Many people don’t know this, but Speedlancer isn’t my first company. But it is my best :)

I founded Speedlancer based on the learnings and the insight I had of outsourcing through running my previous company in the eCommerce space.

As I’ve delved into, I took that site from 0 to 130,000+ paying customers and 320,000 unique visitors per month (equating to $600k in the same year I let it effectively die a peaceful death… actually the asset is still for sale hint hint ;)), and notably a 10 minute work-week for myself.

The thing is, it wasn’t going to change the world. And even more to the point, I knew it was well & truly at its peak. So that’s why I gave up.

I was probably stupid. Well at least any sane person would have called me stupid. The sane person would have decided to focus on selling the site at its peak, but I made a conscious decision not to waste any more time and to instead let it die peacefully.

Why? Because as an entrepreneur by heart I am a natural risk taker. I preferred to leverage my time and my early learnings on something that can truly change the world. And I had some capital behind me to be able to take a bigger gamble, which I was ready to do!

1. Step 1 to any entrepreneurial journey: start a side-hustle before trying to change the world. World changing ideas need time and patience and you need to be able to afford that to give it the best chance of success (Speedlancer still needs my time and certainly my patience before we’ll hit market saturation to the point where we are a trusted and meaningful company)
2. do things with purpose. If your idea isn’t {revolutionary|disruptive|doing amazing things}, that’s FINE — do it anyway! it empowers you and that’s almost always a critical first step to changing the world. But understand what YOUR purpose is behind it. Once you achieve that purpose (or fail to achieve that purpose), either work harder or move on.

I had achieved my purpose with that venture so I moved on and didn’t stop to pass go. With Speedlancer, I actually achieved my simple initial purpose (simply having something to pitch at startup events… I kid you not!), but I am very fortunate to still be running it. So now I get to work harder.