As of the time of writing this post, I started my entrepreneurship experiment three weeks ago.

I would like to share with you some of my progress & learnings so far.

At the end of every workweek, I sit down and reflect on my week.

I ask myself four questions:

  • Weekly Wins. What went well? Any wins (big or little) this week?
  • What didn’t go according to the plan, what could be improved?
  • What have I learned this week?
  • What actions should I take next week to improve?

This post includes some of the notes I wrote in my journal answering these questions.

Wins

Here are some of the things that have been going well for me recently:

Blog redesign

I managed to finish the first version of my blog redesign. I received good feedback and have items to improve for the next update. That also resulted in small traction in terms of an increase in traffic.

Accounting & Finance

Since I just established a company I have to learn about the operational kind of tasks. I made good progress in learning the basics of accounting, the Finnish tax system for companies and corporate law.

I managed to open a business bank account and I was fortunate enough to have a family member willing to help me with the accounting.

Now I have a basic system in place to handle taxes & accounting.

If you are starting a limited company in Finland soon and have any questions, feel free to drop me an email and I will try to help if I can.

Work-environment Optimization

I enjoy working from home so I built my own little office. I got myself an ultra-widescreen, comfortable chair and I already had an electric standing table and other smaller accessories such as external keyboard & mouse.

I enjoy my current distraction-free work environment where I can be most productive.

Here is how my home office looks like

Picture of my home office.

Freelance Agencies

As part of my initial plan, I will be dedicating 6 months per year for freelance projects. I had many good conversations with many recruiting agencies and already discussing with potential customers.

Here are some of the recruiting agencies I found in Helsinki:

If you are a freelancer looking for gigs in Finland, you might also be interested in checking out my new service Nordgigs.

Nordgigs MVP

As part of my initial plan, I decided to experiment with a potential online product that would facilitate easily matching the supply & demand for freelancers.

I managed to build an initial minimal version of Nordgigs. Soon, I will start to promote the service and collect feedback from potential customers. Looking forward to learn from the feedback to achieve product-market fit.

Feel free to check out the beta version at https://nordgigs.com and share any feedback with me via hello@nordgigs.com .

Nordschool first video

I also kick-started my side project nordschool where I will share my teaching material in terms of free & paid courses.

I created my first tutorial and there have been few views already. Nothing significant yet, but it is a good start.

Didn’t go according to the plan

Video content

Creating video content is a new thing for me. It took some time for me to learn the tools necessary to record, edit & publish my content. However, now I think I learned the basics to keep me going.

New Technology Stack

For Nordgigs I decided to use new technologies:

  • Nuxt
  • Vuex
  • Serverless
  • Netlify Functions
  • FaunaDB.

Since that ecosystem is new to me, it took some time for me to be productive. I would say that this is typical for any new tool I use, it takes some time to get used to it. However, my estimates for how long it would take to build the Nordgigs MVP were a bit off.

My weekly plans were too optimistic

My weekly plans didn’t account for unexpected events. In the future, I need to leave some slack in my schedule and not be too harsh on myself when things don’t go according to plan.

Things I learned

Some of the things I learned about so far:

Actions to improve

To help me improve, here are some of the actions I need to commit.

Better defined tasks.

I need to define my tasks in a way that are is concrete and actionable. If the task takes too long to accomplish I need to split divide it into multiple tasks. This would help me to stay focused and motivated.

A system to block social media & email.

I have been struggling with distracting habits such as regularly checking social media and emails. I will design a system that regulates my social media & email usages and limits them to an acceptable level.

Closing words

A quote that I found inspiring:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. - Aristotle

Let’s pay attention to our habits.

You can follow my progress by signing up for my newsletter.

Another way to find my experiment’s updates is to check this tag, all the posts related will show up there.

Thanks for reading this far and until next time!

Ahmed

Credits

Cover Photo by Christopher Sardegna on Unsplash