Late Night

So this past week has been extremely productive. Especially last night. As I had mentioned in my previous post I was contemplating using a friend of mine to do some design work for the front end on my website, www.MobileSharkTank.com, well I decided that would probably be the best route to go so all of yesterday and last night I worked on putting together site maps, page flows, processes, and getting the content together for the front end. I didn't get it all completely done and I am still working on it currently but I got a very good start so hopefully tomorrow morning when I meet to have the pages designed we'll be able to knock them out rather quickly. It starts getting really exciting when you see things coming together. I know for me it puts a lot of the nerves to rest that have been stressing me out lately because of the relative uncertainty associated with starting a business. But its definitely very comforting when you actually see things start to come together. I will be posting again later with some new developments that are really exciting and somewhat recent that have made the company I'm starting evolve even further and into an even more productive, hopefully lucrative, endeavor. Check back soon for my next post.

Present Day

So finally I've caught myself up from the past 5 months of work. It's been a long journey thus far and has been very rewarding in ways other than money. Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to add that to the list of things that have resulted from this endeavor...

To date however, since the last meetings I have had with Hemant I have tapered my initial project's scope to only focus on www.MobileSharkTank.com. Tonight I spoke with a good friend of mine Daniel Patterson about contracting out some of the design work for the site to him as he produces excellent work. (www.sucro.se) If there is one thing that I have learned from the progress that I have been making is that you can't do everything on your own. Delegation is key to success and although it is extremely difficult to put your fate and future in another's hand, it's often humbling to take a step back and look at yourself and look at others and see that they are better at something than you are and putting your trust in them is in your best interest. The work they produce is a result of the hard work they have put forth to get to that point in their life. For me, I am extremely good at development, but only because that has been my absolute focus for the past 4 years. Daniel, for the past 10 years has absolutely focused on designing beautiful websites.

In the beginning, I feel that my greatest failures were a result of spreading myself too thin. Though I am fully confident that I am capable of doing just about anything I put my mind to, I am not capable of doing everything perfectly with the limited amount of time that I have on this earth. Opportunity is in being first to market and doing everything yourself just doesn't make that feasible. Likewise, if you don't put your all into something and truly invest in it, it puts no worth on actually losing that. Forcing myself to invest in my dream and my ideas is like making an investment in my future and I don't like wasting money that I have worked hard for... One of my favorite adages is, let your money make money for you... and the only way that I can see to do that is to invest that money in something that I know I'm going to put everything I have into to make it succeed, and in the end... if it fails.... I'll still come out on top with all of the friends, experience, and with the realization that I pursued something that I wanted to do.

Have you ever wondered why goals are often associated with a dream... it's because they are something that in the deepest depths of your mind you want to attain, and what better way to wake up from your dream than to wake up living in that dream.

Getting Back On Track

After a slight slump and some hang ups it appeared that I now had the facilities to get things back on track and with the advent of the new year my motivation had really come full circle and I was ready to buckle down and really make things happen...

Over the course of a couple weeks I made a great deal of progress:

• I located a contracting firm out of Lexington, KY that would do iPhone applicatoins.
• I researched which states offered the best options for registering a business. I found that I really had 3 options, Nevada, Delaware, and my home state. In the end despite the perks in Nevada and Delaware because of flow through laws on companies under 100 employees I found that registering in your home state is the best option.
• With that being said, I registered my company under the name MAC Technologies LLC, MAC being my initials - Matthew Alan Colin - and also producing the dual intrinsic value of having he same trademark as a Mac computer.
• I determined tax considerations for 2009 and met with a CPA, Charlie McMonigle, from Monroe Shine. He advised me that I would be able to write off all expenses that I had incurred in 2009 in 2010 and that it was in my best interest to file taxes from 2009 as I had in previous years and worry about picking up a CPA when the time was right in 2010.

In addition to all of the above Hemant and I continued to meet and discuss additional business prospects and ventures and approaches and have continued to do so...

All of this has finally brought me to present day....

Major Hang Ups

I had graduated at this point, I owned 3 domains, Christmas was right around the corner, I had already completely moved out of my apartment, though I still had 2 weeks remaining on the lease and I had a great vision in mind...

What went wrong?

I put to much on myself, my ideas were too elaborate for a startup and the foundation I was building on was sand... I had to drastically rethink things. Having graduated and being back home gave me a lot of time to really sit down and think things through and start putting together a logical plan of attack and knocking things out one at a time. It was evident by Christmas that the sites were not going to be up, the trip was going to have to be postponed and plans were going to have to be pushed out and changed if my goals were going to be successful...

