We’ve already discussed the fact that we’re not looking for angel investment or venture capital. We have nothing against outside investment and may be interested in it someday down the road for specific projects, but our priority is independence. This means slower growth, and fewer resources. But we believe constraints force creativity, so we’re feeling plenty creative these days. :)

The fact is though, we had to start with some cash in the bank just to pay the rent. For the last several years I’ve written a food blog that has earned a small trickle of cash from AdSense, licensing of food photography, and t-shirt sales. One day I looked in my PayPal account and found several thousand dollars. Not a huge amount but enough to cover some initial rent, isp, and legal fees. So basically, my food blog provided the seed money for Jackson Fish Market.

If you’re not going to take outside investment, and you plan on having some costs you’ve basically got two choices. Take the money out of your pocket (as we basically did with the blog money) or work for it. While the seed money was good, we didn’t want to put the money in ourselves. Mostly because we felt that having to earn money from the start would keep us more honest about the reality of our business.

We’re not looking to create a consultancy, but contracting with customers and partners doing the kind of thing that we want to do in the long term is not only a good way to make money in the early days, but a good way to practice your core skillset and build your infrastructure. And so today we got our first check for the work we’re doing on our first gig. And frankly, it was a pretty cool feeling. Hopefully there’s a decent amount of additional well-earned money coming our way down the road.