So WeMinder’s been live for 42 days, not that I’m counting. (Of course I am.)
It’s gone pretty well so far. The number of subscribers is growing. I’ve had a few departures, found a few bugs I’m working on, and had some truly great things happen because of it.
There’s this thing I’ve become very, very aware of, related to having my own software company. I have a yet further, deeper understanding of the concept of agency.
Agency is one of those tricky meta-concepts. It means both “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power” as well as “an establishment engaged in doing business for another“.
Put more plainly, in a very real way I am WeMinder. It does things because I coded it to do them. It has customers because of my efforts (or lack thereof). It improves because I improve it. Any issues or problems it has, it has because of me. Any solutions to said problem are squarely on my shoulders and no one else’s.
That is a huge deal. It’s good in many ways, but it is also a profoundly difficult thing in some ways I wasn’t expecting too.
I remember over two decades ago, building my own Windows PC with a friend. We bought all the components at a couple of different places, including the case, the hard drive, the logic board, the memory. Over a weekend, we put it together, installed the OS, all that jazz.
When it booted up for the first time, I was so damn proud of myself. I had a fairly powerful computer, and had it for a fairly reasonable cost.
A few months later the damn thing started to have issues. I lamented to my friend Nullmoniker, who helped me build it, that the huge downside of what I’d done was that when it was super flaky at 10pm on a Sunday, there was no one I could call to help me, that I was on my own.
There are aspects to owning, to being WeMinder that are like that.
But, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve said for a while now that part of the process behind WeMinder’s evolution was that I had to emotionally mature as a person. There are aspects to being in relationships I understand so much better in my late 40’s, than I ever did before.
Today as I’m sitting here fixing a WeMinder bug, I realize that maturity thing has to do with being a technologist and a businessperson too. I see that one of the ways I’ve matured is that I’ve embraced the concept of practice.
When you begin a practice, you commit yourself to well… practicing it. You embrace the concept that you’re doing a thing, but that there isn’t any done per se. There’s always going to be a bug to fix, a feature to add, a place to promote the app, someone to tell, something to improve. The joy isn’t in being done with the whole thing. There is no done.
There’s only doing.
Which makes me laugh, because I’ve been studying that particular truth for a very long time now. And there’s no end to that in sight, thank goodness.