It was during this same period of time that a good friend of mine from work, Hemant Bhade approached me and indicated that he too would be leaving Samtec, however he was going to be leaving much sooner. He was going to be starting his own company as well, Suruss. His plans were to provide consulting to companies providing business analysis and re-engineering to those companies. He proposed a unique proposition to me indicating that he would like to partner up as seperate companies but collaborate to offer a synergistic approach to both of our business endeavors. He knew that I was very technical minded and could help with those aspects of his business, and he could provide business analysis and insight for my company.

This is where things started to turn around...

Tying It All Together

My friends and my brother really inspired a lot of my current business plans just because I could see excitement in their eyes when we would get together and start talking about different ideas they had for applications. As I mentioned in my last post, my ideas had grown from simply developing applications to providing a means for anyone who had an idea to get their ideas published and monetize them. With those ideas in mind I started doing some research on the matters...

What I found, was a perfect niche....

There are a lot of people out there that will develop an application for large sums of money. That is obviously not practical for most people. There are also a lot of people out there that have great ideas for applications but have no development knowledge. So where's the niche.... the niche is in providing a service to people that will take care of everything between the idea and putting the application to market. That's where the basis for my company came in and that next day I started going to work on getting everything in order.

I bought 3 new domain names:

• www.MobileSharkTank.com (this would be my submission site)
• www.AppsByMAC.com (this would be my marketing site)
• www.iPhone-Droid.com (this would be my informational feeder site) Droid at this time was the new hot platform so having this site to compare the two would be logical becasue a lot of people online would try to figure out which platform was better... having people look at this site and get drawn to my others would be a good traffic drawing mechanism.

I started to put together a web paradigm that I thought would be omnidirectional and feed off every other site that I owned. In doing so this would provide for better search engine rankings as well as more avenues to be found.

My business plans started further coming together when I started speaking to outside contractors to determine the costs of development.

At this point I was completely driven. Graduation was right around the corner and I started making drastic movements. I had given a months notice to my landlord that I would be moving out of my apartment in Louisville and back in with my parents for a while to conserve money and in preparation for a 2 month trip I had planned around the entire outskirts of the country to market my ideas, I was going to have all 3 sites up an operational January 1, and I was going to be contracting all development overseas.

Although everything seemed to be on track and I had the ball rolling and things seemed to be going smoothly, one thing that I can assure you, nothing goes as planned....

Setting Things In Motion

I realized at this point that sales just wasn't where I wanted to be and my real passion was in business development and the only way that I knew how to do that was through technology. I was a business major at the University of Louisville with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems, so I had all of the necessary tools to get my new vision rolling... But first, I had to get out of sales....

That week I called a meeting with my previous two bosses who had been very good to me throughout the 3 1/2 years that I had been working with them and discussed the options of coming back to MIS. It seemed to be feasible and they said they would love to have me back and would do everything they could to move me back to that side of the company. After that meeting I met with my current boss at the time and sat down and discussed with him my feelings and told him that I no longer enjoyed working on the sales side of the company and that it just wasn't really my thing. I had a much stronger connection with the development front and if at all possible would like to move back. I also indicated at that very time that I would likely not be staying with the company after graduation...

Within one week I was moved back to the MIS department and was placed on a team where I could be the most productive without tying myself into the company too much long term.

Outside of work, I buckled down for about 2 straight weeks churning out tid bits of code and attempting to write an application. However, I started realizing just how difficult and time consuming the process was.... All the time, while I was doing this, in the back of my head I had been thinking bigger and bigger. My initial thoughts were, I'll write iPhone applications and make money selling my own applications... why not, I mean all of my friends were on board. They were all interested in helping, but why not go bigger...

Graduation was soon approaching and I had not written any applications that could be distributed or even really thought out a business plan other than I was in this for the long haul no matter what. With the recent realization that the development process for iPhone applications was much more difficult than what I was accustomed I started focusing my attention elsewhere, on bigger prospects...

At this point I had determined in my head that if I were able to put together a company that could handle all of this in between process that people have to deal with between an idea and apple, the company would thrive. There are literally millions of people out there with great ideas that could be monetized very easily if they could just bring those ideas to life.

It was at that point that everything came together for me...

My New Plan

After I finally decided what I wanted to do in life and had a new idea I had to start laying some ground work. The first thing that I started doing was research. I started getting information about phone pricing, development statistics, looking at the process for applying, looking at the languages required to code for mobile applications, what all was required... it all seemed very overwhelming but I just started trying to knock it out piece by piece.

It's probably noteworthy to mention that it has probably been about 2 months now and I was closing in on mid August.

