Wow. 2013 has completely flown by. We did so much this year, but it feels like everything happened in the blink of an eye. For us, 2013 was a year of experimentation. Since we’re a relatively new company, we were basically trying anything that seemed like it had merit and then waiting to see what happened.
As you can probably guess, not everything we tried was a win. The important thing to remember when experimenting is that failing isn’t a bad thing. If you get discouraged every time something doesn’t work exactly the way you planned, you’re probably going to have a pretty rough time as an entrepreneur. If you want to succeed, you have to learn from failure.
Here’s a Quick Overview Of The Stuff We Did In 2013:
- We attended five WordCamps and sponsored three
- I gave a talk on why SEO Still Matters at WordCamp Austin
- We made a TON of new friends and business connections
- I started WordPress SEO Meetup groups in Tampa and Austin
- I handed over the reigns in Tampa and shut down the Austin meetup
- We added three members to the FAT Media team
- We launched a SaaS product for funeral homes called Funeral Forward
- We shut down Funeral Forward for a number of reasons (which I’ll detail bellow)
- We created a service to upgrade older Genesis sites called Genesis Update
- After a successful launch, interest died off and we shut down Genesis Update
- I was interviewed on the Matt Report
- We started a podcast called WP Bacon
- We converted the WP Bacon website into a WordPress information hub
- I appeared on the WP Watercooler a number of times
- We moved our lives and our business to Austin, TX
- I hosted the Dradcast
- We completed a bunch of client-driven development projects
- We stopped doing client-driven development projects in-house
- We created a forum for Web professionals to vent about clients
- We completed over 30 WordPress site audits
- We started working on a new service based around our site audits
- I submitted my first plugin to the WordPress.org repo
- I designed and coded a couple Genesis child themes but never released them
- I learned a crap-ton about PHP, how WordPress works, and coding in general
- Nickie started her own personal blog
- We Blamed Lema for pretty much everything that’s ever happened
- Lots of other things I’m probably forgetting at this point
Holy Freakin Crap That’s a Lot of Stuff!
Just listing all that stuff is kind of tiring. I’m surprised we got anything done at all with how many different directions we were headed in throughout the year. Some of the stuff we did was great, other things appear as though they were a bit of a waste of time on the surface.
I truly believe that the full merit of everything we did this year won’t really be understood for a while. It takes time to process why some things succeeded and why others failed. That process is what makes you a stronger, better entrepreneur.
In the hope of both expediting the learning process and letting other people learn from what we’ve accomplished this year, I’m going to go through a bit of the good and bad of 2013 right here and now. So, lets get to it!
The Good Stuff
We Made Sooooo Many New Friends
This is by far my favorite thing that came out of 2013. With all of our travelling, tweeting, and Skyping we have increased our circle of friends a ridiculous amount. The WordPress community has been so overwhelmingly open and friendly that I’m still blown away by it to this day. To everyone we met this year, thanks for kicking so much ass. You all know who you are. 
Our Knowledge Leveled Up
One of the best byproducts of our experimentation in 2013 was a HUGE increase in both my own personal knowledge and also the knowledge of everyone who works with us. We have all learned a lot this year about a myriad of different subjects.
I’m a better developer than I was a year ago. I’m a better business owner than I was a year ago. I know a boatload more about SEO and marketing than I did a year ago. Hopefully I’m also a better friend than I was a year ago. I could probably write an entire book on all the things we learned this year. It’s been amazing. I’ll talk a little more about this in a bit.
We Made A Lot Of Money
It’s not my style to brag or go into specifics about revenue. I’m not saying we made a fortune or struck WordPress gold. We definitely did not. That said, we made a lot more in 2013 than I expected we would. If I had thought that moving from being a freelancer to a business owner, networking, blogging, and being more active on Twitter would have had this kind of impact… I would have done it years ago.
The money we made this year allowed us to pick up and move to a more expensive city and a nicer place. It allowed us to hire out more work. It allowed us to bring on regular team members. Best of all, it allowed us to travel all over the country to meet people we never otherwise would have been able to meet in person.
Overall, it’s been a kick ass year and we’ve been truly blessed in many ways. I’m excited to see what we can achieve moving forward into 2014. After all the lessons we’ve learned, the knowledge we’ve gained, and the network we’ve built… I can’t imagine us going anywhere but up from here.
