just need to learn how to sell." Or so I thought. Then, now that I had run out of funds, I started looking for ways to make money. I started offering web design. By this time I had learned that it is futile to sell a product that no one wants to buy. I had also taken a lot crap from people, which is customary for people in sales. But I started trying to create websites. I realized pretty quickly that it was a very competitive world, and it would take a lot of effort just to make it. However, the website gig also gave me an income for a few months, allowing me to stay a float, but I needed something more permanent.
So, I found this company that needed a content creator. My video editing skills got me the gig, and I started working for them. But I only worked for a month, before I realized that I needed to focus on programming, since that was the field I thought I could really have an impact in. I also did not come to an agreement about the payment terms with the company, leading me to quit after just a month. I can say that stability is not my strongest suit. But I had been pretty focused on programming. So, if I am passionate about something, I will go all in. I had this idea of creating a POS system, because I thought it would help me learn backend programming, and it also seemed like something that businesses could actually benefit from. So, that's exactly what I did.
For the next month or two, I started creating this POS system and did it so flawlessly, that I thought it would be a perfect product to sell. By now, my sales skills were kind of on point, and I was able to get a few people interested in the product. I had one customer decide to buy it on the spot. I thought I had made it. Goodbye anxiety and sorrow. Goodbye sleepless nights of not knowing what to eat. I now have a product that most people actually want. Psyche! That's not what happened. When the client who wanted the product told me to go do business with her, that's exactly what I did. I went and installed the product in her business, and started keying in the products. By the 20th product, the program started raising errors I had never seen, and became too slow that it was virtually impossible to use. On the day I thought I would be getting paid, I lost my first customer, and my confidence in making these full-stack applications.
But not for long. I thought the answer would be to learn a new language C#, and build an application suing WPF (Windows Presentation Format) because I thought that would be easier. So for the next two days, I took a tutorial on C# and towards the end of the program, I learned about error handling. So I refactored my python code, and used error handling on virtually all aspects of the program and now I thought I had a perfect product.
Psyche! So I get a new customer and this customer actually pays me, half price though for the product. I was starving and needed the money, so I took it. The user did not add more than 100 products before the program became increasingly slow. By now, I thought I should use a different database system, instead of "JSON" which is what I was using and it worked. For three days. Then it became slow again, and I learned about how to optimize SQL to reduce slowness. Now, I have a perfect or nearly perfect product that functions without errors. However, I am out of money, and customers tend to take days before they can agree to make a purchase.
So, now its been 365 days of anxiety. I have a perfect product, but do not have the money to survive, which is what I am looking for as I start another 365 days of marketing the product and iterating it until it becomes perfect. I could use a regular job, and do the sales as a part-time hustle however. I have a product, I just need the patience to make it work. But every day, I am always putting out fires, every single freaking day. Entrepreneurship is a bitch! Ciao.