How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 12

Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag.

When we left off in the Year 11 post, I had gone through a ton of dramatic changes: divorce, moving to the US then to Mexico then to Vegas, and started grinding through my last year of live training classes, aiming to finish in October 2022.

This post covers year 12 of the company, and I’m actually gonna stretch the dates out a little: May 2022 to December 2023.

I came out as pansexual.

At the start of Year 12, In May 2022, I published this blog post about my sexuality. After the divorce, I was dating a few people, and I figured it was going to come up sooner or later. People would see something in my Instagram feed and raise their eyebrows, so might as well talk about it publicly first.

The US political environment was (and still is) rough on non-binary and transgender folks, so part of the reasoning behind my post was to tell non-binary, trans, and pansexual folks, “Hey, I’m here with you, and I’m out, so if you need anything, holler.” I knew I’d get some negative feedback, but I was fine with that because I’ve got thick skin, and I’m at a fairly mature part of my career. If I lost, say, 25% of my consulting and training business due to my politics, I was okay with that.

I did indeed get some negative feedback, but honestly, it was less than I expected. I didn’t keep exact count, but I’d guess the hate count was in the dozens, not in the hundreds. I was pretty happy with that. I guessed that it might decrease the number of potential consulting & training clients, and I was curious to see what the effect would be.

That didn’t appear to impact sales.

I track the number of consulting leads that I get, and the 12 months before & after that announcement were almost identical. Consulting leads don’t necessarily read my blog that closely, though, so perhaps they weren’t aware. Training customers do, though.

Our 2022 Black Friday training sale had a similar kick-ass year to 2021, bringing in about $1.5M. That was pretty remarkable given that I stopped selling live classes. I’d actually expected revenue to go down, even without the pansexuality thing, because I was only selling recorded training classes & online services.

A good chunk of the sales were a “lifetime” option where you could pay about 2 years of subscription costs, and get access to the recorded training permanently. On the plus side, that increased the average transaction price – but on the down side, that would be the last revenue I’d get from those customers. They’d never have to pay again.

I relaxed a lot and worked little after Nov 2022.

After the PASS Summit in Seattle, I was no longer teaching live training classes, so my calendar had a lot of flexibility. I had a Vegas house that made entertaining easy, so we entertained a lot of local friends and out-of-town visitors. Yves and I went on trips to NYC, Chicago, Colorado, Napa, and Palm Springs.

I didn’t work much.

Looking back, I was still in the retirement frame of mind. When I’d moved down to Cabo, I had decided to coast to retirement there. I was going to continue to record training classes, but live an inexpensive, carefree life on the beach, coasting to a stop, leveraging my SQL Server knowledge as long as necessary. I’d even said to several people, “I don’t mind being the last old DBA in the corner who still makes a living on SQL Server.”

When I decided to come back to the US, I kept trying to shift my frame of mind out of Neutral, and into Drive, but I just couldn’t get it to happen.

I would get up every morning, make a big cup of coffee, and excitedly sit down at the computer. I’d rip through emails, and then voraciously devour tech news. After reading about all kinds of fun tech stuff, I would look at the Microsoft-related stuff I needed to do, grit my teeth, and try to focus and slug through it.

I had plenty of things I could do. BOU had purchased Joe Obbish’s columnstore training course, and I was trying to edit it into my style of training material and sell it as Mastering Columnstore Indexes. I had started (and never finished) a course on Fundamentals of Stored Procedures and Triggers.

But every time I tried to focus and slug through a day, I just felt totally demotivated. I felt like I’d done everything I really wanted to do with SQL Server, and the SQL Server-based products in Azure (Azure SQL DB, Managed Instances, and the like) weren’t going in a direction that made sense to me. I’d lost faith in that particular part of the Microsoft data platform. SQL Server 2022 wasn’t even ready 6 months after it was released.

(I gotta be careful when I write that. I loved the Microsoft data platform overall because I thought Microsoft was making as many smart moves as they could, given their size. I particularly loved Microsoft’s acquisition of Citus, and their releases of Azure Database for PostgreSQL and MySQL, because it showed that they were covering as many risks as they could. That was awesome. The SQL Server based products, though, just seemed like they were stuck in a rut, going backwards.)

I thought I was burned out. I was wrong.

Coming off of my rough Year 11, I wanted to let myself spend as much time on self-care as I needed in order to get back to a positive mental space. I interpreted my negative work feelings as burnout, and I was so sure that I was right that I didn’t see a therapist. I should have.

My chill 2023 had effects down the road. Because I didn’t release any new training classes in 2023, and because I’d offered lifetime packages in Black Friday 2022, my Black Friday 2023 sales dropped by about 50%! Leading up to the sale, I knew revenue was going to drop, but I was at peace with it because I was trying to take care of myself. All through 2023, I kept expecting that Any Day Now™, I’d get excited about Microsoft SQL Server based products again.

Looking back now in 2024, I was wrong.

I wasn’t burned out overall – I was just mentally done with those products, and at a point where I should move on. I’d made similar mistakes with jobs in the past, staying at them longer than I should have, thinking things would get better. It just hadn’t occurred to me that building training material for Microsoft SQL Server was essentially a job, and it was time for me to find a new job.

The moment that finally made me take the leap was when I took my How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine presentation and started rewriting it for Postgres. I was so chock full of excitement that I knew what my next job was going to be.

I started SmartPostgres.com.

I didn’t want to close BrentOzar.com by any means, but I wanted a new place with content exclusively focused on Postgres. My target reader was someone learning Postgres performance optimization tasks for the first time, with no context.

So at the very end of December 2023, I started SmartPostgres.com. That’s why I used a wider date range for this blog post, covering my life & business up til that moment. Year 13’s post will line up with the calendar year of 2024, which will be the story of SmartPostgres, for sure.

At the end of 2023, SmartPostgres was just a blog & mailing list (with zero subscribers) focused on performance tuning Postgres. My goal for 2024 was to do a speed run of the same kinds of things that made BrentOzar.com successful.

I wasn’t done with SQL Server!

I believed then (and still believe) that Microsoft SQL Server (and its Azure equivalents) is a brilliant database product. It’s powerful and useful. It’s great for a lot of enterprise use cases. If you’ve got an application with that back end, that’s great! I don’t think you should even consider switching it. The amount of work involved is huge. Stay your course. I’ll be glad to continue to sell you training material on it, and consult with you when you’re hitting a performance wall.

I still intended to write a ton of stuff at BrentOzar.com in 2024, but I expected a lot of it to have some Postgres-for-SQL-Server vibes to it. For example, I had a huge list of Postgres lessons I’d learned over time, and for every one of them, I wanted to write 2 blog posts:

• A SmartPostgres.com blog post for the Postgres developer who was learning it for the first time
• A BrentOzar.com blog post for the SQL Server user who already knew how Microsoft approached the problem, and who would enjoy reading about how Postgres approached the problem differently

Also, as part of building SmartPostgres.com, I’d decided to write weekly SQL exercises for readers to write and rewrite queries for the Stack Overflow database. In order to maximize the return on my time investment, I decided to post those query challenges on both SmartPostgres.com and BrentOzar.com at the same time, and cross-link them so people could see how the problems were solved differently on the two different database platforms.

I was excited because that new approach would keep me productive during 2024, in a way that I’d be proud of, and in a way that would continue to grow my revenue streams for the future. I still had dreams of building a house with a bigger garage, and acquiring a few more bucket list cars, hahaha. I’d love a Porsche 917 replica.