Today is the first day I’m working for my own company Kodskepp (Swedish for code ship). It feels strange but also very exciting. I’m started with a part-time setup. I’m have two days (in a regular work-week) dedicated for my own, and the other three days I work at my jobby-job.

I’ve always known and wanted to run my own company, and really, this is not my first stab at running a company, but it is the most serious attempt yet. The first company I started was an IT repair consultancy company helping friends, family and others to fix their IT stuff, yes that printer that never worked, I even helped set up a Minecraft server once. This was a really great learning experience. However, I grew tired at fixing other peoples stuff when I started learning programming and game development. 

So, during the last years of secondary school and just before starting university, I and a couple of friends started a small company to build mobile games. This was during the Flappy Bird hype and we thought if he can do it, so can we! We managed two create and release two fully functional games and even made few cents on it. Then, basically because lack of time, we decided to not continue running the company. I think this was simply the wrong time for all of us involved, everyone was so focused on their studies, our none-existing budget (students, you know) and the admin overhead just became a burden instead of fun. 

Fast forward to 2024, I’ve been working professionally as a software engineer for five years and it has fun and very rewarding. I’ve been lucky to end up in just the right environment for me to grow. 

Then, one day in the beginning of January, I was thinking to myself, what’s the next step for me? Should I apply for a new job, a new role or just continue on as is? 

Then this familiar little voice in my head said, “Isn’t it time to start that company you always wanted?”. I quickly replied, “I don’t have a good business idea”. Over the coming months, that little voice persisted and I always came back to YES, I do want to starta business! But I have no idea what to do. 

I just knew what I didn’t want to do, become a freelancer (which, financially makes a lot of sense). No, I want to build product, but what product? No idea.

I finally realised that I just need to start putting in time into this, otherwise it will never happen, the other great things in my life has not just fallen in my lap, they have been the result of hard work, over time. This is the first day of many where I try to put in the work needed to find what to build, how to build it and how to make it a successful business. 

Over the months since I decided that this is happening and that the 4th of September is my first day, I’ve actually decided on the first product that I’m going to build and try to sell, but that deserves its own post.