So I want to briefly talk about what I've learned about blogging so far from my experience with Less Annoying Software.  The reason I completely moved all my blogging over there instead of starting out with the arrangement I have now (only posting relevant information on LAS) is because I had absolutely no idea what LAS would end up doing.  As you can tell from my last post on this blog, we started Less Annoying Software with absolutely no product, business model, or plan of any sort.  Because of this, I couldn't very well write blog posts specifically for our target audience.

All-in-all, I think it was the perfect way to start a business, and a blog.  I'm pretty sure that the main thing keeping people from starting new projects is the fear of looking stupid at the very beginning.  Maybe you want to start a blog, but you need an awesome name and you need a great first post.  After all, if you can't even pull off the first post of your blog, how in the hell will you keep it going?  The first post is the most important one.

In reality, the first post is the one no one will ever read because you don't have an audience yet.  Your first post is the least important one you'll ever write.  The important thing is to just get started so you have something to build off.  The first 7 months (or however long it's been) of blogging at LAS were unfocused and we didn't really offer any value to our potential customers.  Luckily, we didn't have any readers so it didn't matter.

The important thing is that now we're starting to see some traffic coming to our blog.  We have a real business with a clear focus, and we're adapting the blog appropriately.  But if we'd waited until right now to get started, we'd be far behind.  The seven months of unfocused, irrelevant posts are every bit as useful now as seven months of prolific writing would have been.

The same has been true of our business.  Like I said, we started it without having any clue what software we'd be building.  We picked our company name, started the blog, and got a website built before making any important business decisions.  By getting started right away instead of spending months planning, we gave ourselves some serious momentum.  By the time we decided to make a CRM product, we were ready to jump right in and start coding.

So I guess the lesson I learned (or at least validated) so far with Less Annoying Software is that if you're thinking about doing something, just do it.  At worst, you can just quit if you decide it was a bad idea.  Messing up at the beginning is the best time to mess up, so it doesn't make sense to wait for the stars to align before making your move.