I have had numerous startup ideas, half to full baked over my 25 year career, with just two I consider to be a success. All of them taught me massive lessons about myself, business, and building relationships with other people. All of this experience has gone into my invention of the API Evangelist persona, and there some hard learned lessons that dictate how I grow and scale what I do.
I do not scale anything I cannot scale by developing a new API, or putting a software as a service provider to use (which I can afford). The concept of hiring something does come into the picture from time to time, but always quickly fades. I feel this provides me with some very healthy constraints, that pushes me to really think through what scale is to API Evangelist.
I have a huge laundry list of things I would like to do, but because it has to wait until I have the time, and energy to do, much of it never gets done, and that is a good thing. If it is critical, I will do it. If I feel it will help the API community at this point in time, I will do. If I can convince someone else to do, I will. ;-) Sometimes I just wait until someone else does it, and purchase their service.
I am not saying this is an approach all companies should follow, I'm just sharing what approach works for me. My growth in site traffic, blog posts, industry guides, and revenue, has all happened slowly and steadily over time, in sync with the amount of work I do, and how much I am able to scale my own operations. This post is just a reminder for myself, to not get frustrated with my massive todo list, and scaling of API Evangelist has occurred, and it will never come as fast as I would like.
