Week four has come and gone, and this week I wanted to share what I'm doing in very literal terms each day. This will be useful if you're thinking about your life as an employee and find comfort in the daily routine (and not having to think about it), but have a hint of an idea brewing in your mind that things could be different , and what that different life might look like.
The overwhelming majority of my time over the last few weeks has been spent on building something that I can pitch to other people. In the case of OJS Group that's provisioning servers, setting up a website, paying the mega-contracts described in last week's episode, all to have a 'Services' page at some point in the coming days which will give a non-technical business audience a sense of what exactly I can sell them. This has been a 'low and slow' process deliberately, as security and maintainability are super-critical in my mind. I'd rather have a rock solid setup of two tiny servers, than a slightly shaky 'go fast and break things' setup on a large cluster.
To a technical audience pitching is pretty straightforward; everything from business intelligence tools, workflow optimization, automation pipelines, and more, need reliable datasets. If this means collecting publicly linked accounts to a business on LinkedIn, or an event-driven notification setup for mentions of [your company here] on dark web data broker forums, or an hourly feed of hotel price data in [your town of interest here], that's all something I can help with.
However, my gut feeling is that the majority of decision makers in businesses which would actually engage in such a contract are non technical, or used to be technical, meaning it's less about pitching a capability, and more about pitching reliability, great infrastructure, strong contracts, and all that sort of thing. This is a bit like doing the first few months as an engineer in an organisation where you need to prove that you're not terrible over again. In tech this is so that eventually you're given broader access rights, and can write code and do work in a more trusted way. In business it seems no different.
The non technical analogy is that it's just comforting to know that your food has been prepared by an experienced and capable chef, rather than an intern who just finished an youtube video in fugu preparation . So the goal with all this work is to become the chef, in a very obvious and easy to understand way.
The second major thing I've been doing is wasting time. With the transition to a more 'nomadic' lifestyle comes an absolutely massive amount of information which comes in an ongoing deluge straight into your eyes and ears. Being in a foreign country, figuring out which products in stores roughly match those I'm familiar with, and all the other things you 'just know' become things which you have to actively think about on a daily basis. This does get less intense over time, but all of that thinking energy is spent, meaning it can be tricky to context-switch back to building your business, writing, reading, and more. Then again, this could just be a skill issue , in any case I'll share more about how to handle it in the future.
If you follow me on LinkedIn you'll have noticed that over the past month I've been posting about some useful tech tools I'm using, some stuff about this newsletter, and that kind of thing. In these strange times where most popular posts take the form of an AI-sterilised, adderal infused pitch deck (a'la You won't believe this. I fired my team and here's why. This is a game changer. ), writing anything outside this format doesn't seem to be as broadly interesting to those in my current network, and therefore isn't promoted as broadly by the algorithm.
This puts me in a tricky spot - keep posting in the way that feels more natural, or bend the knee to the algorithm overlords and start writing as if the elevator door to my readers is constantly closing. This newsletter will forever and always be longer form (and AI free), but my gut feeling is to switch up some styles on my other formats and see what happens. The reason I mention this to you now, is that if you're doing anything similar and starting your own business, then your personal brand and your business become essentially one and the same . So it's definitely a priority to get it right.
The final thing I've been working on is a techical setup for customer acquisition. Each day in the UK several thousand companies are incorporated, and I retrieve this data from Companies House and store it for analysis. By taking the postcode of each of the addresses I can identify companies in major cities or specific districts (e.g. Canary Wharf, City of London, etc), and can then pull director information also from Companies House. From there I can search online for social media accounts, addresses, business focus/industries, etc, and reach out to those who might be interested in my services. This isn't the typical word-of-mouth advertising approach, but more of a systematic method which I hope will become a pretty powerful system as it matures.
The tool is still in the early prototype stage, but once complete it will become a semi-automatic lead generator, which is definitely welcome to a humble tech startup still in the pre-revenue stage.
That's all for this week - there was an attempted cyberattack on one of the OJS Group servers last night so I've been busy checking and hardening everything there, fortunately it seems to have had no impact.
Next week I have some exciting plans to share, if the last four weeks have been turbulent, the next 4-6 will be a category 5 hurricane. See you then 🇻🇳
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
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