Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

As a happily married man of nearly 5 months now, it’s been a struggle to maintain a consistent sleeping schedule. It has been a happy give and take between time with my wonderful wife and time sleeping. I’ve known all along, though, that in the long run, if I don’t take the time for rest that I need, time with my dear wife will suffer.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working together to bring consistency to our life. While we continue to be flexible, we tend towards a bedtime of no later than 10:30 and, ideally, closer to 9:30.

With my work as a partner in a development and niche marketing company, several side projects, work in my local church, and a family of my own, finding time for blogging, etc., unless I have control over my time, is impossible.

Here’s how a typical day will go.

I wake up, without an alarm clock, around 5-6 AM. I get up, drink a full glass of water, and then go into our guest room/office and spend time in Bible study, inspirational reading, and prayer. 45 minutes or so later, I close my time in prayer and then begin tackling the day. I’ll divide my time between answering emails, blogging, and working on side projects. This will typically go on until it’s time to eat and get ready for work. Depending on our schedule that morning, I’ll eat breakfast with my sweet wife, spend a bit of time together, and then off I go to work.

On some mornings, I’ll tune in to a message on audioverse.org while washing the dishes or doing some other general cleaning around the house. My wife takes excellent care of our home and helping out every now and then when things get backed up is the least I can do.

So, is it worth it?

Yes! A thousand times over, yes!

That extra time in the morning makes all the difference my friends.

In just the past few weeks, as I’ve had the extra time, I’ve been able to learn more, to move forward on my side projects, and be better prepared for the day’s work.

If you are already an early riser, I encourage you to keep it up. I’d love to hear your personal experiences.

If you’re not yet, how about giving it a try? It’s not an easy thing if you’re unused to it. I know what it’s like to be up till 2 AM and sleep till noon. It’s a hard cycle to break and for some it’s easy to decide that “Well, I’m just not a morning person”. It’s a habit, though, and like any other habit, old ones can be broken and new ones formed.

As I grow older and responsibilities increase the desire to have a mastery of my time and health continues to grow stronger. And as I am learning to control my time and keep priorities straight (God, family, work, ministry, side projects), I’ve been blessed with good health and success in the work that I take on.

I have much to learn and I look forward to more trials and a greater depth of experience.

Have a wonderful new day my friends.

Jonathan Wold

I changed the design on my blog this morning. It took a bit of time and I’ve still got a ways to go, but we’re nearly there. A huge thanks for the excellent work of Chris Pearson as his Cutline theme.

Using the design work of another has been a “no no” in my mind for a long time. Why? Well, why not just do it myself?

And that’s what I’d done.

The previous design of this blog had been put together by yours truly and it had taken me quite some time. I worked hard at it and had some positive feedback.

Design isn’t my strength, though. God has given me talents and abilities in other areas and rather than letting pride hold me back, I’ve stepped forward to make the most of the talents that God has blessed others with. If I had the time, I’d be interesting in learning more and putting the energy into an original design. The time I do have, though, needs to be focused on using the gifts I already have, working to improve and sharpen them.

I finished a book by Ben Carson this morning entitled “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story“. I highly recommend it.

In it, Ben talks about the importance of “THINKing BIG”. He encourages us to begin with determination and the full use of the gifts God has given us, then to go on for training and a sharpening of our skills. Look at the obstacles in life as hurdles, not barriers. Each hurdle conquered prepares us for the next.

In our business, we encourage each other to focus on our talents and work towards mastery. Making the decision to use an existing WordPress theme helped me clear up the block my “old design” was giving me and focus on writing once again. I was reminded to practice what I preach.

Have a wonderful rest of the day,

Jonathan Wold

Dear Readers,

It’s been some time since my hands have given expression to thought on this humble blog. I’ve contemplated new posts every now and then and, in one case, even began preparing a first draft. I didn’t finish, though, and a busy life provided little opportunity to think about blogging let alone to blog.

An email changed that, though.

I received an email letting me know that a sponsor was willing to pay for a new post on my blog. The sum of money was what I’d originally asked for when joining the service a year or more ago. I’d intentionally set it high as I hadn’t fully decided whether “sponsored reviews” was a direction I wanted to pursue.

That email got me thinking. Initially, I said yes. I’d looked over the site and, contrary to finding anything objectionable, found it interesting enough. With little time on my hands between family, work, and a few side projects, though, I hadn’t actually had time to write the review until this morning, a few days before the deadline.

