Midnight Oil

I had the privilege of speaking at the Kansas City Ruby User Group the night on the topic of Web Entrepreneurship. This is the second presentation along this subject. The first was an in-depth walk through how Jon Crawford went from a full time consultant to building his idea, finding his team, and putting his full effort into Storenvy. You can view his post regarding his presentation here: http://joncrawford.com/entries/web-entrepreneurship-presentation-at-kcrug.

Jon had many great points throughout his presentation and was to use those building blocks to discuss how follow entrepreneurs could build their online startup while keeping there day job. As I mention in the presentation, I love the experience that consulting provides, and given my already limited sleep schedule I find building my own startup during nights and weekends satisfies my hunger while also allowing me to keep the lights on. I definitely wanted to layout all the advantages, disadvantages, and discipline that a 60+ hour work week requires.

Web Entrepreneurship – While Keeping Your Day Job – Part 1

Web Entrepreneurship -- Ryan Felton -- Part 1 from Steven Chau on Vimeo.

Web Entrepreneurship – While Keeping Your Day Job – Part 2

Web Entrepreneurship -- Ryan Felton -- Part 2 from Steven Chau on Vimeo.

Slides

Update

Seth Godin gave a presentation today for Jelly Groups saying your going to burn out quickly. That freelancers are different then entrepreneurs. He mentioned that your goal should be to work like crazy freelancing to build up enough to live off when you quit your freelancing and switch to an entrepreneur. The major aspect issue with this (as mentioned in the presentation) is healthcare. Also, I recommend if you are going to take this approach prepare yourself to live as an full-time entrepreneur for 13 months as that tends to be the make or break period.

In part 1, I examined a few of the editors and tried to give some plusses/minuses of each one. At the end, I mentioned markItUp! as a possible editor, but couldn’t make a recommendation due to lack of experience with it.

Now that I’ve used it, I can say definitively that it’s amazing! To be fair, it’s not a true “wysiwyg” editor and is instead a set of buttons and aides for editing some sort of markup language. However, if you are only looking for something that will make editing easier on your users, markItUp is perfect.

Skip the others and go straight to markItUp. You’ll be glad you did.