2015: year of focus.

I am good in many areas. I find it easy to learn new things, and I think it is fun to try new stuff and make everyone happy by trying to deliver everything to everyone. That is how I started my business, soon 13 years ago.

That is a really good strategy for surviving the first few months or even years of freelancing, but it will never get you to the point of financial independency or big success.

The reason is that you won’t be known for anything. You are never the best in any given area – just a decent go-to-guy delivering things that someone who specialises in that given field would just frown upon. You deliver things that are good enough, but nothing that stand out.

When I started my business that special thing was helping business get online and update their own websites easily. That was more than a decade ago, and web development agencies were rare in my part of the world. Now, everyone delivers websites, and nowadays many online tools does a pretty good job too. Competing by offering website creation is not very unique anymore.

Most of the work we do nowadays is building web applications in Angular JS and Ruby on Rails, but that is not what we are known for in our local market. They still think we build websites since that is what all other web development companies do.

So, this year I’m going to do something that I haven’t dared to do for the last 12 years: Focus on a specific industry and deliver digital products just for them. We will be one of the best providers for that particular niche, and we will be known to all big players in that niche.

I think this is the right way to move forward. We are not dropping all current projects and I will let the transition take some time since I am trying to grow the business without bringing in external cash, but we will get there.

We will be happy. Our customers will be happy. That is important to me, I have always believed in happiness driven development.

Boy, this feels good. 2015 is going to be a good year.