Avoiding distractions that come after success

This is something that I have struggled with in the past and want to share my failures.

When I created my first successful business, a business that made so much money that I could slack off, I did just that and let it slip away.

I built my app business from about $1,200/mo to over $30k/mo in about 8 months. At the time, I was mid 20’s with basic bills and little responsibilities so I enjoyed life a bit. I traveled to see friends, went out to eat a lot or just hang out, relaxed, and did less and less work.

What happened next?

The business slowly fizzled off until I was making a fraction of what I was. At that point, it became work to fight back and get my numbers up to where they were. I knew what I could make and wanted to get there again.

If I had remained consistent throughout that time, I would have continued to see growth, probably finding better opportunities and success.

Not only did I waste time, but I also wasted money.

There is a difference between enjoying the money and success and wasting it. Many times, I was wasting it. I had basically no budget and just bought or did whatever I wanted without looking at the price.

I regret not putting the money into 3 things.

1. An emergency fund that the business could use when things got bad

2. New development could have brought the business to higher levels of success.

3. Investments such as stocks and real estate

This leads to missed opportunities. At one point, I was contacted by a publishing agency with interest in one of my games. This was a solid foundation of a game, I’d made thousands with it, it was unique at the time, and had a lot of potential based on other games in the niche.

The publisher basically said, we’ll test your app and see how it does in our system, if it works, we’ll run with it and at that point, you’ll make a lot (his claim was millions and to be honest, I don’t doubt that) but I had to pass the test.

I failed.

This was kind of at the end of my app business life. I had sold off most of my apps before the revenue dipped any lower and continued to be lazy and not work the way I use to. I didn’t have the money to continue building this game properly at this point.

The next thing that relates to the first is avoiding “shiny object syndrome”.

This is an issue that I faced with my more recent business. As things got good, I started to look at expansion, and not just within the same business but completely new businesses as well.

While Boss Personal Planner started to boom, I was looking to open a new eCommerce store so I created Boss Art Culture which is a POD (print-on-demand) motivational canvas art business.

The business is great in the sense that it did make money, it was fun to work on, and it has a lot of potential.

The problem is that it pulled away from my main effort, which was Boss Personal Planner. I spent a lot of time and money on Boss Art Culture and in the long run, I wasn’t doing enough work on either to build strong businesses.

I could have put all that time into new content for my planner business and it would have far exceeded what I made with the art business.

Boss Personal Planner should have been my sole focus and if I was ready to move on to new things, I should have sold it.

Looking back now, I wish that I continued to work at the same or similar pace that I was while initially building the businesses or if nothing else, sold them at the peak before I started to slack off.

The big lesson as a solopreneur, unless you build a system for continual growth, if you decrease your efforts, the business will follow that trend. Focus on your main business and don’t get distracted.