The Home Repair Theory of Startups

One of my goals with this blog is to write more often about running small businesses - especially software startups. I set out this week to do just that, but the only thing I really wanted to write about was my home projects.

Since our move in late December (it's May, now for any future readers) my wife and I have been settling into a new house just outside of Boulder, Colorado. It's been an exciting change and a big one, having lived the past half decade in our beloved apartment in Denver.

Going in I knew there was going to be a lot of new. We're in a new town. Home ownership is new to us. And having the duration of living somewhere potentially measured in decades is scary, exciting, and different from the world of one-year leases we'd been living on in the city.

What surprised me is how much of it felt familiar. A lot of my inner discussions about the home mirror ones I've had throughout my career growing a small business. The overlap is pretty striking.

Here - I made a list:

1. At the beginning you're full of excitement with the change, the opportunity, and all of the possible future ahead of you.
2. You take on a huge amount of external capital to make it happen. Potentially the largest movement of capital you've ever been a part of.
3. Off the bat you build a huge list of ambitious to-do's you're certain you'll get to.
4. You bring with you a truck full of stuff you've accumulated from your life to that point. Some of it's an incredible fit. Some of it is obviously and frustratingly wrong going forward.
5. To speed things up you look into hiring people to help and realize the tradeoffs are real between draining finite capital on experience or saving the cash and learning to do things yourself.
6. Everything takes more time than you expected. Progress is slower but still really rewarding, so you review your list, push back timelines, and re-evaluate what you can realistically get done.
7. Excitement remains high but you're focusing the vision. You're learning what it actually takes to check a project off the list - the tradeoffs of setting aside time from stuff you'd rather be doing in order to have the satisfaction of doing the thing that needs doing.

I'm going to stop there because that's where I am with the house. But this list feels pretty analogous to one I'd write a few months into a new business. I don't know how many words I'd have to change to make it about starting a company, but the number's not more than twenty.

And that's interesting. It's been a while since we started BugSplat, so I'm further down the road with that experience than I am with this new homeownership adventure. If the two are so similar, could their differences offer any useful perspective?

That might be trite but it's my experience now so I'm going to mine it.
The first thing I've noticed is that the house is great at giving perspective to frustrating days of work.

With startups, bad days tend to just sit with you. With the house, even when you spend all day slowly repairing a sprinkler line because other leaks keep sprouting up, have to run back and forth to the hardware store three times to finally get the right part, and then cut your finger on an exacto knife while rewiring the outside garage door opener - you can sit back with a beer and see that the garage door now closes and the sprinklers work. It's tangible. The emotional toll you put in bore fruit and the fruit is right there in front of you.

Those types of days happen all the time building and running businesses, but they rarely provide the same clarity at the end of them. When you have an analogous day at work it's so much easier to sit there afterwards and focus on the frustration and so much harder to see that you're further along than you were in the morning.

Inversely, bootstrapping BugSplat has offered some interesting perspective on moving into a house with a thirty-year mortgage. This is a place we want to invest in and be proud of and live in for a long time. We're not flipping it. And although we're never sure what will happen down the road, our assumption when taking on new projects is that we'll be here a while - so choosing to learn how to do things ourselves means we're investing in knowing the systems of the house, making it cheaper and easier for us in the future.

At bootstrapped businesses early on you don't have the option to pay others to do tasks you're not an expert in. That's not a case for getting in over your head on the important stuff. But knowing that the initial slowness is a trade for understanding how something works is not always a competitive disadvantage against companies with more cash. That early investment can make things faster down the road because you've learned that part of your business and that knowledge helps you make smarter decisions around it for years to come.

There's more overlap. Ruthless prioritization and project management is key to getting anything done at both. The red tape of local regulations is like security and compliance - incredibly important to get right and understand, but no fun at all. Throwing money at a problem without thinking it through doesn't lead to solutions. It just leads to less money.

This goes on and on and I'm only about half a year into the experience. I'm sure when I write my year-and-a-half update I'll be shaking my head reading this piece ruefully - a reminder of what I didn't yet know. Because like with running a business, the most common thread in owning a home seems to be that there is much we do not know and only the fool doesn't think there's something to learn every single day.

Oh, and thank god the previous owner was the one who got to replace the roof. Not sure what the analogy is with a new business there.