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I’m thinking about the word “abide” this week. Our church has been working through the writings of John to start off the new year. During my reading in John 15, as it probably should, the word abide is leaping off the page. You know those moments when you read something, and you know that you know that you know there is something important going on. This is where I found my heart and mind. I’m reading it again and again, and seeing this undeniable link between abiding and bearing fruit. What I hadn’t picked up on in earlier readings is the connection to prayer.

Karla and I were discussing the music industry and how it’s been affected by Apple Music, Spotify, and other similar services. The conversation started around an innocent box of CDs that Karla hangs on to for sentimental reasons despite the fact that she was almost every one of those songs available at the touch of a button online. There are formative albums, sentimental albums, gift albums, everyone else had it so I got also albums, et al. But all of these albums have one thing in common, they are owned. The endless supply of digital albums that we “add” to our libraries via digital music services isn’t quite the same.

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.

We moved. Actually, we bought a house. We weren’t planning on it. We weren’t saving for it. It was basically handed to us on a silver platter. Back in April or May we were discussing our current living arrangements. We were in an amazing apartment with no upstairs neighbors. The upstairs neighbors had moved out in April. They were quite noisy with an even noisier large dog that was afraid of being alone…

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.

What does "quiet" even mean?