I took a short walk before sunrise this morning and after asking God for wisdom, I came to my decision. I wouldn’t write the review.

Integrity is crucial. Those who requested the review had, understandably, requested that I not mention it being a paid review. That could easily lead my readers to believe that it was a personal endorsement when, in actuality, had it not been for the offer to be paid, I wouldn’t have written about this particular site.

So, it was a simple decision. The small sum I’d make upfront wasn’t worth the risk of losing your trust.

And, there was an added blessed in all this..

I’m blogging again :).

Have a wonderful rest of the day and look forward to more.

Jonathan Wold

Dear Friends,

A formal update has been on my mind for sometime now, but has been readily usurped by the happy demands of married life and work at Sabramedia. I’m writing this brief update today from the kitchen table in our new home. Joslyn and I, married for a few days over a month now, have been working hard putting our home together and it’s nice to finally watch as things are settling into place. Thank you for all your well wishes and support.

Just a little while back, my brother Joshua and I began work on a collective sale of our niche websites to free up focus for work in our web development startup. You can see the work in progress on our sale over at: http://www.woldboys.com

Of note today, though, is a website Joslyn and I have been working on for over 2 years, MoldBlogger.com.

As of April, 2008, the website was bringing in over 4,000 unique and highly targetted visitors on the topic of mold. The “Ask A Question” feature gets an average of 4-5 questions per week. In May, traffic climbed higher to over 5,000 visitors. In June, we’re projected to pass 6,000, with 23 RSS Subscribers and no advertising. Among many other terms, the site is #1 on Google for “mold blog”.

The site is unmonetized at the moment. I have plans to pursue advertising contracts, but am balancing that decision between the time involved and the potential of selling the website and passing the opportunity on to someone else.

Interested? Let me know. I’m giving this a short window of opportunity before making a decision.

Working on MoldBlogger.com has been an awesome opportunity. My wife and I have learned a lot and we’ve had a tremendous amount of positive feedback. Before deciding the next step, though, we want to carefully consider our options.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to further updates in the near future.

Jonathan Wold

On an average work day, we take a 45-minute drive in to our basement office in Jasper, Indiana. Nick, Joshua, and I will typically commute together and meet up there with the rest of the team (currently 6, soon to be more). We were planning to head in to the office today to put in some overtime hours on an active project. Our ideas were changed by waking up Sabbath morning to this beautiful sight:

We had a wonderful day and went for a nice 2 mile walk in the snow after lunch. That evening, we spent some time sledding.

This morning, though, it posed a challenge to our plans of going in and pulling an “all day(er)” at the office. We decide to work from home. Nick, who lives just down the road from his parents house (who are kindly housing Joshua and I at the moment), came up to visit and we setup shop on the kitchen table and got back to work.

Here you can see Joshua designing away in the background. He handles all the design work for the company. He works primarily in Illustrator and is also starting to branch off into Photoshop.

To the right you can see Nick programming. Today we’ve been working out some small bugs on Blogster.com. Nick is fixing a challenge with the TinyMCE editor. He works with Zend Studio as his PHP IDE of choice and Navicat for MySQL work. He uses Firebug (on Firefox) for his AJAX/jQuery debug work.

And to the left is my humble little laptop. Today I’ve been answering questions on Blogster and making sure various projects of ours are up-to-date.

Life in our little startup (Sabramedia.com) is wonderful. I’m currently working full-time as a developer, exercising my God-given talents and abilities with CSS and interface development to work with Nick in building our application platform and working together on a number of implementations. My passion is niche marketing and, slowly but surely, opportunities are arising for me to do that full-time within the company. First, though, I will continue to be faithful in the small things and pursue my love of development.

We’ve been blessed with a lot of success and a lot of challenges which, as we’re faithful with each, continue to bring even more success.

Tomorrow we’ll be heading back into the office and going through another fast-paced day of work.

On Friday, I’ll be flying out to Oklahoma to spend a week with my fiancée, Joslyn. Fiancée? That’s right! On May 19th of 2008, I’m getting married! :) - As excited I am about working with the wonderful team of guys and girls that we have at Sabramedia, I’m even more excited about my future with Joslyn. God has been very good to me.

More on life in our little startup later. Once development demands have given us a bit more breathing room, I’m looking forward to sharing more on our experiences and the daily lessons we’ve learned on running a successful startup.

Have a wonderful day!

Jonathan Wold