A Start Up Life

Enough about dentists already, right? I agree. Just for closure on the subject…I got one of the teeth looked at, and it turned out to only need a crown. Then I was referred to another (read “competent”) dentist who looked at the other two and determined that only one of those needed a root canal and there was nothing wrong with the other. Now I wonder if I ever really needed the crown I had done either. So that’s that. I will never go back to Western Dental.

As predicted my life has been crazy this past year. I had to put business and this blog on hold for a while, but we’re up and running again.

Sara has been able to do more on the business front this year than I have. She now has her own voice lessons and singing performances business. She currently works part time and studies full time at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. However, she has managed to create her business and teach lessons in her “free” time. She inspired me to write an article on creating a business for the sole purpose of creating employment for yourself, which I will do in the near future. She charges $30 an hour, so that beats earning minimum wage any day.

If you want a great looking website without all the hassle of learning to code in html and css, you can follow Sara’s example. She used a standard template for her website and customized it to fit her business.

If you want to create you own website from scratch, as I did for my new business, Quantum Tutoring, it can be a great learning experience. I recommend looking the this website for html and css code and this one for some useful style sheet examples. I knew nothing about creating, hosting or uploading a website two months ago. However, with a little help, I have been able to do just that. Just find a friend who knows about web hosting, and a bit about design, and then you’ll be able to do the fun, creative part.

In addition, I thought I’d try an experiment and create my own wikipedia page to see if it draws attention to me. I’m very new at this SEO (search engine optimization) stuff, so I’ll keep you posted on what happens. You can create your own wikipedia page here. Well, that experiment failed rapidly. Apparently Wikipedia has guys checking all the articles and they determined that I was not important enough for my own page. If you think you’re more important though, go ahead and give it a try.

Here’s an update on life and the prospects for the coming year:

Last year I became the stunningly beautiful, pregnant woman poring over materials engineering textbooks that I set out to become. I made it to the end of school just in time before our son was born. The next phase is to start our businesses and begin to raise the little guy.

Sara, my sister now pregnant with twins, has started a Professional Voice Lessons & Singing Performances business in Quincy, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, I am about to launch Quantum Tutoring, a tutoring business specializing in teaching science and math to high school and college students in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois. We also intend to start a business together with the help of our husbands, but we still can’t let you in on the secret of that one just yet.

I am the only one out of school. Sara and her husband are finishing up their undergraduate degrees in Vocal Performance/Education and Literature, respectively, and my husband, Scott will start his masters in Electrical Engineering. So while those guys are finishing their education, I get to do most of the business-related work.

So what do two engineers, a literature guy and a singer know about business? Well, we know more than when we started last year. This blog will continue to document the discoveries we have made and the sources that have helped us to get this far.

See how far we’ve come:
About Us Summer 2006