I Quit my Job

I sit here…  after starting, then deleting, starting then deleting and now (hopefully) finishing to write this major update in my Epic journey.  I decided to share this in public…..

I QUIT MY JOB

I didn’t quit epicplugins.com or epicthemes.com but I quit my “9-5”.

Why am I telling this to you? Well it’s so I can look back, have a record of the week that I finally did it, and share my journey along the way. If it helps you along the way then great.

Why did I leave a highly paying statistical risk analyst position? Well I wrote a post (over a year ago now) which went into the different ‘realms’ of work. While I enjoyed the position, I was constantly working with out of date tech (2007 and earlier versions of desktop applications) and there’s so much more value I can add by focusing my time on web development, as well as ticking the following major boxes for me:

• I put in the effort, put in the hours and it directly benefits my own business and my own customers
• It’s what I enjoy, it’s what I’m good at and I can work on what interests me
• I can work from anywhere, anytime and for how long I would like (no sitting at a desk until the clock says go home)

It’s a risk though, I could have done this a long time ago but wouldn’t have built up savings and it would have been a lot more stressful.  Whether the risk pays off financially, only time will tell. But I know I’m in the right place now personally (thanks NB).

So, what now?

You’ll have seen I have sent out some messages to my mailing list about what pains you have (sign up below so you don’t miss out on any reach outs) and also introduced the ‘transparency reports’ commitment (April 2016 now here). This has been to help me come up with my objective and strategy now I’m steering my own ship, but more on that below.

A special shout out here goes to @troydean for a very useful chat probably just about a year ago now, @ralphquintero (a plugin hunt theme customer) for some awesome advice and of course the ever sage contact with @woodyhayday.  A special thank you to each of you for the following snippets of wisdom

• What’s the worst that could happen
• You’re in control of your own ship, steer it where you want it to go
• It’s scary, its hard work, but man I’ve never looked back

So, what’s to come?

I’m a pretty big fan of Nathan Barry (@nathanbarry), and stumbled upon him from being recommend his blog as part of my anonymous question on Quora (see the reply from Tim Cull)* and really connected. But I still had the following doubts in my mind

• All these guys kicking it are from the states, I’m from the UK, can I network the same?
• Do I have what it takes to do what they do, they’re owners of some pretty wicked SaaS systems (I’m a ConvertKit customer)
• It’s 2016 now, and there’s tons of new web apps, tons of new frameworks, is it getting too late to launch something new?

p.s if you want to see how the graphic in the Quora post developed since then, here it is (Feb 2015 was when the plugin hunt theme launch got some press from premiumwp)

*source internal system for sales tracking

By no means an exponential growth or a ‘hockey puck’, but still pretty good regular income, especially while spending most of my time at a full time role. So through a lot of reading and thinking of what my goals should be in this new direction of 100% of focus on epic…  I came up with the following objective for Epic Plugins Limited.

Stabilise the product portfolio, including tidying up the feature lists, and work towards stabilising and diversifying the revenue while reducing reliance on the key man risk that is me

Wow, pretty nuts of an objective, so how do I intend to go about this?

Well, I’m deciding to do TWO THINGS splitting my time the following ways:

WordPress Plugins and WordPress Themes Development

I’ll obviously continue to do this line of development, whether it be enhancements to existing themes or development of new ones. I’ll also continue to do custom development of WordPress plugins, WordPress Themes, or custom features for any existing themes or plugins (get in touch if you need anything).

Web App Challenge

This is on the back of me following Nathan’s blog. In it he describes how he went from nothing, through idea stage to developing ConvertKit in 6 months with a limited time budget and a revenue target at the end of it. I want to give something like this a crack too.  The main reason being it will help keep me on the cutting edge of tech and keep my inner “how does this new tech work and what could I do with it” demons at bay. I have some reservations to this though

1. This has been done before, so I would be copying a cronicling of a web app challenge
2. There’s a lot more apps on the market now than when Nathan set about his challenge (end 2012)
3. I’d be moving (although only partly) away from WordPress Plugins and Themes
4. Can I do this, will I fail, you don’t hear of too many UK people doing this (shout out if you are with where you’re from, maybe we can grab a coffee sometime?)

What do you think? Leave your comments below. Am I mad? have I made the right choice?  I’m excited to share my journey along the way so if you want to follow along, you know what to do.