Building Something Tangible

I haven’t been posting much recently. That is down to two reasons.

Most of it was because I was sick most of last week. Just the flu, so nothing major. But it just drains you and all you can do all day is sit and watch tv (Which is what I did). Took 3 days off work aswell, which was actually alot longer when you think about it. Monday was a public holiday in New Zealand (Queens Birthday), I went to work Tuesday feeling a bit off, but OK. Then took Wed, Thurs, Fri off. I actually went to work on Friday, but got sent home within the hour. Funnily enough when I went to work today, The guy who usually sits on the desk next to me was off work sick. Woops!

And also I have been working behind the scenes at building a “Tangible” business for myself. I guess the word tangible doesn’t quite fit here. Usually it is something that you can physically hold, that you can point to and say “Hey, I did that!”.  I don’t know why I call what I’m doing now, more tangible than anything else I’ve ever done. But this time it feels like I can point to something and say that I actually have a “real product” with real customer lines.

In the past I have centered most of my efforts around affiliate marketing. And for a long time now I have thought that while I do well at it, and it is a solid “money maker”. It doesn’t quite feel real to be doing hit and miss SEO work or PPC work. And it never made it any more of a tangible business by offering your services to others. I always felt it was always going to be something invisible, something that I could never have anything to show for my efforts at the end of the day, other than money.

Most will point to the fact that I have built a number of successful tools and products to do around the IM niche. And while this is getting closer to having something that I consider to be “real”. It still never really hit me in that way. It could be the way that I ran things back then. I was more of a happy go lucky businessman. And just rolled with the punches. That isn’t to say I didn’t plan ahead. But I never ever pictured myself actually building it up into something more broad. Affiliate marketing in my mind, is still a fairly small niche (With alot of developers in it), and so developing affiliate marketing tools was not always the path to riches and a fully fledged business.

And so that lands me here right now. Today I finished work on Wachahost.

Wachahost is put simply, a Web Host. For some of you, you may be going “What The FU–” in your mind. I mean, a lock stock webhost? That is as plain as they come. There is millions of them out there, what makes you think you can make millions with just a standard webhost? And the truth is, I don’t. Do I expect to break even? Ofcourse! Do I think I will eventually be able to make a good chunk of change with it? Most Def! But I am under no illusion that Wachahost is going to be the next big thing. I mean… Just look at it… She’s as plain as they come

All of the above doesn’t worry me. If anything, I am looking for something to keep me occupied that is more routine. It is getting back to using a part of my brain that I thought I had almost forgotten. Nothing really in setting this up has been about massive problem solving. It hasn’t really stressed me out yet (Touch Wood). It has just been business dealing, working out the data center that we are going to use, doing all the paper work behind the scenes. And it has given me a good idea of what goes into a bricks and mortar business.

At this point, there isn’t much to report about the business going on’s. We haven’t officially launched yet. I don’t even know if we are going to do a huge bonanza anyway. But I will likely be reporting back periodically in between my regular posts, about how the business is doing (Minus financial’s in all honesty). In actual fact, it has given me a bunch of post ideas already. You seriously never realize just how much load WordPress takes until you see a shared hosting server going full tilt.