I recently stumbled onto the Second Startup Syndrome article by Ben Horowitz and whilst reading it I realized that I was going through exactly the same thought processes, emotions & ideas as was described in the article.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on getting my original company - radiiate - out of hibernation, since I didn’t want the brand or the initial TLC that went into the company go to waste. My biggest problem though has been to find the time to devote to what can essentially be called a startup all over again, as WooThemes was still taking up the majority of my time, whilst The Rockstar Foundation was also beginning to demand more and more of my mental energy & ideas.
So during the last 6 months I have taken shortcuts. I didn’t trust the same, bootstrapping advice & strategies that I blog about here and didn’t apply the same thinking as we did when building WooThemes so successfully.
In fact, this only recently changed when I came to the realization that I needed to be less idealistic about what I wanted for the company and almost needed to go back to square one if we wanted it to succeed.
The 6 months also didn’t get wasted, because as a team we learned a hell of a lot during this time and if we only learned one thing, it’s that there are models & ideals that we definitely won’t be exploring in future… :)