I hate debt and I’m sure most everyone does, but for the majority of people (8 out of 10) it’s normal to have debt and be in debt most of your lives and even take it to the grave. I mean you have to have a house, a car, education and things right? And all these “things” take massive amounts of cash which most people simply do not have working a normal 9-5 day job so they take out large loans. Add a wife and kids to the picture and most people live paycheck to paycheck. A slave to debt. So what’s the answer?

The Motivation of Becoming Debt Free

Well for me the answer was living within my means and I knew I had to make more money than what a normal day job would pay if I truly wanted to be come debt free and own a house, provide for my family and not worry about money in the long term.

The way I see it is if you are tied to a fixed income then you need to become really good at saving and minimizing expenses to chip away at your debt. This is a long play for most people. The other option is to live the American dream and start your own business where your earning potential is nearly limitless.

Ever since I graduated college I made this clarification and I knew I wanted to run my own business. I was never satisfied working for someone else and I knew my time would be better spent making my life better as opposed to some company. But I had no choice, businesses just don’t start themselves and they are hard.

So after college I took a day job and I was making just enough to live. So essentially I was working to live. That year I set my goal to start a business and one day own my house, cars and things outright and not have to worry about debt. That was 18 years ago (from setting my goal) and this month, I’m happy to say, “I became 100% debt free!” And yes it does feel incredible but it was a hard fought battle.

The Journey

How did I become debt free? Well I must say it was not easy. After graduating college I took a day job at a startup in Nashville. At night I started working on a business idea I had dreamt up and it took me about a year or more to build out my first version. I was new to programming so I was also essentially teaching myself how to program at the same time.

I ended up launching a band website builder called eArtistManagement and since I lived in Nashville I knew a few people would I could get to instantly start using it. So I launched and I think the first month I got 2 or 3 signs ups at $15 per month. Needless to say I was excited. But the next month I got no signs ups. I thought I could just build something and people would flock to it. I had no idea about marketing at that time and it would take a while to learn that lesson.  Over the next 5 years or so the website chugged along and at the peak I think I was making around $1000 per month off the site and while this is not wildly successful it did prove I could make money on the internet and it afforded me some extra income.

I continued to work my day job and hone my programming skills at night on the site adding features which I thought would attract people.  At one point I decided to rebuild the site on a new platform at that time called WordPress. I thought it would be easier to add these features since WordPress had a plugin system. I spent a year porting the site over to WordPress. Launched and crickets. No more new customers and my revenues stayed about the same.

So I did what any good programmer would do, I built a new page builder for another niche without doing any research. This time I built a custom page builder for Facebook. I thought since Facebook was a social network it would be easily for people to discover my product and to get to new customers. This was around 2010.  I spent a year building this new platform on Google App Engine and learning to program in Python. I remember thinking to myself since this is going to be huge I need to be able to scale.  Again I had no clear concept of marketing, product market fit and I certainly did not need to worry about scaling.  I launched and nothing.

The Enlightenment

At this point I really didn’t know what to do next.  I was married now living in Charleston, SC and had two mortgage payments.  My wife and I had both bought property before getting married and the housing market crash. We had around a half million dollars worth of debt between our houses, cars, student loans and credit cards. I was drinking about every night and smoking around a pack of cigarettes a day.  I was not happy or healthy. I was still working a day job and thinking this can’t be the rest of my life. Also my first child was on the way and I knew I had to keep searching for a way to provide for my family and a way to achieve my goal of owning a business and being debt free.

Somehow I found a website called Micropreneur Academy. It’s tag line was something like “Where solo software developers learn to develop and market their first product“.  I thought this is perfect, while I was not the best developer in the world I knew I could build anything I could imagine. I was just missing the marketing secret sauce, I thought.

I instantly signed up and was eager to learn the marketing side so I could solve all my problems and learn why what I had built previously had failed.  I consumed as much info as I could in the Academy. Being a developer, marketing is a hard skill to learn and I’m still learning to this day.

I realized it was time for me to shut down all my other products and and use their blue print to find a new product that had an audience.

The New Beginning

Since I had learned WordPress in and out porting my band builder application to it and the WordPress theme market was coming to life during that time, I thought I could build a WordPress theme as my next product. The theme I had in mind would be geared toward SaaS companies.

In the academy I learned that you should test your idea before you actually build something. Essentially put up a coming soon page  and drive traffic to it and see how many leads  and interest you can generate. I went looking for a good coming soon plugin and could not find one. So again being a developer I built one and released it for free on WordPress.org.

