After I sold my last company, I felt like my identity was overly tied to one product. So, I decided to build a company separate from the products, so that over time the products can change but I have a through line company brand.
When I started this comapny, I didn't have a product - but I had the holding company (Contraption Company). My first product was Postcard, but now I spend most of my time building Booklet. As the shift in products has happened, my professional email address has been the same, the terms of service have been shared between services, and I have a unified blog + announcements email list. This also means I can launch lightweight experiments such as "FRCTNL", and even if it's not commercially successful - I benefit from compounding returns in the brand and mailing list.
I'm self employed in NYC and its a dream of mine to travel/work in Japan. I've sort of written the idea off that unless I can speak the language its going to be too difficult. Curious if you agree or not.
I speak zero Japanese. I've met a lot of immigrants here in the last couple of weeks, and it seems that you can get to a working level of Japaneses within a couple of months. After that, it seems that working for a Japanese company IRL is the biggest determinant of becoming fluent.
I've heard that the path from temporary visa to a more permanent one is somewhat straightforward for a self-employed person if you're able to show moderate revenue from Japanese clients.
When I started this comapny, I didn't have a product - but I had the holding company (Contraption Company). My first product was Postcard, but now I spend most of my time building Booklet. As the shift in products has happened, my professional email address has been the same, the terms of service have been shared between services, and I have a unified blog + announcements email list. This also means I can launch lightweight experiments such as "FRCTNL", and even if it's not commercially successful - I benefit from compounding returns in the brand and mailing list.