It’s been a month since Gigantc launched and fortunately I’ve been incredibly busy.  Here are a few things that I’ve learned my first month on the job.

1) Don’t burn bridges.

We all want to have that amazing feeling of telling everyone that we hated working with to f-off when we quit a job.  I once witnessed a fellow co-worker quit in a way that would rival Scarface from Half Baked.  I was working as a bartender for a mexican restaurant in LaCrosse Wisconsin and one of the cooks (who was aptly nicknamed “Sunshine”) got fed up and walked out into the middle of the dining room and yelled,

“Attention everyone.  I am the head cook here. I fucking QUIT…and by the way I spit in all of your food.”

I’m sure that felt amazing, but the consequence was that he never worked as a line cook again in LaCrosse again.

One of my first clients was someone I worked with at my former job, and a few other people from my old employer have expressed interest in working with my company.  It’s a great initial base of people to work with.  If you did good work and were well respected, they are going to want to work with you again.  And everyone always feels more comfortable hiring someone that they know well.  As much fun as it is to leave in a blaze of glory, it might cost you some clients at a time when you really need some.

2) Social networks are awesome.

I’m a somewhat humble person…somewhat.  Those of you who know me personally vs professionally can debate that among yourselves.  When I started Gigantc I didn’t shout from the top of the social media hills.  Some of it had to do with the fact that I was currently employed and I didn’t want let people I worked with know I was quitting.  The other part was that I felt that it would come off as spammy  and actually annoy my friends and followers.  I wanted to get everything perfect and completely setup before I told everyone.  During my first few weeks I made the mistake of putting myself in a self-imposed social network silence.  But my wife wasn’t in one (which is something that she won’t stop reminding me off.)  A simple congratulatory post from her directed at me and Gigantc actually landed me quite a bit of business and it wasn’t even from people in her social circle.  The power of social networks is that you have friends, who have different friends who have different friends.  It adds up exponentially and can be a great way to land some clients in your first month, even if you don’t personally know them.  My advice: get the word out on social networks, and encourage you social base to help you out.  99% of them could probably care less, but it only takes one or two to land you some gigs.

3)  Don’t wait, just get started.

I still don’t have a finished web site.  I know, that’s crazy for a person who is going into web development.  In fact I might be a huge mistake on my part.  Only time will tell.  But the truth is, I’m really busy with client designs right now and I don’t have a ton of extra time to work on my own stuff.  Although building my site might lead to money in the long run, it isn’t paying the bills right now.  I jumped into client work from day one and didn’t look back.  You’re not going to get paid until you finish some jobs and if you are too busy doing things for yourself, that first month is going to hurt your pocketbook.  Word of mouth will bring in better higher quality clients than a web page will, so just get to work.  You can finish everything else later.

4) Caffeine.

Late nights blend  into early mornings.  Pretty much all aspects of my day seem to be fueled by caffeine.  Get ready, you are going to build up quite a tolerance to the stuff.  My mornings start off with Kirkland Dark Roast from Costco, afternoons I hit a little Gunpowder Green from Adagio and my night shift is usually fueled by Rockstar Recovery.  You know…you gotta mix it up.  In fact, I’m going to go make some right now.

Later.

It was quite ironic that I was eating an apple on my drive home when I got a text message:

 ”Jobs Died”

As soon as I got home I opened my macbook and launched the TWiT network.  My wife and I watched as Leo flipped over to a YouTube video of Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford University.  I stood there listening, overcome with sadness for a person that I had never met in my entire life.  My family had gone through this a couple of years ago when my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  Unlike Jobs, she left us only a few months later.  I felt a sadness for Steve’s wife and children as well as a sadness for someone who had helped create the technology that shaped my life and career.

And then Jobs said something in the address that really hit home for me.

 ”I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

It was also ironic that I had just put in my two weeks notice a day before to, as Jobs put it, peruse something I love doing.  In a strange way it made me feel justified that what I was about to do wasn’t an absolutely crazy idea.

 ”Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”

Tomorrow I’m about to embark on that “foolish” adventure.  Over the past two weeks I’ve talked to a multitude of people about going out on my own.  The ones at my soon-to-be ex-job mostly think I’m nuts.  They give me kind works and good luck statements, but you can hear it in their voice that they don’t understand why I could possibly think this is a good idea.  On the other side of the coin, the people outside of the corporate shell have a completely different view of the situation.  I haven’t talked to anyone who has left the cubicle world that said I was making a mistake.  Their words are sincere and you can see the excitement in their eyes – I’m another person who dared to take the red pill and unplug from the matrix.  It almost feels like they are welcoming me into a very exclusive club, and the first rule of “quit club” is to not talk about “quit club” until you have taken the plunge.  One fellow cord cutter said this to me last week.

“Dan, it was a long time coming.  I always though that you would eventually do this.  Trust me you’ve always has the right mindset for this and you’ll do great.  It was the best decision I ever made in my life and soon you’ll understand.”

So here’s to the crazy ones.  I’m not in it to change the entire world, just to change mine.  And hopefully in the process I’ll convince a few others to that it’s ok to take the red pill with me.

Write what you know.  Isn’t that the first thing any seasoned author tells you when you ask the question “What should I write about.”  So here I am, writing what I know.

Let’s start at the beginning.

I started beingboiledhurts.com around the year 2000.  I was attending college and really wanted a place that all my friends could go and laugh at crazy stuff I found on the web.  I was young, drunk and thought I was hilarious.  Who wouldn’t want to read my site?

BBH was a simple, hand coded site and each day I would add something new.  Eventually WordPress came around and made my life a whole lot simpler.  Years later a little thing call Twitter caught my attention and made it even easier to blast out links to my friends.  At some point social took over the web and there was no need for this blog.  If you wanted my links you just followed me on twitter.  If you wanted to know what I was listening to you followed me on last.fm.  If you wanted to hear me bitch about Facebook you friended me on Facebook.  And then as the years went on life just got complicated outside of the web world.  I got job, got married, had kids and that witty sarcastic blogger retired and went wherever internet personas go to fade away.  Presumably that guy is sitting on a virtual beach somewhere sipping margaritas with Tom from mySpace and throwing flying toasters at the dancing baby.

So what is this post?  This isn’t a “hey look I’m back” kind of a thing.  Truthfully, anyone who was hitting this site up on a daily basis in 2004 is probably not reading this post.  In fact, if you have been checking this site constantly for the last 4 years eagerly awaiting new content…STOP!  Haven’t you heard, blogs are dead.  The only people blogging are laid off ex-newpaper reporters and 30 year old moms.

But…Dan isn’t this a blog post?  Did you sprout a vagina and lose your job at the Daily Bugle?

Not quite.  I guess I just have something new going on in my life that I thought might be worth sharing with the world.  Maybe in the process I’ll pick up a few readers and a few clients.  Hell…maybe someday I can put all of these posts into a book and make some cash like the guys at 37 Signals.

With that being said, 4 years after this site died a slow painful death it’s coming back as something new.  Being Boiled Hurts is going to be my personal voice trying to shine through in this mess we call the internet.  Right now it’s going to focus on what I’m going through professionally in hopes that someone might stumble upon this one day and it’ll help them follow in my footsteps. Sorry for being vague, but I’ll talk about all of that in more detail in my next post.  For now I just want to say hello and welcome  you to the new site.

By the way, start carrying around 10 dollar bills.  Everyone always has 20′s.  Don’t be a freaking sellout.  It’s all about the Hamilton’s baby.

-dFree