A few months later, while I did have some interest in the new theme idea, it still was not generating quite the buzz I thought. But at the same time something strange had happened. My free Coming Soon Page plugin had become quite popular on WordPress.org. I think in the first couple of months the plugin had gotten over 10,000 downloads and I had people posting to the forums and emailing me for features. The WordPress plugin market was in it’s infancy at this point.

Then it hit me! This is the product. I spent about a month putting together a pro version and then released it to people who had asked for the features. September 14th, 2011 I made my first sale. Ever since then I have been making sales, learning to market and growing the business keeping my goal of becoming debt free in mind. Slowly I started chipping away at my debt.

Did I also mention that I had been working a day job this entire time as well, even after my plugin sales exceeded my day job I kept it for insurance and just incase the business went boom. I have a wife and two kids to provide for and while I could have left I wanted to see it through.

So here we are almost twenty years later and I have reached my goal. It’s an amazing feeling and even though the battle has been won I still have many more new goals and and new journeys that await.

Conclusion

I also just want to communicate that whatever it is in your life that you want or want to change,  never give up and keep on keeping on. During this journey there were times I got down and burned but I keep going. Always find the “why” to the things you do. When my kids were born it was major motivation for me to keep going and never give up and ultimately it’s family who motivate me to do the things I do.  Thanks to WordPress for being an open platform and thanks to Rob Walling and Mike Taber for building the academy and sharing their knowledge.

What to find out what’s next for me? Keep an eye out for my 2017 Year In Review and 2018 Goals Post.

 

I wanted to write this blog post mainly as an accountability tool for myself. At the beginning of the year I wrote out my goals for 2017 and just wanted to give an update on how things were going. BTW it’s crazy how half this year is already gone.

Here were the goals I listed for 2017 and an update for each one:

• Consistently work out/ jog at least 3 times a week.
  I have been doing this, back in May I did a 30 day challenge to do the 7 minute workout for that month. I completed that with only missing 2 days that month. This helped me build a habit which I have stuck to. Not every day but at 3 to 4 times a week. Plus I have been swimming mostly everyday this summer. So I’d say I’m on track with this goal!
  
• Grow business by at least 15%
  This has been a standing goal every year since I started my business. This year so far I have seen an 8.5% increase in revenue over last year. I’m happy with that but I have some things planned for the latter half of the year to try to make it into double-digit growth territory. I also switched SeedProd.com over to automatic renewals in May so hopefully I will see bigger gains by next year’s update.
• Finish becoming debt free.
  I was on track at the begging of the year to have been completely debt free by mid 2017. But then my 2000 Honda Accord gave up the ghost. So I ended up buying a new car and had a little than larger tax payment in April than I was expecting. With that said I’m still on track to meet this goal by the end of the year! 
• Strategize an investment/retirement plan and contribute more to my kids college funds.
  Even though I’m still contributing I have not sat down to figure out a long-term plan and projection. This has been deferred until I finish paying of they little but I have left on my mortgage.
• Never stop learning.
  I bought a Kindle early this year and have been reading like crazy, in fact I rarely watch TV any more. I have been reading mostly personal and business development stuff. I also love the “Send to Kindle” chrome browser extension. So instead of breaking my concentration during the day when I see an article come across I want to read, I send it to my Kindle so I can read before I goto bed.
• Focus on learning Marketing better
  I’m currently reading and learning everything I can about email marketing. I think this is a marketing channel I’m really not taking advantage of. I just finished reading “Email Marketing Demystified” by Matthew Paulson who was one of the speakers I saw at Microconf this year. I loved the book and I’m implementing the techniques I learned in it. 
• Review goals monthly and writing more about my experience on this blog.
  I have been review my goals each month but not writing about it. Right now I’m planning on doing a 30 day blogging challenge to build this habit to rectify this. I think communication and self brand are key for entrepreneurs. So I need to build that skill.

OK so that’s it, so far I’m pretty happy with my progress. To keep up my momentum I’m going to start doing monthly challenges every month to help me improve on the areas of my life and business that I want.  So subscribe and keep up with my progress. I’ll be announcing my July challenge which I have already started later this week.

2016 has been another great year for me personally and for my business. I feel very blessed for everything I have and I still get excited and motivated about what’s to come. Ever since I started my business back in 2011 the main focus has to become financially independent of any debt. Including a house payment. This summer if everything goes as planned I will have achieved that dream of being 100% debt free!

