Fork That! I'll do it!

I gotta start somewhere right? So this is it. This is the place where you will be reading all about what works/worked and also, and maybe more importantly what didn't work. But first things first:

Who the ... am I and why should you read about my stuff?

I am Alex Hammerschmied, born and grown up in the lovely town of Vienna in a time where you had a 50% chance of stepping into dogsh#t when stepping down from the pavement between two parking cars to crossing the street. Dammit that stuff stinks on your soles.

So yeah, I turned 40 this year (2024) and I am the seventh(!!!) year living in Cyprus now. My wife and I decided both to walk into the sunshine after we suffered burnout and to build something new.

It kinda worked so far which is great. We live in a lovely house in the mediterranean, have a company which runs a Marketing Automation Agency (automatethis.pro), a SaaS (hartmut.io) and we are building a few sideprojects and have some ecommerce partnerships.

So yeah. I know definitely how to break up with stuff, burn everything and start again.

But wait, what? Ok from the beginning:

I dropped out of school when i finished 9th grade and started and finished a 3 year apprenticeship as tiler and stove-fitter (traditional Austrian fireplaces). After that I needed to do civil service for 12 months and during that time, I saw how little work people did who work in offices (seriously - this was just mindblowing). So I concluded I need to get away from building fireplaces with my bare hands and breath dust all day long to something more fun and easier to do.

I ended up being unemployed for around 6 months, had little dayjobs here and there eventually found a job in a Motocycle store. This was a-m-a-z-i-n-g! I loved doing that. Hanging out with cool people (back then I thought it was cool), talking about bikes the whole day and occasionally smoking pot was my life.

But it got boring. After two years I started to realize, this won't change much. Internet was not there yet (2006/7/8) and ecommerce was what everybody was loughing about. So I needed to find something more "meaningful": The only thing I came up with was to become an Architect. That's what I did. I finished school and went to Technical University Vienna to become an Architect.

Oh my. After a few years of learning and studying I started working in an architicural Firm (ArchitekturConsult) and did what others did after they successfully graduated their masters degree. I got payed more, because I know a lot from my earlier experience and proved myself useful for the true problems in the building industry. I stayed there and worked full-time until we finished Fischapark Shoppingcenter. I was 6 years involved in the project. But the problem was, I had no urge to finish my masters degree anymore. University and all the lectures there seemed so stupid and far off from reality for me. So I did what I did a few times already: I quit. And my carreer became once again boring and seemed capped. Architects in Austria who have years of experience get paid around 4000€ gross. That's rediculus. So I decided to change my path again.

Ok. You said you had burnout before

Yes. This happened in the beginning of 2014. My father died by the end of 2013 and I was working like crazy at the Shoppingcenter project when it hit me: I was walking on the street when I suddenly lost my hearing. I just thought like "What the fork?" What's happening? I went home to my wife (girlfriend back then), started crying and thought all sorts of things like, will I ever hear again and what is life doing to me? But I wasn't totally deaf. I could hear but very little. It felt like a was beneath a very thick blanket. Totally surreal. And I felt fit with everything else. So yeah, she took me to the doctor and they told me I should go to hospital for a few days to take some tests.

I brought my laptop. Of course. On the third day I sat in bed working on a private project when the psychologist stepped in and asked if I had some time to talk about me and my feelings.

That was the first time I realised that I had a severe problem being a workaholic.

On top of being a workaholic I also realised that I am constantly working on stuff that I don't really care about. Which depressed me in return.

Long story short, I realised in the upcoming months that I wanted to change my life. This is where stuff started to getting interesting.

We need to wrap this up now

From that moment on (2014) I read as much as I could find about onlinebusiness, SEO, Webdesign, and so on. Of course there was not as much stuff available then today, but even back then I felt I was late to the race. Interestingly I think today, that I was still early :)

I built my first portfolio page in 2012 to get my initial job at ArchitekturConsult and realised two years later that building websites would be my stepping stone out of the "normal" path into something more, something bigger: a local-independent lifestyle.

On this blog I tell you everything I learned, did, what worked and what didn't work. I take you on the journey to find the few gold nuggets in the very noisy world of doing something online and building a life around that.

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