A good, quick read from Manton Reece on forging your project(s) ahead and possibly having to sacrifice some things to see them through. I particularly like this little nugget from Gary Vaynerchuck,
“Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are.”
Upon launching Note & Point last week, I did get a feeling of accomplishment and pride that I hadn’t felt in a while professionally speaking. The ability to take a project from concept to finish in a matter of a few weeks and get the kind of positive feedback we received, it made the idea of doing it again seem much more plausible.
And I didn’t even have to skip a meal.
I’ve mentioned before that one of my goals is to some day move in a direction that points me away from actual client work. I have nothing against clients – I am thankful for each and every one of you – but I’ve always got ideas and projects floating around in my head that I’d like to see come to fruition and a little less client work would be a step in creating time for those projects.
For a long time, I’ve been an Internet enthusiast and evangelist. I sing its praises, share its benefits and do my best to make a living off of it as a whole. But compared to many out there, it took me a little while to get into the whole, making friends on the Internet craze that some easily adopted. I’d never been one for chat rooms or message boards and never needed the services of any dating sites fortunately.
MySpace wasn’t my thing. Facebook even to this day isn’t either. But the one that did get me hooked was Twitter. Not knowing what to expect when I signed up, it took me a little while to get into it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know one person using it when I signed up. But I tweeted anyways. And then I did some writing for other sites, and my byline had my twitter username (@christianross). I got some followers. And organically as I found others I wanted to follow, my count grew as well. Twitter did what I didn’t think I needed, it forged friendships with like-mindeds around the globe and fortunately in 2009 we don’t have to be ashamed of telling others we have Internet friends now. I’m not.
Enter Note & Point. Thanks to Twitter and some organic growth, one of the projects that was in my head made it to the big screen. Dave Ruiz (http://foundationsix.com | @foundationsix) is a phenomenal designer based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and one of which I would have never known with out the social networking site. Together we hatched an idea, fleshed out a great design and developed the first online gallery devoted to high-quality design work in presentation related areas (Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, etc) in less than three (3) weeks.
I might be a little biased, but I think its beautiful. Thankfully, others seem to agree. With a little love from Twitter and word of mouth, in four (4) days time we’ve been blown away at the success it has already seen:
- Almost 20,000 visitors to the site
- 57,000 page views
- Over 1,000 RSS subscribers
- Over 325 followers on Twitter
- And my personal favorite number: less than 5% of visitors using IE6
Even over a long holiday weekend, I am overwhelmed at the success we launched to. We know full well that traffic will level out but have been grateful for all the love shared across the net and for each and every visitor that has taken the time to stop by and/or follow along.
Feel free to add yourself to the list of followers by subscribing to the N&P RSS feed and/or following along on Twitter.
As excited as I am about what we’ve done already, we’ve really only scratched the surface so far. We already have plans in place to make Note & Point even more usable as well as working on ideas for some new projects.
PS. Since our projects don’t actually make money yet, we’re both still available for contract work. Hit us up if you’re ready to play: Foundationsix & Christian Ross