Personal Life

Aside from being debt free, part of the reason I wanted to start a business was to have more time with my family and enjoy seeing my kids grow up. 2016 I thought would be the year I would quit my day job to have more time but as I approached my goal of becoming debt free I wanted to keep my income stream as high as possible to complete my goal as fast as possible. Other goals I had this year were to read and write more. I signed up for a service called Blinkist which basically breaks down books into 15 – 20 minutes reads. I love this service. I usually read around 3 titles a week. Also in the second half of 2016 I gave up social media for a short time to try to better my writing skills. I would say it worked. Every time I went to go waste time on social media I wrote instead. I was more productive at writing in those 30 days as I was the whole rest of the year. While I back on social media I now only check it a few times a day.

As with most everyone else I had the goal of becoming more fit and making better food choices. I had a big problem with staying consistent with this in 2016. In 2017 I plan to do a 30 day challenge to form a habit in both areas.

Business

My business grew 6% from the previous year and it has grown 132% from 2012. I think I found a way to break through a revenue plateau I have been fighting the last couple of years. If things go as predicted I should see a 15+% increase this year. I still remain a solo entrepreneur and I still have a day job. I don’t plan to change this in the immediate future but will review this every 3 months.

This year I did a major revamp of my flagship plugin, Coming Soon Page Pro, and made my own version of the WordPress customize to make edits in the plugin. I thinks it my best version of the plugin by a long shot and very proud of the work and performance of it. I also released a few other small plugins in an effort to increase my average revenue per user. This seems to be working. More experimenting in 2017.

I also released a platform independent Coming Soon Page builder which you can find at https://comingsoonpage.com This has for the most part has been a failure. With a WordPress product there a clearly defined marketing channels. When you venture outside this ecosystem they channels are more blurred and I’m not interested in doing paid ads at the movement. So for now I have focused that site to be freemium with the hope of organic growth, but it won’t be a focus this year.

2017 Goals

OK, so I’m going to change it up this year. While I am going to set yearly goals they will be generic. And to be honest most people all have the same yearly goals. To gain more wealth, become more fit, eat better, and in general become a better person, right.

This year I’m going to set more defined monthly goals and write about them each month in an effort to better achieve my yearly goals. This will also help me write more and find my voice which is a goal.

Here are my generic 2017 Goals:

• Consistently work out/ jog at least 3 times a week.
• Grow business by at least 15%
• Finish becoming debt free.
• Strategize a investment/retirement plan.
• Contribute more to my kids college funds.
• Never stop learning.
• Focus on learning Marketing better
• Review goals monthly and writing more about my experience on this blog.

January 2017 Goals

• Personal
• Start working doing 7 minute workout app in preparation for a Feb 30 challenge.
• Eat a salad for lunch at least once per week.
• Start monthly blogging on johnturner.blog
• Business
• Switch billing for SeedProd from manual to automated renewing.
• Start crazy heatmap data collecting on SeedProd.com in prep for Feb A/B testing.
• Release Form Add On for Coming Soon Pro
• Implement Unsplash search API in plugin  and experiment with feature gating this in pricing plans
• Start weekly blogging on SeedProd.com

2014 was another successful year. There were some goals I accomplished but also some I failed at as well. Over all a blessed and great year.

Professional Life

Revenue from my Coming Soon Plugin for WordPress  grew by around 10%. I had intended on releasing another major plugin in 2014 but the rebuild of my Coming Soon plugin took a bit longer than I had thought. My goal was to 2x my revenue. Unfortunately I missed it but the important thing is I know why.  I focused this year more on developing than marketing and the numbers show.

One of my other goals was to release https://www.sellwp.co a SaaS for selling WordPress theme and plugins. I spent the first quarter getting this product ready. I released it in limited beta and got lots of awesome feedback. However I quickly realized this would be a slow revenue ramp. I decided to halt the product to the public. My plugins were making more money and it didn’t make sense for me to switch gears to a slow ramp SaaS since I still work a day job and have limited time.  I still think this is a viable product however. I get weekly request wanting to know when it will be ready.

2014 was also going to be the year I quit my day job. Well I’m still work a day job…What happened? We had another baby. My wife and I were blessed with my son in September of this year and I took 3 months off to be with him. During that time I evaluated whether I should quit my day job and or not and if it felt right. I decided that I wanted to get my other plugin out the door to see if I could replicate my current success. I wanted to reassure myself I was not a one hit wonder. Plus I want more runway with another child.

I attended two conferences this year. Pressnomics (WordPress Business Conference) and Microconf ( Self Funded StartUp Conference). I was honored to present an attendee talk this year at Microconf.

