It's challenging times right now. Hard, shape-shifting, and yet interesting. We had to alter habits, discover new skills like cooking, and realise that a small runner has always lived inside us. For the last several weeks, I've been curiously watching how my social feeds filled up with people doing exercises, playing games, sharing funny videos and reading every article about coronavirus out where. I've been thinking if I should join the movement but stopped myself shortly several times before jumping the wagon. It didn't feel like being me.

At the same time, I felt the tickling at the points of my fingers - there was something I had to share. But what? And why??? What can I say that may be useful for me and at least entertaining for others?

There is a thing - I have a microbusiness, a workshop management platform for training businesses. I've been working in it for almost four years now, and it's my primary source of income. Last December Max, my business partner, joined the party and we've moving it forward together now.

The coronavirus struck training industry hard. Not as hard as airlines or hotels, but significantly nevertheless. In March the number of cancelled workshops due to COVID-19 exceeded the number of cancellations by other reasons combined. Luckily, our company wasn't affected as much as I was afraid. The subscription nature of our business model helped, plus some of our clients actually flourished and saw 5x in growth.

It doesn't mean that it was easy for us. It's the middle of April, and we found ourselves in a fascinating situation. From a financial point of view, we're alright. Not great, but good enough even to report a small growth. We're running multiple experiments, yet there is no sense that we're moving in the right direction. I feel like losing it and that we're not using opportunities brought by the crisis.

What should we do? How should we proceed forward? How could we come out of the crisis with a much stronger product and the business which is x times better than it was before the crisis?

My head is exploding with questions and ideas, and there is a strong need for focus. Ah, focus. It's the most important business word right now for me. How to get it? I found that writing helps me to structure thoughts, improves my analysis and, finally, give me much needed freaking focus.

So I decided that I'm going to share regularly how our small business deal with challenges, run experiments and find a way to the top. I will be open and blunt to myself. It sure will be challenging and embarrassing from time to time. Yet I'm excited. I've had this idea in the back of my head for a while but didn't have guts to begin.

I call this topic Founder's Banter. I'm afraid there will be no banter in the beginning, but hell, I like the name.

My target is to publish 2-3 times per week as there is a lot to share. We'll see how my desired schedule will work out :D. Let's rock!