The first thing that I did was choose a platform, at the time iPhone seemed to be dominating the market and had just released there new iPhone 3Gs so it seemed to be the most logical choice. After I settled on the platform I decided that I probably should have one if I wanted to do any application development so I buckled down and went and purchased the newest model. This was a big leap for me, because until this point I had been leaching off my dad's company cell phone plan and not paying any bills. However, it was around this same time that dad decided that I needed to get off of his policy and get onto my own so it seemed that all signs were pointing to this being the right direction for me.

Now that I had the phone I had to start figuring out how to actually use it and what the process was for getting an app on the market. This proved to be a much more expensive endeavor than I had anticipated. Apparently Apple has attempted to lock down the platform so much so that in order to develop iPhone application you have to own a Mac and also must sign up for their developer program. (At the time I was unaware that you could develop on a PC using the MONO platform, but hindsight is always 20/20 and I am happy with my Mac purchase.) So the next thing that I did was scan ebay day in and day out for about a month until I finally came across a sweet Mac Mini that was fully spec'd out and had a great variety of software and graphics editing tools, including the entire Adobe Master collection. I ended up purchasing the system for 700 dollars. In addition to the system I had signed up for all of the necessary developer accounts and such with Apple so that I could gain access to their developer resources.

Finally after much time and set up and frustration I got the machine, had the phone, had the necessary affiliations with Apple and the only thing that was now holding me back from publishing an application to the Apple store was having a Developer License to do so and actually having written an application. This lead me to start rethinking my career decisions. At this time I had moved from being a full on application developer into a sales roll where I had little or no affiliation with coding or developers at all outside of what I was doing on my own at home. This lead to the first real drastic move that I made that really set things into action....

What Changed My Mind?

So, after last night's post it became somewhat evident to me that I shouldn't just write this blog for people that I know so I'm going to try to make this as objective as I can so that anyone can follow...

I guess the first question that most people would have is "what in the world made you decide to give up your job and try to pursue something so uncertain?" I guess the short answer to that would be, why wouldn't I? But I realize that just isn't going to do...

So.... despite having a wonderful job with a bright future at a great company, Samtec Inc; I decided that I wasn't going to be happy working for someone else. I've always been very pro-potential in a person and I didn't feel like I was fully exploiting my own. There were a lot of perks to the job and I had a lot of great friends working there, and loved what I was doing for them, but when it all boiled down I could see that sitting at a desk, working 8 - 5 everyday stuck in one location just wasn't what I wanted and no amount of money could convince me otherwise. Even with the recent promotion/opportunity within the company to explore new avenues in sales, I just found myself constantly searching for more and looking for something that I could really put my heart into and go after on my own.... it was really about that time that the fog started to clear for me and I was able to see that the only thing that was going to make me happy was to pursue something that I could make my very own.

This realization came about midway through the summer of my last year in college. I was due to start summer classes in July and throughout the entire summer while working under my new position I kept falling back on my original craft which was software development. Despite the roll change I accepted and all of the motivating factors pushing me to succeed in the position I just didn't feel at home with myself and would find that I would go home and work on things of my own. It was around that time that I started to do some research on outside opportunities. I knew that when graduation rolled around the world would once again be open to me and I really wouldn't have anything tying me down except for this job that I was positioned in.... A job that most would probably love to have and would be very happy with, but that's just not me..

After a long while and a lot of sole searching and discussions with friends, family, and co-workers I decided that some drastic measures had to be taken and it was at that point that I really started to push things into action. One of the first things that I did was started to devote all of my time outside of work to researching avenues that one; I saw great opportunity in, and two; that I felt I would fit into and would enjoy working towards for the rest of my life. One of those avenues just happened to be development and the area of development that seemed to be booming the most at that time, mobile application development.

When I finally settled on something that could keep my interest and really drive me to succeed I knew it was time to start setting into motion a plan that I could follow...

Foreword

A brief foreword...

I decided to start writing this blog for two main reasons, one; because I have a lot of people that know I am starting my own business and like to hear updates and how things are progressing quite often, and two; because having a recurring blog generally boosts your ratings with the search engines so it will be beneficial for business as well as informative.

I plan to write on a variety of topics ranging from what I have done thus far, the hang-ups that I have encountered, the plans that I am making, the people that I have encountered and anything else that anyone may particularly request.

To begin, I will be posting a series of posts that will recap all that I have done thus far up until this point. Please feel free to comment on the posts and provide feedback or questions regarding something that interests you as it will help me with future posts.

The first posts will cover:

• What was going through my mind when I decided that I didn't want to work for someone any longer and wanted to work for myself.
• Where my idea came from.
• The first steps that I took to get the ball rolling.
• Problems that I encountered along the way.
• When things really started to get serious.
• When things started to pick up.
• and finally, Where I am now.

For now however, it's time for bed so I will start working on the first posts tomorrow.