Feb

15

How I Started a New Business on a Saturday – Part One

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I love throwing new business ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.This mentality has led me to practice something I call “Startup Saturday” where I essentially launch new web business ventures in a day. Here’s part one of the vlog for my latest launch: TweakMyTheme.com.

TweakMyTheme.com is a WordPress theme customization service. I’ve customized quite a few WP themes in the past, so the service itself is nothing new. However, lately I’ve felt that it’s important to package certain skills into “products” and give them their own website. Sometimes listing everything I do (design, ASP.NET programming, video, SQL design, etc) on a single site results in a watered-down offering. Maybe I should just focus on one of those skills altogether, but that’s another story…

I spent a Saturday a few weeks ago putting the site, plan, and content together. To further complicate my life, while working on the TweakMyTheme site I also came up with two more startup-in-a-day ideas, so I’m already looking for the next free Saturday to launch another one. It’s a lot of fun and I’m getting good practice, if nothing else.

Am I off my rocker? Is it better to launch a lot of “small” businesses and see what works, or do you think one well-planned venture is more powerful?

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View Comments  | Posted by : Dave Yankowiak
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  • jdenham

    Dave: Great stuff and great idea. I had tried WordPress at one time and realized that there was some cool functionality to it, but found it cumbersome to navigate. I could see myself as a future customer of yours down the road depending on how things go. Very cool!

  • hackmanj

    Rock on Dave! We need to talk. Glad we connected via Amplify.

  • http://www.anywhereman.com daveyank

    Thanks Jimmy! Yes, WordPress is awesome. I just realized I had so many sites running on it that it I needed to offer it as a service all it's own. From what I'd seen, people were missing out on a lot of the functionality that a self-hosted WP site has to offer (vs. a WordPress.com site which is very limited).

  • http://www.anywhereman.com daveyank

    Thanks Joe! Yes, really happy to have connected on Amplify (which is running on WordPress MU by the way). Keep in touch!

  • bohonyibalazs

    Great Idea Dave.

  • http://www.anywhereman.com daveyank

    Thanks, much appreciated! Thanks for stopping by AnywhereMan.

  • http://www.fivetechnology.com/ Aaron Weiche

    Start-up Saturday, love the idea Dave. For those of us that never have a shortage of ideas and can work with a few resources/tools it can offer up some fun. Just what can you accomplish in 4,6, or 12 hours on a Saturday? Thanks for the fun.

  • http://www.anywhereman.com daveyank

    Thanks Aaron! Yes, never a shortage ideas, and even as I was working with the TweakMyTheme idea that Saturday I ended up thinking of a few other Startup Saturday ideas. Realizing that the main thing is to just get far enough with my own stuff that I can get it “out there”' in front of the public. Sometimes I'm way too much of a perfectionist and it results in things never getting released. Just read a post on Zen Habits this week that describes it perfectly: http://zenhabits.net/2010/02/completion-princip...

    We will have to coordinate a group around “Startup Saturdays” sometime and use it to get in-house ideas out to the world. “StartupSaturdays.com” has now been registered. :)

  • http://twitter.com/ShutterCal ShutterCal

    Great stuff.

    I got a great idea just while watching this. Don't worry, nothing considered competition ;)
    Subsidiaries are a powerful and effective concept.

  • http://www.anywhereman.com daveyank

    Awesome! Keep us posted if you pursuit it. I might build a network around StartupSaturdays.com so folks using their weekends to launch new business ideas can share and collaborate.

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