The Not so Good Stuff
We Spent A Lot Of Money
Now… this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The old saying ‘you have to spend money to make money’ rings true to this day. If you ever expect to get anywhere in business, you’re going to have to shell out some cash along the way. The reason this falls under the not so good section is because we didn’t do an effective job tracking our ROI.
I’m almost positive that we spent more money than we should have and in some cases we flat out wasted it. If there’s one thing that I learned from the money we spent this year it’s that we need to hold ourselves accountable for every dime that goes out. Spending money is fine, it just needs to be spent more wisely in 2014.
We Lacked Focus
An unfortunate byproduct of experimentation is a general lack of focus. This can be seen across the board in everything we did in 2013. We didn’t blog consistently, we didn’t target any one thing successfully, and we were really all over the place in everything that we did. I’ve spoken about this on a few podcasts already because it’s a subject which seems to come up pretty often.
I honestly believe that this is a problem faced by nearly everyone who does business online. Some people manage it better than others, but the issue remains. With such a vast expanse of opportunities at our fingertips, it’s extremely difficult to find and maintain focus. We started to get a handle on it towards the end of 2013, but we’re still not there yet.
We Had Too Many False Starts
This plays into the lack of focus and our experimental nature this year. We were trying so many things and going after so many opportunities that we launched things which never really took off. Were the ideas flawed? Maybe. Did we fail to test the market effectively before we jumped in? You bet. Funeral Forward in particular is a bit of a sore spot for me. We called in favors, spent lots of time and money, travelled cross-country to promote it, and in the end we never really got the service off the ground.
A number of factors played into our decision to stop, but the primary reason was because we weren’t passionate about it. The idea behind the service came from a need that I perceived after working for a number of funeral homes as a freelancer. I still believe that need exists, I just don’t think we’re the right people for the job. I’m hopeful that someone who is more entrenched in the industry will be able to create something similar to what I had planned. In fact, if anyone reading this has any ties to the funeral industry, please drop me a line. I’d love to discuss what we learned during our start-up attempt.
Another reason we decided to shutter Funeral Forward and some of our other projects is simply because we found other, more lucrative business endeavours which didn’t require as much effort. Through the process of doing our work, we found more opportunities to expand on things we were already doing and turn them into a lucrative system for getting shit done. Anything that falls outside of that system has been evaluated and most of it has been shut down.
Stuff We Learned
Quality Matters, But Only Within Reason
Honestly, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. The problem with this is there is no such thing as perfection. This issue crops up pretty often in my work. I always want to make things just-so and it’s simply not possible. I don’t always know enough code, or enough about marketing, or enough about whatever it is I’m working on to bring it up to my “standards”. It’s also unreasonable to place these kinds of expectations on the rest of my team, although I think I’m better about that than if it’s something I’m working on myself.
Caring too much about quality does nothing but slow down your production and lower your output. At the end of the day, the only quality that matters is the quality that’s good enough to get the job done. Crafting the finest quality products and services sounds nice, but in reality it’s going to cost you time, money, and you’ll probably never reach your standards anyway.
I’m not advocating the production of garbage or saying that quality doesn’t matter. Quality is certainly important, you just need to keep it in perspective. If you’re delaying projects or not releasing things because they don’t measure up to your ultra-high standards. Stop. Right now. Get it out there and get feedback. Chances are it was good enough a long time ago.
A Good Idea Doesn’t = A Good Business Decision
We had lots of ideas in 2013. Towards the end of the year we started to realize that even though our ideas were great, not all of them were feasible. We didn’t have the manpower, resources, or in some case the passion to execute them. Just because an idea COULD work, doesn’t mean it will work for you and your business. When you come up with an idea, you shouldn’t run blindly into the execution of it. Stop and think. Don’t start buying domains, churning out code, or designing the next killer landing page until you’re sure it’s both a good idea and a good idea for YOU.
Test the market. Do research. Ask people outside your circle of friends and family. Get as much feedback as you possibly can about your ideas before you spend a bunch of time on them. Hell, once you’ve validated the idea in your own eyes it might even be a good idea to try crowdfunding it. If you can get a ton of other people to pay you to work on your idea, chances are it’s probably got some legs. Whatever you do, don’t spin your wheels and throw money at something because it sounded like a great idea in the shower one day. Trust me, it’s not worth it.
