4 ms·

This was a great read, in a "Plan 9 from Outer Space" sort of way. We have the story of a naive first time entrepreneur with his first attempt at building a we

This was a great read, in a "Plan 9 from Outer Space" sort of way. We have the story of a naive first time entrepreneur with his first attempt at building a website and his first experience with eLance, with the sort of unbridled optimism that you only ever see in people who've never tried to outsource anything on eLance. I love the authoritative "this is how it works" tone of the article, as it outlines his stumbling along, misunderstanding pretty much everything, getting bait & switched, watching his deadlines go past while his only meaningful communication is with the guy asking for more money. Better still is going out to find the end product (http://trekdek.com/ http://trekdek.com/), now that his "final, definitely finished" date has passed. Priceless. Thanks for putting a smile on my face this morning.

sivers 16y ago
No need to discourage someone trying to be helpful. If he's learned something helpful along the way, I'm glad he's sharing it. I loved your awesome "Book a flight" blog post - http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-thing-you-absolutely-need.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-t... - (also full of unbridled optimism) - without needing to research how well that's worked out for you or not. I didn't need you to be a travel agent or very experienced traveler to share what you've learned. The reader is the point, not the messenger. http://sivers.org/you-not-them http://sivers.org/you-not-them
- jasonkester 16y ago
  I think the key with a post like this is the tone. If you're writing a "my first experience trying X", you should avoid trying to sound like you have any advice to give or lessons learned. You don't know what lessons you've learned until much later. If he'd wrote it from the learner's perspective, it would have been a much more interesting read. We all had experiences like the author's during our first try at this. I made just as many mistakes from just as many bad assumptions on my first for-profit site. The thing is, I waited several years until I had some perspective before I was ready to write that experience up in a way that would be useful to other people. [edit: this is the article I refer to: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/01/6-things-that-killed-waifmail.html http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/01/6-things-that-kill... . You can only imagine how comical it would have sounded had I spouted off about how all this stuff was going to work back when I was doing it.]
dmd149 16y ago
Yea actually the whole project was to put a godaddy landing page in. It worked!

sivers 16y ago

No need to discourage someone trying to be helpful. If he's learned something helpful along the way, I'm glad he's sharing it. I loved your awesome "Book a flight" blog post - http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-thing-you-absolutely-need.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-t... - (also full of unbridled optimism) - without needing to research how well that's worked out for you or not. I didn't need you to be a travel agent or very experienced traveler to share what you've learned. The reader is the point, not the messenger. http://sivers.org/you-not-them http://sivers.org/you-not-them

jasonkester 16y ago
I think the key with a post like this is the tone. If you're writing a "my first experience trying X", you should avoid trying to sound like you have any advice to give or lessons learned. You don't know what lessons you've learned until much later. If he'd wrote it from the learner's perspective, it would have been a much more interesting read. We all had experiences like the author's during our first try at this. I made just as many mistakes from just as many bad assumptions on my first for-profit site. The thing is, I waited several years until I had some perspective before I was ready to write that experience up in a way that would be useful to other people. [edit: this is the article I refer to: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/01/6-things-that-killed-waifmail.html http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/01/6-things-that-kill... . You can only imagine how comical it would have sounded had I spouted off about how all this stuff was going to work back when I was doing it.]

dmd149 16y ago

Yea actually the whole project was to put a godaddy landing page in. It worked!