It’s lonely at the top (and bottom)

This has been the first week where I’ve felt lonely. That’s partly because my wife’s been away all week on business, but it’s been the first time where I’ve felt the need to be part of a team.

I’m generally pretty happy in my own company. For the past few months while I’ve been working from home, the dog (Boris) has been sufficient company. I’ve even toyed with the idea of remaining a company of one, outsourcing design, development, manufacturing, fulfilment, marketing, support — the lot — and retaining the flexibility to work when and where I want.

The thing that triggered it was getting my SEIS Advance Assurance approval from HMRC. There was nobody to share the good news with. Or at least, nobody that really cared. It would have been so nice to go for a celebratory pint with a fledgeling team. I’ve decided I’d like a small, but perfectly-formed team again. This time next year there will be five of us: me, a developer, a designer, a marketer and a customer supporter. Is that the right mix?

My two contractors haven’t been working on Race.Radio this week, so it’s been up to me to move things on where I can. I’ve finished up building a website using Shopify — so much easier to use than Squarespace. The plan for my research is to direct cyclists to this and then get them to answer an abridged Technology Acceptance Model survey and some Price Sensitivity Analysis questions.

With that accomplished, I faffed and farted about for a day, achieving nothing much of note. I’m relishing the point where I have a developer and designer working fulltime on this and it’s all I can do to stay on top of progress and avoid becoming a bottleneck.

So, I re-named and tarted up this ‘publication’ on Medium (it’s now called Along for the ride). Then my final act of the week was to create this infographic and share it on LinkedIn and Twitter (using my Broleur account).

Thus far it’s yielded one potential partner/investor type, one software engineer and another kind offer of help with the technical architecture. Maybe I’ll get to have some conversations IRL next week. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Over and out.