Coming Soon

There are entrepreneurs and mompreneurs and many other varieties.  I am the snailtrepreneur.  My tribe are those who are managing multiple full-time endeavors simultaneously.  For me, that’s my more-than-full-time school administrator position, momma to a preschooler and an infant and entrepreneur-in-training.  (I would add doctoral student to the list, but I don’t feel justified doing so since the literature review articles for my dissertation are collecting dust in a binder in a bag, out of sight in my office.)

When you move at a snail’s pace, every milestone feels monumental. I don’t have a website I can link you to…yet.  But I am one who writes things on my to-do list to then have the satisfaction of striking them off of it, so I’m spending a few days reveling in things that have gotten done to muster up the gumption to tackle the Not Yets.

I have a sharp, simple, brilliant logo. I can brag on it like a momma would because, like a momma, I contributed the raw materials and lent my best guidance and then humbly observed in awe. My team at REACTOR Design Studio in KC, the self-proclaimed “Headquarters of Awesome”, is just that. They made something abstract concrete, put form and color to it.  That process is nothing short of magical to me, and my logo is downright charming.

Even though I feel like my entrepreneurial journey has led me up and down the Eiffel Tower and across the Golden Gate bridge, someone viewing this from a regular-speed perspective has probably seen me cross a sidewalk (leaving a sparkly trail of snail-stuff in my path).  In the grand scheme of complex business decisions, I know my small steps don’t even make the chart. That’s fine.

What I know is that I have a Coming Soon page which is almost ready to go live:  a bookmark in cyberspace which signals the imminent creation of something life-altering (well, altering my life at least).  The page looks great, and I can’t wait to shout the URL out from the mountaintops or get it tattooed on me – or at least email it to a few close friends.  Hard not to get carried away.

If you’ve been following this journey, you know that “getting $” has been a recurring theme in this story.  I don’t quite have all that figured out yet, but as I weigh pros and cons, I am crossing options off the list and feel like I’m getting closer to the right answer.  There will be no Kickstarter campaign.  I can’t afford to have this idea out there for so long before development of the website.  I am working on the business plan, doing a little every day.  It’s daunting, and I feel more comfortable writing in Spanish than I do in sales projections, but I am making progress.  The plan right now is a combination of an SBA loan and seeking the support of a few other investors.  I finally feel like I can make the $ work.

So I may be slimy and funny-looking and squishy in some parts and carrying a heavy load at all times, but my snail self is trucking along.  Turn your head for too long and I may have made it out of view.  And who knows where I’ll turn up next.