Now it's time to get a bit personal.

Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side.

This episode starts down the road of discussing the personal side.

The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, go to http://brandingblitz.com/3/

Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand.

This is the third episode. Last time, I gave a quick overview of where we're at so far with this business. I am still very early in this process, but things are well underway and moving quickly. That is one of the things that makes me excited to share this story with you. I always love hearing people's stories of building a business – while they are actually doing it rather than after the fact. I guess it just adds an extra level of excitement and suspense not knowing what the outcome is going to be. As this story unfolds, I'm hoping to share that excitement with you – not so much an excitement about my business and where it's going but about the potential for YOUR business and the things that can happen as you take action towards your goals.

I mentioned that in this episode I wanted to talk about some details from my personal life. At first, that may sound like something that doesn't really belong here – but I truly think it does. It is an inseparable part of this story. If I don't share at least some of these details you really won't have the full story. Even more than that, I really hope that my situation can become a catalyst for you, as it has for me. I hope that it will inspire you to take action and move forward and remove any barriers or excuses that may be stopping you from starting or growing your business. Wherever you're at in the process, I think there's something here to help motivate and push you forward.

So let's get started!

About a year and a half ago, my wife and I found out we were going to have our first child. We didn't have a whole lot of resources but we were getting by. My wife had a full-time job at a residential treatment facility for women with drug and alcohol addictions. Overall, she enjoyed working there, but it was low pay and fairly high stress – and we wanted her to be able to stay home with our daughter if possible. We'd been living pretty frugally and were able to get by with the income from her job, which had left me free to begin gradually building up a small online business whatever extra resources we could budget.

I had a little business set up that was growing gradually but steadily – but it needed more money to scale than we had to invest so the growth was very slow. When I had started, we didn't have a baby on the way, so I figured scaling very slowly was okay – I had plenty of time. Suddenly, with a baby on the way, I had 9 months until our expenses were going to go up and even if my wife kept her job we wouldn't be able to get by on just her income. That wasn't going to be enough time to get this very slowly scaling business model I'd been working on up to the necessary size to support us.

We decided it was time to look for something that could scale faster. We didn't need 7 figures, but even $1-2000 a month in profit would be enough for our little family to scrape by.

After digging around for a while, I came up with an idea for a service that I saw a decent amount of demand for that either wasn't being met or wasn't being met well. Again, it was something that was going to need quite a bit of money to get running at scale – actually it needed more than our annual income to get running even at a low level because I would need to buy specialized equipment. But unlike the last business venture, I had an idea of how to get the money necessary.

I spent the few months reading every resource I could find on running a successful Kickstarter project. I made a video of myself talking about the project to put on the project page. I designed a bunch of special graphics and carefully crafted text, descriptions, and calls to action for my page on Kickstarter. Set up the business, the bank accounts, went through the approval processes, went to trade shows to see the special equipment in action and try it out myself. I built up a decent following on Twitter in the months leading up to the launch, contacted blogs to write about my project, got discussions going about the idea on major forums in the industry – basically got as much buzz going as I could with less than $100 in my marketing budget.

The day finally came and my wife and I got up together in the morning, went into my office together, loaded up my Kickstarter account, stared at the computer screen as the minutes ticked by until the time came that we had scheduled to start the project. And finally with a shaking hand – I clicked the launch button and... it gave me an error! I think I ended up just having to reload the page or something to get it to work but talk about nerve-wracking.

At this point, since I already told you I don't have a lot of money, it may sound like I'm leading up to a big flop – but the project didn't flop. Not even close. The project was scheduled to last just over a month. I think a lot of people have a perception that the Kickstarter creator is just sitting around waiting while the project runs. But that's not the case – at least not for the good ones. It was a very fast paced month trying to keep up with updates and emails and back-and-forths vendors as I realized I was going to need larger orders and more varieties.

We hit our base funding goal – the minimum amount I had decided that we needed if this business was going to get off the ground – in under a week. Often after the first couple of days, activity on a Kickstarter page drops off completely – but ours only dropped partially and then our momentum actually grew throughout the campaign with a HUGE burst at the end... and when it was all said and done we ended up raising almost 4 times our initial goal.

Now all that extra cash definitely came with it's own set of expenses and commitments to deliver the end result to our customers. It made it both possible and necessary to get more expensive equipment, and have a higher amount and variety of our inventory produced. We were ecstatic at this point. This was going to be a monumental time commitment from me, but we were okay with it because it set us up spectacularly for her to be able to quit her job and take care of our child and we were going to have a successful business which would eventually allow me to hire employees to take over some of my time commitments.

The months that followed led us through many bumps and bruises with various vendors and manufacturers and service providers not living up to promises or expectations. But we put our heads down and pushed through. Discouraging as those bumps were, we knew we were blessed to have a business that was going to allow us to meet our goals and had a ton of growth potential.

Then my health began to fall apart. I'm actually still working towards a full diagnosis, but it sounds like it was a combination of new issues as well as health issues I've been living with since I was in a car wreck at the age of 14 – some of which have gotten better over time, some I've learned to cope with over time because I had to and some of which I didn't even really know I had. Because the newer issues built up gradually, I didn't notice at first. I knew I was beginning to lose productivity, but I just thought it was stress or lack of sleep (we did have a newborn sleeping in the same room with us afterall). But eventually those new issues inflamed the physical problems I had as a result of the wreck – I recognized those symptoms, but I also recognized something else. I now had health problems I'd never had to deal with before. Something about the combination problems various things in my body created a bit of a perfect storm. Suddenly I'm having severe chest pains, I can't get enough air, and even something as simple as blowing my nose leaves me dizzy and gasping for breath. I get searing headaches, severe fatigue, and I can't think clearly and my memory is fuzzy.

As I said, I don't have a full diagnosis yet, but they have told me the EKG, x-rays, etc seem to show a healthy and properly functioning heart – so the chest pain doesn't seem to be a heart issue. The current theory is that my lungs had actually been gradually losing efficiency for quite some time, which was causing my body not to get enough oxygen. The lack of oxygen explains the fatigue, headaches, and mental issues – funny what your body does when it doesn't get enough air...

I am being referred to a pulmonologist get get some more tests done and try to determine more specifically what's going on and determine the proper course of treatment or maintenance.

Sigh

Al