On the Need to Start Somewhere

I’ve been thinking about starting this blog for quite some time, which means I have a backlog of posts to write. I could pick one at random, but I have an obsessiveness which prefers a single post to link the stories together. While the information may be able to stand on its own, I find the same information much more memorable when strung together in a cohesive narrative. Story telling is a powerful skill.

A lot of the posts on this blog may end up reading as a sort of stream of consciousness. I apologize in advance for any babbling or ranting, and will make every effort to edit them into coherence before posting. That said, the primary purpose of writing is to better explore and understand my own thoughts. From there to gain a better understanding of the actions which followed. Finally, to analyze the outcomes and determine what lessons there are. Helping others or getting advice from strangers are secondary goals, though still important.

Over time, there are plenty of topics that I’ll write about from the not-so-recent past, to name a few:

• Being a clerk in the weird, dying world of open outcry derivatives trading
• Joining a failing market making desk trading S&P 500 derivatives
• Switching careers from finance to tech (From QA intern to Senior Software engineer in < 4 years)
• Travelling between Asia and Europe
• Relocating from Chicago, IL to Santa Barbara, CA

But for this post and the next… lot, I don’t want to dive too far into the past, which I’ve expanded on a bit in my about section. Instead, I’d like to dive into some of my more recent attempts to expand my skills in different ways.

The goal

I want to rewind to September 2019 and examine a few of the major threads that unravelled between then and now (April 2020). These events are still ongoing so the endpoint will shift as developments occur. This posts marks the beginning of a few threads that I suspect will end up becoming many posts. The high level topics are:

• Acquiring a small ecommerce company as both a financial and educational investment
• Serving as Tech Lead on a project where the difficulties were mostly non-technical
• Finding a business partner and experimenting with launching products on Amazon FBA

I’ve learned a lot in this time about a wide variety of things. They range from “managing” projects in a software company, pay-per-click advertising, ecommerce logistics and fulfillment, and even image editing in GIMP.

My primary goal is to make sense of the many experiences I’ve had over the past six months stemming from these threads. While I already have quite a few takeaways, there are doubtless many more to be had upon closer inspection. For that, I know no better method of inspection than long-form prose. Making that prose public will force me to put a little more effort into the analysis than I otherwise would.

My secondary goal is to share stories, problems, actions, and results from each of these threads in a way that can be useful to you in the future. I’m excited to share some of the more brilliant (in my mind) things I’ve managed to figure out. I’m also super embarrassed and not excited to expand on my very real failures along the way.

A Teaser

In September 2019 I had some extra cash on hand, little faith in the stock market, and a lingering desire to do more than ‘just software’. I managed to find an ecommerce business for sale on empireflippers for ~$25,000 and decided to jump on it. As you can imagine, there were plenty of (in retrospect) predictable blunders. You’ll have the opportunity to laugh at my foolishness and rookie mistakes. Ideally you’ll also get some insights which can help you avoid similar blunders while running your own business.

About that same time, I was designated Tech Lead for a project which was riding the struggle bus rather hard. This project technically started earlier that year (with me on it), but this is about the time that I really started being able to reflect on our troubles. From there, I started trying to correct some of the mistakes I felt we were making with (as you’ll see) very little success.

Around the end of September one of my colleagues also expressed interest in learning about non-software businesses. We got to talking and over the next few months worked out some limited experiments via Amazon FBA with varying results. These ended up being a great complement to my acquisition even though they were also a difficult competing priority. I won’t venture to guess how either might have been different if pursued on their own.

In summary

Besides a common character there’s not much tying these stories together. Quite simply they were all happening at the same time, and they were all happening to me. Even so, it may help us both understand any given post better by understanding my full frame of reference while these events were unfolding. Or maybe not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Suffice to say that I’ve learned a whole hell of a lot over the past six months. I’m excited to get some of it written down (and learning a whole lot more), while welcoming public ridicule. I’ll be even more excited if some of those lessons help you out in one way or another. Please let me know if that happens!

I’ll update this post with references to the later series as they become available so it should serve as a sort of hub. Additionally, there’s a section down below to submit your email address. Use that if you’d like to get notified when new posts are available. If you would like a way to subscribe to only a subset of these posts, let me know in the comment section and I’ll see what I can do.

Onwards!