Episode Details

Now it's time to get a bit personal.

Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side.

This episode continues down the road of discussing the personal side.

The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, head over to http://brandingblitz.com/4/

Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand.

This is episode 4 – a continuation of episode 3 where I started discussing some of the aspects of my personal life which are going to significantly impact how this brand building story plays out.

If you haven't listened to episode 3 yet, that might help some things make more sense in this episode. But just for a quick refresher summary: I started the story about a year and a half ago when we found out we were going to have a baby. The business I'd been working on wasn't growing fast enough, so I needed something else. After a ton of research and some shoestring marketing, I launched a Kickstarter project and blew away my expectations.

I had a nice little sand castle staying just barely out of reach of the waves, when a big one came in and flattened the whole thing. My health completely fell apart. My lungs aren't functioning properly which kind of causes a cascade of other issues. I've got severe fatigue, my brain partially shuts down at times causing foggy thinking and memory issues. I get short of breath really easily and often find myself getting dizzy for no reason. I've listened to the recordings of the first couple of episodes of this podcast and thought to myself, “Wow... I don't come across as very high energy – I sound tired and out of breath at times.” Well, part of it is I have a pretty laid back personality – but part of it is because I actually am tired and out of breath. I'm also scripting these episodes out ahead of time – I don't plan to always do that, but with the mental issues I've been having, I don't think I could talk for 15 minutes without just getting completely lost. It's worked out much better to sit down and write for a couple minutes at a time throughout the day.

Even that would have been pretty difficult a couple of weeks ago, but some of the meds they've got me on do seem to be helping somewhat.

With all that going on, work has come to a screeching halt on my Kickstarted business. Even this new business which is way less demanding than the old one still has to move slower than it normally would because I have to find windows of time where I feel I'm thinking clearly and have the energy required to work.

The Kickstarted business is not earning any income since I'm not working on it. There is still some money reserves in that bank account, but I also still have plenty of commitments to fulfill to my backers as well, so I don't really feel at liberty to invest that money in this venture. And the little reserves we had built up personally have been completely depleted... and actually have been for a while now. But I didn't see a way to get any more income coming i