Truth be told - it also very nearly killed me! I had a breakdown which left me an emotional and mental wreck, as if I’d been hit by a bus (10 points if you tell me which one!)

It has taken me the better part of 15 years to recover from that, and in the meantime I tried working for others and I enjoyed it. In the end, though, I think once you have run your own company for a while, it is incredibly difficult to do anything else. It was inevitable that if I ever got well enough, that I would want to start something of my own again.

It was a long and hard journey, but I am finally better, and I am ready to start again. I am taking all the hard earned lessons into this venture, and I want to do it even more differently this time.

I promised myself that this time around, I would:

• Surround myself with people who will challenge me and expand my perspective.
• Accept the fact that I do not have all the answers
• Do things the way that we are meant to:
  • Bring in expertise we do not have
  • Have someone in the team right from the start focused on marketing
  • Technically, BDD, TDD, Agile, Lean, ““The only way to go fast is to go well””
• Focus on people first
• Focus on the journey, not the destination

One thing I realised as part of this journey is that doing things differently means that all the tools, technologies, and processes out there don’t quite fit.

With #muster, we are starting with one of the easier parts, and streamlining the developer experience. We are ending up building a lot of other things in the process, but they all take longer.

With choosing to do things in a very different way, we don’t know exactly how it’ll all pan out, but it will an interesting journey