Aaron Evans, CEO & Co-Founder at Drips says:
Wow. This might be the hardest question to answer that I’ve been asked in recent memory.
I just read the question aloud to my wife, Anny, who quickly replied: “Nothing. Relaxing? Hanging out!” – She’s half right. The truth is, it almost upsets my stomach to imagine doing anything else outside of solving big problems, working with talented people, scaling the unscalable, and building businesses.
So, my knee-jerk response is if I wasn’t building Drips, I’d almost certainly be building some other solution to some other problem. But that’s mailing an easy answer in. A much more thoughtful (much longer) answer is below.
Since I first got a taste for “making money online” as an 18-year-old “webmaster”, I was hooked. The freedom and flexibility of working online was intoxicating. The opportunity and abundance of the internet simply floored me.
In 2001, I dropped out of college. I lived all over the country, and even in Belize for some years, as the quintessential “digital nomad”. Coming and going as I pleased. Attached only to my laptop. I can count almost 30 projects and businesses I bootstrapped from nothing during that period of my life.
That lasted for some time; over a decade of complete freedom. Some great years, income-wise, and some where I was just scraping by from one project to the next.
Then I woke up one day, realized I was over 30 years old, deeply in love with the woman I was dating (my now wife), and I hadn’t built any sustaining businesses in all of that time being an entrepreneur. I had no redundancy or lasting revenue to protect our future or to build a family around.
That’s when I decided to really *build*. Focusing on sustainability over easy money.
Anny and I moved back home to Ohio from our beach front condo in Belize. I got an office, and I got very busy. Today, Drips has over 50 employees, has solid recurring revenue, and services some of the biggest brands in the country.
So, if I hadn’t decided to build something scalable and eventually exit-able, I believe I would’ve double-downed on the solopreneur life.
I can see another (much less responsible and much less stressed) version of myself who still lives in Belize with Anny making a decent living, project to project.
Doing nothing, relaxing, and hanging out.
The event will take place on September 19! You can still purchase tickets here
