ColorBliss is two years old!

The first commit to the ColorBliss repo was September 13, 2023:

At that point, I really didn't think I'd still be working on ColorBliss in 6 months, let alone two years!

I've talked about the story with a lot of people, but haven't written down a lot of it, so maybe it's time for that.

I remember the morning I started ColorBliss pretty clearly, because I woke up around 4am and couldn't sleep. I had left my job at Netlify about two weeks prior. I was coming off of three years at Gatsby Inc, followed by six months at Netlify after they acquired Gatsby. The pre- and post- acquisition periods were very stressful for me, and by that point I was feeling burnt out.

I had made the decision to quit and start my own software business. I was tired of working in customer success, and also wanted a break from venture capital style businesses. I had asked myself the question, What is my rich life?, and realized that more money wasn't what I craved. What I really wanted and thought would make me happy was the time to spend on the things I enjoy.

So step one of the plan was "Make less money". Or rather, it was "work less, and be ok with making less money if that's what happens."

Personally, I have always wanted to own and run my own software business. It's why I learned to code in 2013. After years of failed side projects, I felt it was a good time to give it a try. My experience at Gatsby taught me a lot about working in startups--mainly that the name of the game is experiment, learn, and iterate. Try something, if it works, do more of it, if it doesn't try something else. And over the three years at Gatsby, I came to develop confidence in my own instincts.

So when I went out on my own, I set a few guidelines for myself.

To start, I would work no more than 20 hours in a given week. I wanted to test the theory that I could make enough money in 20 hours a week to support my family. (Two years in, and the theory is holding!)

I would aim to start my own software business. I had calculated that if we kept our expenses to a bare minimum (or as close to it as we could for a family of five), we had a safe runway of about a year.

So in that year, I gave myself a gold, silver, and bronze target to hit. My gold medal would be to start a software business that made enough money to cover all my family's expenses. My silver medal would be to make enough money to cover all my family's expenses without getting a full time job, by some combination of freelancing, consulting, and software business. My bronze medal would be that I had a really great year learning and spending more time with my family, and then found a job.

But why ColorBliss?

I had decided that I was going to leave Netlify in June, but there were a few good reasons for me to stay until August. We had a family trip to France planned, and that would be easier as paid time off rather than as unemployed (because of money). I also had a six month retention bonus from the acquisition, which would get paid in August. So as I bided my time, I kept a list of ideas as they popped into my head of how I could make money. (Most of them were not very good ideas). But my son was really into coloring at the time (he was 5 years old) and he was also usually very unsatisfied with the coloring pages that we found on Google--he always wanted something very particular.

Flash forward to September 13, 2023. I don't remember exactly why I woke up. I do remember for a few weeks after leaving Netlify, I would dream all night about the things I forgot to do before I left. I think I still had a lot of residual anxiety, and that would usually show up worst for me in the early hours of the morning.

In any case, I remember being up at 4am, and having thoughts about what I was going to do for work race through my head. I had bought a subscription to SEMRush a week earlier, to help with keyword research for project ideas and to help me deconstruct other sites' SEO strategies. I opened up my list of "ways to make money", and decided to do some research on coloring pages.

I found that there were a lot of searches for coloring pages for that were easy to rank for. Stuff like "mushroom coloring pages" and "Bowser coloring pages" were low difficulty, but still had 4k searches a month at the time.

That led me to believe that I could get a coloring page site off the ground and get traffic to it. I also remember seeing that a big coloring page site (Monday Mandala) was estimated to get something like 650k organic visits a month (I'm sure it's way higher). I saw that they were monetized by ads, and estimated that they were making at least $6500 a month from ads (assuming a $10 CPM).

What I concluded for this was:

• there are tons of people searching for coloring pages
• it is not difficult to get traffic to free coloring pages sites
• there are multiple ways to monetize a coloring page site

My hypothesis at the time was that I could get organic traffic via free coloring pages, and then funnel people into the coloring page generator.

Interestingly enough, looking at my notes from back then I wasn't evening doing keyword research on the actual product (ie coloring page generator)--I was really just looking at coloring pages themselves. But seeing the traffic there helped me realize that there was room in the market for more coloring pages, and I could make highly customized ones using AI.

So, with that info in hand, I used Domains GPT to help me come up with a domain name. I settled on ColorBliss.art. I liked the name, and I liked the price (it was like $4!). The dotcom was available, but for $2500, and I wasn't ready to spend that kind of cash (I did end up purchasing colorbliss.com in June 2024, but that's a story for another time).

And I was off to the races.

Looking back at my ColorBliss - Month One Update, I launched the very first version by the end of September, and had my first sale on October 3 I believe. ColorBliss did a little less that $100 in revenue that first month (and my expenses were twice that), but it was promising enough for me to keep going. I believe ColorBliss did $240 in October.

I decided I would treat ColorBliss as a kind of "practice business". I didn't think it would make a real, full time income for me. But it was making some money, and so I would learn some product development and marketing skills working on it until I felt like I was ready to start a real business, which I planned to do in January.

I've got more I want to write down about this story. The next chapter is something like How I gave up on starting a real business and became the Coloring Page Kingpin. I'll see when I can get that written.

Post Script: Lessons Learned

As I was reflecting this week, I started jotting down lessons I've learned over the past two years. I'll work on expanding these into more than just a title. I'll publish them somewhere like Lessons I've learned running ColorBliss as a solo founder.

Here's what I came up with so far:

• Only play games that you enjoy playing.
• The anxiety is coming from inside the house.
• Authenticity is an enduring quality.
• You’re going to fail, so practice failing gracefully.
• Be proactive in looking for good news
• What’s worth sharing and what’s better kept secret?

Post Post Script

Here's a photo of me, our newest baby, and a celebratory latte on the two year anniversary of ColorBliss: