Three days before my 30th birthday, my world changed forever.
My wife and I became parents for the first time…of TWINS! My wife was committed to a training program at the time and couldn’t stay home with the newborns. After doing some math, I realized that the cost of childcare nearly equaled my current salary as a private school teacher. As I left my role at the school, I prepared to become a stay-at-home dad.
As luck would have it, babies sleep a lot. To make some income during this time I learned how to develop websites and picked up a few clients (mostly relatives and neighbors). Over the course of a couple of years, I gradually built up my portfolio to include celebrities, global relief organizations, presidential campaigns, and Fortune 500 companies.
Fast forward a couple years, when I joined a venture-backed startup in San Francisco as a lead software engineer. I was excited to learn more about the startup life, and get to know some of the tech innovators that grace the covers of Inc. and Fast Company. I was certainlys stretched and learned a lot during this time, but after 2 years I decided to leave my position with the company in order to build my own products.
In 2015 I partnered with my friend Andy Johnson from Shaping the Page to launch Harpoon—a financial planning and time-tracking tool for creative agencies. Born out of the ways we used to hack together financial planning and success metrics when we were freelancers, Harpoon was a product we needed ourselves, and realized that many others needed it as well to run their businesses successfully.
So while I’m not building and marketing products mentioned above, I’m taking in new knowledge and writing it down, and sharing it with others. I’ve found this is one of the best ways to learn and process new skills.
That is why this blog exists.
I hope that you find the posts insightful and educational, and that they help you become a better entrepreneur or marketer.
