Having a Business is like Having a Baby

An article by Ryan    No Comments

Though I haven’t had one yet, I can imagine growing a business is very similar to raising a child. Not so much in the physical pain experienced by the mother at birth, but in the sense of the commitment and dedication required to grow and nurture both. There an initial excitement when they’re brand new. You find yourself staring at it saying to yourself, “wow, I made that!” You devote countless, often thankless hours in the hopes you are helping them grow up right. You take pictures when they reach milestones. You worry about other people hurting them. You do your best to protect them. When they fail, you feel like you failed. All the while, you constantly are wondering if you’re doing this right.

This morning (well actually yesterday morning, it’s past 12 o’clock) around 3:45 AM I woke up and went to my computer. I don’t know why I did, I just had a feeling that something was wrong. There was a blinking IM box from Seeso in Chicago, one of our mods for UU. We had been hit hard with spam and he was trying to delete them all but he didn’t have access to some sections. We began working together, banning all the accounts that he had identified. As I banned, more registered and posted spam posts. We kept deleting more spam posts, the other mods began to chip in. I eventually upgraded the software in hopes that that would be the fix, it slowed them down, but they still were registering and posting spam all the way into the early evening. It was the largest, and worst spammer attack we’d ever experienced to date. I banned well over 50 accounts in one day.

Sure I was pissed. I was pissed at those spammers for trying to ruin the experience of the UU forum members. But never for even one second did I ever think to myself, “Man I don’t want to be doing this.” At 3:50 am all I could think about was taking care of the members and making sure they didn’t notice too much of the spam.  It was like noisy neighbors waking up a baby and the baby starts crying in the middle of the night. You’re not pissed at the baby, you’re pissed at the noisy neighbors.

I’m actually very blessed in the fact that UU has grown the way it has. I don’t consider any of the people on the site a customer. To me, they’re all family, which makes it quite difficult to explain to people who run traditional businesses. I try my best to really get to know as many of them as possible. I care about what they’re going through, and I often find myself just checking up on them on myspace or facebook, just to make sure they’re doing ok if I haven’t seen them on the site for a while. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter though if other people get it or not. People who are a part of UU get it. There is really the feeling that we’re all in this together and we’re growing this ukulele movement as one. I’m lucky, instead of just me and my partners doing it alone, it’s more like a village raising this child. And this Baby is going to grow up to be HUGE.