Allow me to Reintroduce Myself

If it’s your first time reading my blog, thanks for being here. If you’re returning, sorry for the hiatus. I can’t even lie and say that I’ve been busy. I just haven’t prioritised this blog as much as I should have in the last few months.

But in the words of Shawn Carter, “allow me to reintroduce myself”.

Building a startup

Together, my friend Ronan and I have been building Finsho, a platform that improves the instore shopping experience for both retailers and shoppers. We officially started building things in Feburary and although some things have fallen through along the way, the last few months have been the most productive we’ve been in terms of customer research and building the minimal viable product (MVP).

We have demos lined up in two different stores. As a technical co-founder, I’m responsible for all things that relate to building the product. At the start of the year, I had some imposter syndrome. I’m pretty good at writing code but building something that could potentially be used by a lot of people was something I thought I couldn’t do without 5, 15, 20+ years of experience.

I’ve realised while I’m really good at writing code, I’m even better at learning and teaching myself new things. This realisation paired with late nights of googling has improved my confidence in building Finsho over the last 3 months.

Freelancing

Outside of building a startup, I’m also a freelance web designer and developer. This year I’ve gotten to work with a lot of interesting clients. There have been really good but also some bad moments. One of them was when I lost a client mid-way through a project. At the time, it felt like a big loss but it ultimately led me back to the drawing board to take a deeper look at the service that I provide and which clients are/aren’t for me.

Contracting

I’ve also had a stint at one of the biggest startup hubs in Ireland. I’ve been supporting startups in their accelerator program in the area of engineering. My favourite thing about working with startups is the ability to make a lot of impact as well as being thrown into the deep end early. It’s also allowed me to be a fly on the wall and see what it looks like to build and grow a startup.

Other work

Outside of work at this hub, I also spent some time cold calling digital agencies to give them an extra hand on projects. I ended up finding one agency that looked great on the outside but inherently had a lot of problems, specifically from the head. I left after a month. Although it wasn’t the best experience, I learned a lot about the type of environment I can grow in as well as the type of leader I want to be.

Life currently

In the last year, while there have been some ups and downs, I can say that I am at a good place in my life. Some more key learnings I’ve had this year are:

The importance of making decisions quickly and being ok with being wrong about them.
Jump out of a sinking ship.
Not everyone’s personal styles blend well with each other.

I’m not exactly sure what direction I want to take this blog in, but I do know that I plan to be more reflective and share more moments and learnings moving forward.