{"id":1148,"date":"2015-03-06T22:05:03","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T21:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2015-10-18T11:21:53","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T09:21:53","slug":"what-happened-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/what-happened-next\/","title":{"rendered":"What happened next"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Future<\/a>
Future Or Bust!<\/a> by Paul Hocksenar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In July last year (2014), I started working full-time on Antecons<\/a>. Back then, I wrote a post about complete independence<\/a> where I predicted that I could support myself for up to half a year without income. This turned out to be true, but now that we have entered a new year, it is time for an update. This is an update that I was nervous about until very recently where a story about monetary failure took an interesting turn for the better.<\/p>\n

The challenge<\/h3>\n

A lot of people try to hide their failures, myself included. Being afraid of failure, taking risks and facing challenges, it seems like a very weird and poor life choice to give up a lucrative and comfortable position as a consultant to work without income and earning potential for an extended period of time. The explanation is simple though: Things were starting to get fun<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When Antecons launched on Shopify in 2013, it was mostly developed while doing freelance consulting work. Having a high-revenue commercial product was never really the goal. I simply wanted to see if it was possible for me to start something from scratch and make it through all the way to a finished product and not just an abandoned side-project.<\/p>\n

When the first few customers started coming in, I realized that this product might have some potential, and it was quite a different feeling having customers that bought a service rather than buying my labor. It was… fun. So I started working on Antecons full-time in July with the vision of slowly building up a list of stable clients. I had a good relationship and regular contact with a webshop house, and they sounded very interested in offering Antecons to their webshop customers so I pushed towards a first “revenue milestone” with them as a re-seller. It was a great Summer and I built an API beta that I was satisfied with offering to potential buyers.<\/p>\n

Fail<\/h3>\n

My plan failed. It turned out that nothing came out of my contact with the webshop re-seller and in the meantime, Shopify sales only increased very slowly. Antecons was even featured on the front page of the Shopify app store, but there were disappointingly few signups.<\/p>\n

There is no need to go into great detail about the technicalities, because the main problem was that I neglected sales too much so I failed to sell. That makes sense now, but I did not realize it soon enough… so I failed. Period. The end.<\/p>\n

Late Fall came, I was not making any money and the product was not going to generate significant revenue anytime soon. I had to take on a few hours of consulting work again to pay the bills which meant that I had less time to work on Antecons and in the beginning of December, I was hired full-time as a Python developer for Neodev<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I had mixed feelings about starting a new job, because it felt like a defeat to stop working on Antecons. Both the job and my colleagues were great though, and it was sometimes quite difficult to explain to friends and family how having a rewarding and well-compensated job could still feel a bit like a step back or a let-down. Nevertheless, it was difficult to leave Antecons behind. As it turned out though, the departure was short-lived.<\/p>\n

An unexpected journey<\/h3>\n

It was exactly one day after signing my new contract that I was contacted by Adii<\/a>, a successful entrepreneur with experience in the e-commerce field. Adii was looking for a recommendation engine to improve a product upsell feature in a young startup called Receiptful<\/a>. Initially, I was skeptical and without hope, because I had basically given up on monetizing Antecons since it was not making any real money. But after a few weeks of communication, we decided to work together and I was “acquihired” (yes, that is a real word) and Antecons was revived before it had even drawn its final breath.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to today and I have been with Receiptful for a month, working on integrating Antecons as part of the Receiptful system. It is really great to be able to work on Antecons and data analysis in a full-time position and it has also presented some new challenges, but that is a topic for a different post.<\/p>\n

Working independently was a great experience. It was an unexpected journey with an unexpected ending. A new and different chapter has now begun: Life in a startup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In July last year (2014), I started working full-time on Antecons. Back then, I wrote a post about complete independence where I predicted that I could support myself for up to half a year without income. This turned out to be true, but now that we have entered a new year, it is time for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,4],"tags":[141,147,143,128,144,142],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antecons","category-news","tag-acquihire","tag-antecons","tag-entrepreneur","tag-job","tag-life","tag-startup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}