Feeling like a fraud

Plus Alfred and fam

I begun writing The Leap to help anyone who’s looking for a new start, and thought that by sharing what I’ve learned in retirement from Rugby could be useful.

But after some more thought, I’m going to stop as I feel like a fraud giving advice about career transitions while I’m still deep in the midst of mine.

The main message anyway was that in order to cope with the stress of having to start again, I’ve had to make my health my top priority, otherwise I fall into a heap and stop making progress.

And while I’m still not certain that prioritising my life in this way is going to work, things are starting to look good, and I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch.

Also, I only started writing as an attempt to improve my communication, after realising my poor communicating was the root cause of all Alfred’s fuck ups.

But I feel I’ve made good progress there, and it’s now time to focus on improving other areas like time management.

And with that being said, I’m going reduce how often I blog, and when I do it will mostly be about how I’m going with Alfred, and how Jen (my wife) is going with fam.

In my first blog, I wrote about how my mission in life is to build tools that create a happier and healthier planet, and how I believe the two main problems we need to solve in order to achieve that are:

1. Chronically low personal energy levels caused by modern lifestyles, and the impact it has on mental health and self-belief.

2. A disconnect from our true support networks, caused partially by social media.

Alfred and fam are built to combat these issues, and I’m proud to announce that Jen has been accepted into a mentoring program by venture capital fund Blackbird for her work with fam.

fam is a free photo and video sharing app for families, and we started building it in late 2019, after family members with Android phones couldn’t join the Apple photo album of our girls.

We’d been posting photos of our girls there because we didn’t feel comfortable sharing them on public platforms, and looking back, the first version of fam was so embarrassingly ugly.

But 2 years later, it’s looking good and we have nearly 7000 users and families from all over the world using fam to share their everyday moments with the ones who matter.

Trying to get Alfred sustainable has been so tough, and sometimes the doubt from trying to get 2 start ups going at the same time becomes overwhelming.

But even though the odds suggest we’ll probably fail, we believe the problems we’re trying to solve are too important for us not have a crack at, and to see if our solutions can help more people than they currently do.

I feel like a nut job writing all this, but to hell with it, and we’d love to hear from you if you’ve got any questions or feedback from using either.

Thanks for reading.