Pajama Entrepreneur

During the first year of its existence, Muniwireless.com made no money. Because there were few cities setting up Wi-Fi hotzones and hardly any were deploying municipal Wi-Fi networks, posting was light. I would write three to four articles a week, but as the year went by, the number started to rise because more cities were slowly doing something with Wi-Fi.

By January 2004, six months into blogging, traffic to my site began to increase significantly. Vendors of wireless mesh nodes as well as city officials began to email me about their planned projects. There was definitely more activity by March 2004 than when I had started (June 2004). But still no income.

I decided to send out a weekly newsletter, not only to summarize the posts for that week, but to give my readers an indication of where the market was heading, what to expect, and occasionally, to rant about what I believed to be the unfair practices of telecom incumbents who had everything to lose with the deployment of open neutral networks. Actually I think I just needed something to do.

As I mentioned in part one, by merely aggregating information written elsewhere about municipal wireless projects, Muniwireless.com began appearing on page one of Google searches.

No income, lots of time for creativity

However, I found it worrisome not to have any income from the site. During that year (June 2003-May 2004), all of my clients (software companies in Europe and the US) had very little business. I was still an intellectual property lawyer and years of too much work (1997-2002), everything dried up. And it dried up very quickly. I was still very busy until late 2002, but as soon as 2003 came along, there was nothing. This was the bottom of the tech market, after the dotcom bust. Everyone had a lot of time to do other things:

• Hang out in cafes: it was wonderful to be able to call up friends and just meet up in a cafe, sometimes to moan about the lack of work, often to talk about the projects we had just started. It was a fertile season for our imaginations because we had time but no money, and we could do as we pleased.
• Work out in the health club: I remember having amazingly muscular arms and abs, and seeing a lot of people at our health club in the middle of the day.
• Bake cakes: I cooked a lot that year and experimented with baking banana bread and making fresh pasta.

Having very little work worried us all, but having a lot of time allowed us to start our own little projects - new ideas for websites (I will write about Weekendhotel.nl and Dogster in the future), consulting companies (Trendwatching.com), etc.

Because I could not rely on anyone else to give me work (clients, employer) and I was really on my own, I had to devote my energies to Muniwireless.com.

The year 2003 - 2004 was one of the happiest and most creative in my life. Now, when I think of how worried my friends and I were about our prospects in life, and how depressed we were at times, it seems absurd.

Lesson 2: Use the period of “no work” to hang out, loosen the mind, let the imagination fly and be thankful for it. When you are busy again, you will miss it.

Lesson 3: When your back is against the wall, really good stuff happens.

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