Professional

Hello! I’m Stephen Walsh, and if you’ve found your way here, you’re likely looking for a mix of professional insight and a bit of real-world perspective.

Not much is happening on the work front. We continue to forge ahead on the large integration project. We took some time in mid December to transition our code base to Git and TFS 2017. We had just released a large branch that contained about six months of work, so the end of the year was the optimal time to do that. We had some hiccups in getting build definitions working again, Octopus Deploy pointing to all the right places, etc. but by and large it was a success. Now, the work continues to integrate and process funding both up and down to our new vendor. We continue to refine our development pattern, and it’s so refreshing to step away from the text book and evaluate what we really need and not create fourteen layers until we absolutely have to. When you have a small team, all of the layers are just unnecessary complexity that make code less readable.

I’ve had this dream in my heart to be in business for myself for quite some time. For a very short period of time I was in business for myself. I had a Tax ID and everything. I did market research for a fitness product called a kettle bell. This wasn’t just any kettle bell, though. It was adjustable. At the time, there was nothing else like it being sold on Amazon. So, what does any halfway decent entrepreneur do in this situation? Validate the idea. I threw up a simple landing page, put out some Facebook ads to drive traffic to the landing page and started collecting emails. My target audience was 18-25 year olds that liked CrossFit on their profiles. I had about one million potential customers. At $150 per unit, there was potentially a profitable business at hand. After a week, my idea was validated. I purchased 50 of these things, got them through customs, onto freight trucks, and into a fulfillment center ready to ship out to customers. Through some tough lessons learned, margin per unit turned out to be about $20. This isn’t terrible if you’re able to sell dozens each month, but I just didn’t have the cash flow in order to do that. I sold all 50 that I’d ordered and watched the other larger companies in the mix lower their prices to compete and push the smaller companies (mine) out of business.