Buzzoo

It’s 11:30 p.m. after a long day at work, the dryer is spinning and I am starting a blog entry. There is a strong temptation for me to just drop this blog post and wait for a better time to write it. Such temptations are much too familiar, and have been entertained way too many times. Consequently, this is only the second Buzzoo blog post, a month after the blog launch…

I am sure time management issue is an issue that many people share, especially by other moonlighters like us. (Per Wikipedia, moonlighting is the practice of performing an additional job which is separate from a person’s day job.) People moonlight for many different reasons. For some, the reason can be the much needed money that extends their live lines. For the rest of us, Buzzoo developers including, it is the fulfillment of personal dreams.

In the recent rise of personal entrepreneurship, kindled by Paul Graham and the like, many people took the challenge of starting their own startups. This is manifested clearly by the flood of endless Web 2.0 sites that are still popping out everyday. Many of us run the site as a night jobs, we are the struggling moonlighters.

For whatever it’s worth, I am tempted to share the what I’ve learned about moonlighting to you. If it can inspire one or two moonlighters out there, my day is made.

1. Keep the fire going.
One day I was driving home from a trade show with my career mentor. He was the founder of the company where I work my day job. I shared with him that I was working on something on my own (not buzzoo at that time). While he was excited about my efforts, he painted a gloomy picture saying how unlikely someone can be successful moonlighting a startup.

His argument is harmonious to ideas that Paul Graham said numerous times. To grow a successful startup, founders need to have the killer/animal instinct. Fulltimers who are betting their bread and butter are likely to have this, while moonlighters can easily raise the white flag, and still have a living from their day jobs. Kevin Rose would have a much higher drive to success as he was betting his house payments for Digg. Whereas me, I have to continually push myself to do something for Buzzoo.

Moonlighters, be aware that we are handicapped on this front. It’s not just about how much time we can put in, but how much heart and soul. There will be times when motivation is hard to find. In those days, you have to yield to a strong discipline to keep going. Once you stop, you are in danger to stop forever.

2. As always, it’s possible.
Although my mentor painted a gloomy picture for moonlighters, there are certainly success stories.

One posterchild of Web 2.0 sites was born by a maniac moonlighter. When Joshua Schachter shared his success story about del.icio.us in the Startup School 2006, he mentioned that del.icio.us was not his first project. It was his sixth or seventh. Some of his previous ones failed so miserably, he let the domain name taken by other people. He failed but he kept going, and some unthinkable miracle happened.

The chance of making it while moonlighting is certainly greater than zero. This means that a moonlighter just need to keep on trying. Per probabilistic laws, the chance for success is higher as someone continues to try. Furthermore, good entrepreneurs should learn and grow as they learn from failures. Their chances should grow with that.

3. Work in chunks of time.
One luxury item that moonlighters don’t always have is a span of continuous time to work. If this is the case for you, the first task that you have to do is to reorganize your schedules. You have to strive to have some continuous hours to work. In my experience, working for three straight hours yields much more than working for five sessions one hour each.

4. Close an ear and an eye.
The last thing that moonlighters need is distraction, especially when continuous working hours are rare and few. There are so much noise in the Internet, enough to fill up our heads with endless string of junk thoughts. Worse yet, when we do that, we often justify the effort as ‘planning’ or ‘research.’ While these things are critical for the success of anything, if your plan changes too many times before you can implement anything, then you are obviously distracted. Reduce your intake of noise from the Internet, and spend more time in implementation.

These four thoughts are what I can offer so far. I hope they worth something for someone. I’d share more as I learn more, and I hope you would too… Please share your stories and thoughts with us. We are too, struggling moonlighters.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 1:21 am and is filed under Announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.