Emotional Roller Coaster

I shared some details about the ups and downs of working on entrepreneurial endeavors and freelancing projects as a high school student. Spoiler: it's not easy.

OhBoard, my little $3.99 whiteboard software, has been around for 2 months, and I’ve experienced many ups and downs while taking care of the app.

After feeling fascinated from reading Paras’s (founder of Visual Website Optimizer) post about his emotional roller coaster, and from interests on Twitter. I decided to share my own.

Here is what my typical weekday look like:

8AM-3:30PM: School. :-)

3:30PM: On my way home, I will clear as many emails as I can (side-note: I love emails!). If there are 2 negative ones and 2 positive ones, I always make sure I see the good after the bad. So I can maintain a good mood for the remainder of the day.

4:00PM: Arrive home, look at my to-do list on Flow. It is never a good feeling. 1. If the list is full of tasks, this comes up: how can I do all these in 4 hours? I am not superman… 2. If the list is completely empty, this comes up: what am I going to do? Just sit here and waste my time on Twitter?

4:10PM: Time for some marketing. It is never as excited as development, but I can’t make something unbelievably incredibly awesome but nobody knows about it, right? Nevertheless, finding the right people is really hard!

4:20PM: I usually start off by firing some emails to potential customers & bloggers.

4:40PM: Wow, they respond rather quickly. But nevermind, it is a rejection email. They don’t even use Google Chrome. I guess it’s my fault for not knowing what browser they use.

5:10PM: Wala, a guy I never heard of purchase OhBoard and email me saying he is going to recommend OhBoard to his 12 co-workers. Well, that form of marketing is unbeatable.

5:50PM: Let’s start writing something. Sometimes my brain get stuck, and can’t crank out a paragraph on marketing site copy in 20 minutes. Yet sometimes, I can write a whole blog post about getting things done in 20 minutes.

6:30PM: Time to plan for evening’s mini coding session. What am I going to do? Am I going to add a new feature or refine the current feature set? How can I fix the bug I’ve been trying to figure out for days?

7:00PM: Eat dinner and watch Jeopardy. So I can get smarter.

7:40PM: Shower time. I think this is best period for creativity. Seriously, 75% of my ideas come straight out of shower. More than half of the development & marketing strategies come straight out of my shower as well, and they usually work better than the ones that are not. Hot water works like magic.

8:00PM: Here comes the fun part: coding. I am embarrassed if I can’t fix that annoying bug, but that’s rarely the case. Usually, I am pretty motivated and crank out few hundred lines of code in 2 hours.

10:00PM: Time to procrastinate a little. Sometimes on Hacker News, where I will click on something entitled “How did I generate $4000 recurring revenue in less than 3 months“; or sometimes on Forrst, where I will some beautifully-made icons and carefully-crafted code.

10:40PM: Get a good night sleep, and always hope I dream about generating $4000 recurring revenue in 3 months.

Do you have this kind of constant-changing feeling too? Let me know!