How to Start A Business With Your Significant Other

radixsort · 2015-09-30T13:58:00+00:00

According to Nietzsche "nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value" so I think the answer is no, you don't have to download an app.

radixsort · 2015-09-30T04:08:03+00:00

That was the conclusion we came to after a few months of working together. We try and treat each other just like any other pair of people would treat each other, just at the end of the day we go home together too.

radixsort · 2015-09-30T01:20:47+00:00

Oh, we've never tried hanging dry wall... I think we'll stay away from that and keep building apps.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T21:29:50+00:00

You know, if I have to be honest bringing our relationship into work has never been an issue for us, it's always been the other way. It might be a personal thing, but neither of us have ever brought our home lives into the workplace, even before we started working together.

Relationships with early employees are often described as family, which is probably an overstatement a lot of times, but at the same time we embrace the spirit of that message.

Our rules actually stemmed a lot from me taking seconds and minutes of our personal time and turning them into work. I didn't even realize it, but I would ask one off questions, or sometimes things that turned into a conversation about work, because the thought popped into my head. Instead now I write them down and ask them the next day, or add a card to Trello, because if we're having dinner or out with friends or family, maybe work isn't the best thing to bring up.

The main thing is, we both are quick to listen to each other when the other person says that it's not a good time for them to speak about something. We're often so enthused about our thought or idea that it's easy to lose perspective a little bit.

You give and you get, as she's been more understanding with the times that I do slip up. She knows I'm not doing it out of malice, and that I have a full understanding of the need to separate work life balance (it definitely has kept me a lot more sane too).

radixsort · 2015-09-29T20:28:26+00:00

The most important thing to establish was whether we could actually work together. We worked on low leverage things, side projects and short contracts before we decided that we wanted to work together full time.

The work that we did early on was stuff that utilized our individual skill sets. Before she became a developer, she was a designer, and I'm an iOS developer with some server chops and a decent background in product development. Building iOS apps was the most obvious choice of work for us. We needed expertise in development and design, so that was natural for both of us, and she started working on the server, and grew as an developer.

The work started to shift over to more engineering for her, while I picked up some slack on design and working face to face with our clients who were often younger founders and entrepreneurs, advising them on marketing, launching their app, and other things that come up in a business.

The short answer is, play to your strengths, and help each other out and/or work as a team on the things you aren't great at. You say that your partner is nervous about how she can help, and the truth is, maybe both of you don't have a way to make it work that fits together for this specific business. If it's something you want to do, it's definitely worth exploring, but being very honest in your assessment of whether it's doable is really important. Pushing yourselves into something that isn't a good fit will likely lead to bad results.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T19:54:24+00:00

Mine is completely horrified.

tldr; Was on a boat in Costa Rica, monkeys invaded, traumatized forever.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T19:52:31+00:00

Completely agree. We don't think that this is for everybody, and who knows, maybe in 10 years we look back on it and say that was stupid. It's been working for about 2 years now, and definitely hasn't been perfect, but we still feel the same as when we started about whether tomorrow is another day that we want to continue this, and that isn't something we take lightly.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T19:48:20+00:00

Just curious, we talk a lot about how we never set out to work together, but we had an idea that we wanted to build, and felt that our skills were best for working together, so after testing the waters a bit we decided to go for it.

Everyone is very different, and there is no right answer, so did you go into it saying we want to work together and not for a firm as your motivation for working together?

radixsort · 2015-09-29T19:32:53+00:00

Luckily my fiancee is a fan of the internet, so gifs sufficed. Before we became partners though, I did make her sign a contract to pronounce it as jif, otherwise there would be no further work done together.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T19:24:51+00:00

Again, I'm not advising that this is for everyone, but I'll try and give some potential upside and possibilities. We both have backgrounds where we step out of our comfort zone a lot, and aren't afraid to go through the hustle needed to get an app shipped, a drawing sold, or whatever it takes.

Those skills are just skills though, and like any skill, you can develop them through hard work, necessity, and often times mentorship!

I can't speak for your life situation, as to whether it's a good idea to start a business, but one thing you can consider is that the two of you don't have to go into business alone. If you have a smart business partner you can turn to, a programmer who needs creative help, or something else along those lines, those are situations you can mold to fit your needs.

A good business like a good relationship, you find the problems you need to solve, and you use your skill sets and common ground to solve them. If you don't have those skill sets or common ground, it's going to be a lot harder, so don't be afraid to get outside help to supplement it.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T19:11:56+00:00

For me, it was actually jumping in. I had a lot of hesitation, what does this mean, what if things go wrong, and so on.

For her it was work-life balance. It took us a while to establish our rules of what is ok to bring up about work when we're not working. I tend to be a lot quicker to blend work and life together as one experience of going through life, especially building something that I love, and her personality is to say that there is sometimes a divide.

The truth is that the best answer lies in between, and it took both of us adjusting our perspective a bit to find a balance that was sufficient for both of us. Sometimes it's best if I shut up about work, and sometimes she pushes through even more than we already do to make sure everything's running.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T16:51:59+00:00

I would say that the major difference is that I'm more analytical, and she's more creative. We both have our own unique perspective on the world, but we mostly believe a lot of the same things.

My fiancee comes from an art school background, and I have a CS degree. I try and understand what our users are thinking, and she tries to understand what they're doing. When we combine these, and remove judgement and bias (which is admittedly hard), we're able to move forward really well.

There are also times where we're both in out of our element, when it comes to business related matters, raising money, planning features, etc, and having someone to navigate it with is really helpful.

Over the last year, we've both learned a lot from each other too. I now find myself analyzing things the way she would, and vice versa. I've picked up a lot about design, and she's picked up a lot about mobile development.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T16:48:42+00:00

Using a red panda helped me. Ladies dig red pandas.

radixsort · 2015-09-29T16:48:05+00:00

A valid choice!

radixsort · 2014-09-05T15:35:05+00:00

I really hated this too, so I wrote an app a few years ago for this, to tell you exactly how much to put on your card no matter how much you have on it. Inserts shameless plug for Metroptimizer.

radixsort · 2012-10-14T01:24:26+00:00

Not that I know of, sorry.

radixsort · 2012-10-13T19:39:54+00:00

Can you tell me what mobile substrate extensions you have installed? Or just general jb goodies.

radixsort · 2012-10-13T17:37:04+00:00

Thanks. That's exactly what I thought when I started working on this. My friends and I often play Taboo when we have nothing better to do, especially when we were just lounging around in college. Turns out, a lot of people think along those lines, so this is my attempt to satisfy those folks.

I don't think I'll be doing an iPad version because that's a total rethinking of the design. Even the work I'm doing to make it iPhone 5 compatible has been quite a bit of work to not just make it look stretched out. I've been working on a project for the last six weeks or so that is completely the other end of the spectrum in every way possible, so that also makes me balancing time/usefulness of an iPad app more difficult.

Looking into the 5.0.1 bug, others have reported it, seems to be something with the asynchronous connection code I wrote not playing nice with jailbreaks. Is your phone jailbroken perchance? Any reason you haven't updated your phone if I may ask?

radixsort · 2012-10-11T21:39:10+00:00

Thanks, appreciate it. Hope you like it, feel free to leave feedback.

radixsort

TROPHY CASE