An introduction to FightPaper Pt 1 - Why start another new business?

Several years ago, wndr, my creative services company, had seem to hit a stride; we were winning significant awards for national clients, business came in easily, and I was happy to think at the time that I'd gotten through the "hard part" (a naive assumption, I know now). I remember clearly a thought I had at that time, which was basically "well, I'll never do that again," referring to starting a business from scratch.

Years later, I am doing it again. Why? 2 main reasons:

1) Scaling

The primary reason is that wndr, as a services business, is not scalable in the way I truly desire. A services business grows horizontally; your inventory, your product that you sell, is hours. Adding revenue means adding available hours to sell, which means either working more or adding staff. Neither of these are particularly appealing to me. A small staff is OK; having growth hinge adding people is not my idea of an attractive business model. A digital product or service, however, scales much more vertically; the incremental cost difference between serving a single customer and tens of thousands is not a significant barrier.

2) Passion, or Lack Thereof

A secondary reason is that I don't have the same passion for design and advertising as I once did, at least not the hands-on, details part. The briefly-lived television series "The Pitch" pretty much killed any delusions I ever had about advertising being sexy. I've also learned that my greatest strength is the intangible, yet monumentally important, ability to "get shit done."

FightPaper presents a unique opportunity to combine lots of interesting topics – sports, causes, athletes, money, sponsors – into a SaaS ("Software as a Service") business model that my wife and I can work on together. A platform that allows others to make money makes it exciting; integrating causes as we have makes it worthwhile.

Next post: I'll answer the question: "So, what is FightPaper exactly?"