Both of these are A+ conferences and I can’t stress how much networking has to do with your success.

One goal I badly missed was blogging more. I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve created a blog post. This is going to be one of my main goals for 2015.

Personal Life

This year was the first year in my family’s new home.

I welcomed the birth of my son Jake Dylan Turner.

We’re putting a pool Clark!

My daughter is learning to ride a bike.

Also I started jogging this year which was one of my goals from last year. I jogged consistently up until my son was born. I have been slacking a bit but plan to make it part of my routine again in the new year.

Goals for 2015

In no particular order here are my goal for the new year.

• Blog more, I plan to post on this blog my experiments for obtaining my financial goals. Plus I plan to do more content marketing on https://www.seedprod.com
• I want to 2x my revenue either by creating a new plugin, growing my current user base or a combo. I have a new sister plugin planned for release in January 2015
• Raise conversion rate over 4%. Right now my conversion rate is the lower 3’s. I plan to constantly be running A/B test on my site to raise conversions.
• Hire someone to handle my support / dev or both. While I want to stay small, I do want to have a back up so I can freely get away from the business here and there.
• Start working out, using this app. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/for-a-7-minute-workout-download-our-new-app/ I was good about running this year now to add some strength.
• Spend more time with my kids. As I was setting out presents for my kids at 3 am on Christmas morn it really occurred to me this is a special time and I really want to make the most of it.
• Stop and smell the roses. I want to enjoy life more and not take any moment for granted. I work hard and sometime get caught up in it all. I want to start taking every Sunday to disconnect from it all and spend time with family or friends.

So that’s it. I’m truly blessed and grateful for everything 2014 has given me and my family.

Here’s to an awesome, healthy and prosperous 2015.

Cheers!

 

 

2013 was an incredibly busy and awesome year in my personal and professional life. I accomplished most of what I set out to do this year but I have a few goals that will carry over.

Personal Life

We sold our house in April and lived in my father-in-laws river house for 8 month while my family and I searched for a new house. Did I mention I had no internet for 8 months. I used my cell connection the entire time to run my business. To say that was challenging is an understatement. We finally found a house in late September, remodeled it in late October  and November and moved in December. We got settled in just in time for Christmas. The whole process of moving was extremely time consuming and really dominated most of my time and thoughts in 2013. I ‘m super glad to finally be settled and don’t plan to move again for a long time!

Other notable moments include: My daughter turned 3 and is really becoming quite the princess 🙂 We made 2 trips to Disney World this summer. My wife and I  celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary.  Overall we have been extremely fortunate in 2013 and I am so grateful for that.

Professional Life

One of my goals for 2013 was to quite my day  job. While my business has enough income to do this I needed to have my day job to get a loan and make the process of buying a house go smoothly. So I worked a day job and on my business at night this year. For 2014 I do plan to accomplish this goal once I get my reserves built back up.

I 2x my business, SeedProd, income from 5 figures in 2012 to 6 figures in 2013. I attended Pressnomics in Arizona. And I started the planning of a WordCamp in Charleston for 2014. I didn’t get to grow my business as much as I’d like in 2013 since I was working a day job and moving but I have some high expectation for myself in 2014.

Goals for 2014

I really want to focus on my business this year and quit my day job.

In no particular order here are my goals:

• Blog more – I’ve signed up for Chris Brogan’s Blogging Masters Class and hope to learn to write better. It will boost my credibility and have SEO benefits.
• Launch SellWP.com – This is a platform for selling WordPress products that I originally built for myself. I rebuilt over the last year so other could use it.
• Market more and hire a VA and eventually a developer for SeedProd. – I want to start delegating out more of the day-to-day task of the business so I can focus on growing it.
• Take the Google Analytics University class. – A key part of growing your business is to be able to measure what you do and make decisions based on that info.
• Release 2 more major plugins and try a plugin that uses the add-on revenue model.
• Release smaller plugins that generate at least $3000 per month in rev with little to no support.
• Over I’d like to generate an average of $1000 dollars a day in revenue.
• On a personal note I need to become healthier.  I need to eat better and exercise more, just like everyone else right 🙂 I plan to start slow by just taking a walk every night with the family to build the habit. The goal is at least 30 minutes per day.
• Finally quit the day job. I have a few things left to pay off and settle up on but I plan to quit my day job by September if every thing goes as planned.
• Start a podcast to discuss bootstrapping a business and help other do the same.

So that’s it! 2013 in a nutshell and my goals for 2014.

Here’s to an awesome New Year and I  hope this is the best for you so far as well!