You Have to Blog. A Lot.
This is something we tell our marketing clients all the time, but it’s not something we’ve practiced ourselves. The truth is that I don’t find it easy to write about myself or what we’re working on. I’ve had to force myself to stop what I’m doing and write about it sometimes. There are some subjects which I’ve been even more hesitant to write about, particularly with regard to SEO. I have my reasons for this, but none of them matter.
I give my friend Chris Lema a lot of crap for blogging daily, but the truth is that he’s right. Blogging all the time is a key component to success on the web. Google loves fresh content because your audience loves fresh content. Keeping your name in front of people and establishing yourself as an industry expert is extremely important and blogging regularly is the most effective method for doing exactly that. I doubt that I’ll ever become a daily blogger, but becoming a consistent blogger is something that I know I have to do.
So… What’s Next?
The answer to this might surprise you. In fact, it’s a decision that I’ve only come to recently. As many of you already know, we’ve struggled with a branding issue since we started FAT Media. There’s another Fat Media in the UK as well as some others spread around the world. Our branding has been inconsistent and it’s been an ongoing issue for us since we appeared on the scene.
I’ve come up with a few different ways to fix this, and I’ve even spoken with branding expert Chris Ford about what we should do. After thinking it over for quite a long time, the choice which makes the most sense to me at this point is to simply stop using the FAT Media brand.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I know, I know… you love us and you can’t possibly imagine a world without FAT Media…. but don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. We’ve got a shiny new service which embodies everything we’ve been doing lately much more effectively than that FAT Media brand. It’s called Audit WP and it’s pretty awesome if I do say so myself.
In a nutshell, we perform hands-on, manual website reviews and deliver our reports using a customized version of WordPress. Each audit is completely unique and tailored to the site in question. We cover all the bases from technical on-site and off-site SEO to conversion optimization, code problems, and just about anything else you could think of with regard to a website.
It seemed fitting to announce this from the FAT Media domain, but in time this post along with all of our other content will be migrated to either WP Bacon or Audit WP. Don’t worry, all the links will still work. We know a thing or two about 301 redirects. 
There’s Still Room for Bacon
WP Bacon is one of the things I’ve enjoyed working on the most this past year. Doing the podcast and writing the posts for WP Bacon is a ridiculous amount of fun and I can’t wait to see how we can grow the site in 2014. We’ve already started generating some affiliate revenue and we’re in discussions with some of our favorite WordPress companies about an ongoing sponsorship for the podcast.
We all really love working on WP Bacon, so don’t expect to see it going away any time soon. I mean c’mon, it’s bacon. Who would ever get rid of that?
We’re Committed to Consistency
I think the thing that hurt us most this past year was a lack of consistency across the board. We missed deadlines, we had inconsistent results with our various start-up attempts, and we just failed to stay the course on a lot of things. This can’t happen in 2014. In order to make sure we don’t fall into the same traps we did in 2013, we’ve scaled WAY back on the amount of side projects, ideas, and other things which seemed like they might be worth testing in 2013.
As you probably noticed in our list at the beginning of this post, we’ve shut down quite a bit. I haven’t done any of this lightly or without a ton of thought on the implications of starting and stopping, but the reality is that in order for us to do what we’re best at and live up to the potential I know we have, we need to focus and maintain consistency.
We need to blog consistently. We need to stay consistent in our subject matter. We need to be more consistent in our personal habits. Are you getting the picture here?
I’m Not Really Big on Setting Actual Goals, But Here’s What You Can Expect From Us In 2014:
- Level-headed, data-driven decision making
- Blogging on a regular schedule
- Podcasting on a regular schedule
- Strict adherence to relevant subjects on our two distinct blogs
- More Twitter ridiculousness (Don’t expect this to change any time soon)
- A stronger focus on our health and our personal lives
- The general badassery you already know and love us for
Well, that pretty much wraps her all up. I don’t really know if this post will come as a surprise or not. None of these decisions were made lightly and all were motivated strictly by what’s best for us and our business. It’s not really dramatic or anything, but hey… we’ll leave that kind of stuff to our friend John Saddington.
I’d like to wish everyone in the WordPress community and everyone who has read our blog this past year the most amazing luck in everything you do next year. I hope our mistakes and our successes help you in some way. Here’s to another kick ass year!