{"id":927,"date":"2012-03-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foundersnetwork.com\/?p=927"},"modified":"2018-11-14T22:46:10","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T06:46:10","slug":"travel-your-entrepreneurial-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foundersnetwork.com\/travel-your-entrepreneurial-side\/","title":{"rendered":"Travel & Your Entrepreneurial Side"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was over 4 years in the making, but my girlfriend and I had done it.<\/strong>\u00a0We had saved $50,000, quit our jobs, sold all of our stuff and bought a 1-way ticket to Hong Kong. It was time for a career break to spend a year in Asia just traveling and enjoying life.<\/p>\n

\n
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Why was I traveling?<\/h2>\n

Many people travel to \u201cfind themselves\u201d or \u201cfigure out what they want with life\u201d. This was never my intention.<\/strong>\u00a0I thought I had it figured out already. I liked my job (enough), I liked the area that I lived in and I liked the career path I was heading down. I had worked for a large company for over 4-years. I had steadily gained responsibility and earned promotions. When I was finished traveling, I assumed I would join another company and continue down my path. How wrong I was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Entrepreneurial Bug<\/h2>\n

My entrepreneurial bug started as I researched long-term travel.<\/strong>\u00a0The research led me to people who showed there was a different way to live life. There was\u00a0Chris Guilleabeau<\/a>,\u00a0Brian Armstrong<\/a>,\u00a0Kirsty Henderson<\/a>,\u00a0Nora Dunn<\/a>\u00a0and this was just the beginning. I started exploring what it meant to be an entrepreneur and became fascinated with\u00a0Andrew Warner\u2019s Mixergy interviews<\/a>,\u00a037 Signals<\/a>,\u00a0Jason Cohen<\/a>,\u00a0Dharmesh Shah<\/a>\u00a0&\u00a0This Week in Startups<\/a>. I was hooked.<\/p>\n

My girlfriend and I were seeing new cities, meeting new people and doing a lot of fun things. I was trying to enjoy my time off, but it\u2019s funny \u2013 when you no longer have a job, a commute, chores, and obligations, you end up with a lot of free time to think. I couldn\u2019t shut my brain off.<\/p>\n

Within a couple months I had an itchy mind (yup, I just made that term up\u2026think\u00a0itchy feet<\/a>) and I started looking for problems that I could solve. I realized one of the biggest problems I could solve was one that I was experiencing every day. Figuring out what to do and how to get around in the new cities I was visiting was a huge pain!<\/p>\n

Wikitravel<\/a>\u00a0gives a nice overview, but after that it was pretty much downhill. I wanted someone to tell me what the best things in the city were and how to specifically get around. I wanted something cheap. I wanted to see the city like a local and I still wanted to do it on my own.\u00a0Thus spawned\u00a0Unanchor<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Building Unanchor<\/h2>\n

The idea was simple. Local experts from around the world would be able to write travel guides and sell them on our site. What I particularly loved about this idea was that if it took off, the writers and the community would keep most of the money. I\u2019d be helping the community of writers while making travelers\u2019 lives easier and more enjoyable. The only question was \u2018how do I build it\u2019?<\/p>\n

In high school I had built websites and in college I had taken some programming classes. Things had changed a lot since then \u2013 that was quite a few years ago. From the interviews I was listening to and the blogs I was reading, I knew the best way to start was to build it myself. So I decided to teach myself to code. I downloaded and read every page of \u201cLearning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites<\/a>\u201c. At this point we were settled down in South Korea, giving me more time to learn. Within a couple months I had built the first version. It\u00a0wasn\u2019t pretty<\/a>, but it did the trick. I started getting some interest and eventually found a partner who could help me improve it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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What Happened?<\/h2>\n

Fast forward almost a year and a half. We now have almost 100 itineraries for 75 different cities around the world. Travelers are using the itineraries and saying great things about them.<\/p>\n

While I wish I could say that Unanchor took off and it now makes enough money to support me and my wife, that is unfortunately not the case. No matter what anyone says, starting a business is hard and takes a lot of time. Unanchor has grown and I\u2019m proud of how far we\u2019ve come, but it hasn\u2019t grown fast enough. Once again I\u2019ve found myself at a cross-roads trying to figure out what\u2019s next. We\u2019ve decided to move back to the Bay Area and I\u2019m looking for a job now. I now know I want to work for a small company with a big goal. I won\u2019t give up on Unanchor, though, and I\u2019ll continue to work on it during nights and weekends.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny how things worked out. I never thought I\u2019d be the type of person to \u201cfind themselves while traveling\u201d, but that\u2019s exactly what ended up happening.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a\u00a0repost<\/a> from the\u00a0MeetPlanGo<\/a> blog hosted with permission from the author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was over 4 years in the making, but my girlfriend and I had done it.\u00a0We had saved $50,000, quit our jobs, sold all of our stuff and bought a … <\/p>\n

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