Ever since the later years of my college career, I have had a strong desire to start and run my own successful venture in the world of software. I can't quite explain it, but the idea of working for myself has always been much more appealing than the idea of working for somebody else, being stuck on the treadmill of trading time for money.
For that reason, I've spent many late nights and weekends tinkering with code, trying to learn the skills that would some day translate to a successful digital business.
One of the biggest success stories of my life thus far is the story of a project that was born from this desire, ended up failing and ultimately being resurrected and providing extreme value.
Starting with Web Design
One of the first things that attracted me to web design was the fact that if I saw something I liked, I could simply download all of the code that made it work and dissect it line by line until I understood what everything did.
This carried over to web design projects early on in my career. I was great at dicing up a Photoshop document to create pixel-perfect HTML output, but unfortunately these opportunities didn't come along very often. Many of the web design clients that I had over the years didn't come with their own professional designs, so I was on my own in that regard.
Between my self-perceived lack of design skills or my lack of confidence in dealing directly with actual clients, my web design business never really got off the ground. I did make a decent sum from it and, looking back, I am very grateful for that but it was far from the success I imagined.
Stumbling Into Content Management Systems
During my journey into the world of web design I stumbled upon a content management system called Orchard. I was a .NET developer around this time attempting to build my own CMS (due to the lack of quality CMS options in the .NET ecosystem) and, about halfway through my attempt to build the CMS, ran into a screenshot of Orchard.
At first I just wanted to use the screenshot as inspiration. I was designing something similar for my homemade CMS and I liked the user experience they had designed.
Several months later I finally gave in and decided to invest my time in actually learning Orchard. It was brand new at the time but had some real funding behind it and seemed to have an enthusiastic community that sprang up quickly.
Getting Into Web Hosting
Naturally, websites that you build and design need to be hosted somewhere. With the relatively obscure CMS that I was using, hosting wasn't necessarily a trivial matter for me. I ended up getting a Virtual Private Server from GoDaddy and learned to install and maintain an instance of Orchard on my very own server.
Along the way I got several sites up and running all on that single server. During the process, I got sick of having to actually log into a server and copy files, set up new user accounts, and all of that admin type work.
I ended up automating the process so that I could simply log into a website, see all of the sites that I currently had running and spin up new ones, delete or modify existing ones, everything that I needed to do. If I had a new web design client come along, I could have a sample site set up for them before the end of the first meeting.
Swing and a Miss
The only problem with this was, I didn't have very many clients knocking. I had maybe two or three clients during the lifetime of this venture, and only ended up making a few thousand dollars. As the clients came and went, I became discouraged.
But I still had this asset that had been created for quickly and easily spinning up new CMS websites.
Opportunity Knocks
One day, a friend came to me to talk about a problem he was having. This was a good friend of mine who had given me a good chunk of my previous side project business, and so I was always eager to engage with him.
He knew a business owner who was having a problem. This particular business operated in the field of IT change management communications. So, they would be the ones to help announce when your company was going to get a new email system or something along those lines. They would generate posters and fliers to put up around the building, craft email sequences, all of that stuff.
What they needed was a way to to quickly and easily spin up a "portal" for each of their clients. A place where they could come in and view timelines, statuses and share their final output for each project.
My friend had previously gotten them set up with an Orchard site for their own company, and so they were familiar with the system. When we got to talking, we realized that the hosting automation system that I had just built for Orchard was exactly what this company needed.
Within a couple weeks I had them set up with an instance of my software on their own server. They paid an initial cost to use the platform, and in addition had multiple customization requests coming in at a steady pace for the time of the engagement.
In the end I can say I profited thousands from this one little failed side project. It was a lot more than I had ever expected, and I was glad that I had kept the system in working shape even when things weren't going well.
On to the Next One
My success with this project gave me the energy and confidence to move forward onto other ventures. Not long after that experience I went on to try out affiliate marketing. Again, using the platform that I had previously built, I was able to easily spin up a site to try it out.
Like my Orchard hosting platform, my journey into affiliate marketing was not very lucrative at first. It took a lot of persistence and faith that hard work upfront would eventually pay off. And eventually it did, beyond anything that I had ever imagined.
In Summary
Sometimes, a project might not work out the way you expect it to. Just because things might not always end up perfectly doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. Opportunity only comes to those who are prepared. If my friend had explained his need and I didn't have something ready to go, I never would have earned the thousands of dollars that I earned in the long run.