Incremental Milestones for Happy Acorn Ventures
As I approach the end of March (as I write this), I am looking at the growth of Happy Acorn Ventures -- the small business I started this year. Fortunately, the 2025 Goals make a nice stepladder, so I thought, before I got into how I'm performing against my goals, it might be useful to catalog the progression of the business--sort of like milestones on a Kickstarter.
Tier 1: 10 + 50 #
At the first tier, the company pays the family 60 dollars a month, in two different categories: 10 for bills, 50 for adventures. This allows us to begin to live off the business in both senses of the word.
Tier 2: + 75 #
The next tier adds 75 dollars to bills, for a total of 85 dollars a month. This represents my wife's minimally impactful income (MII) of having Happy Acorn Ventures cover one of our utilities. This makes sense because of its proximity to actual living than our iCloud account, which I guess we could technically live without.
Tier 3: + 300 #
This probably deserves an intermediary step. This introduces a third bucket as well: the living bucket, or the bucket we make discretionary purchases out of. We've lived on the same discretionary (gas, groceries, hygiene) budget since I was a middle school math teacher, despite all the cost increases in our lives since then, like two kids going through diapers and additional food.
Tier 4: Revenue target of 500 / wk #
The final tier represents a significant growth in need from 300 a month. This target is also more internal to Happy Acorn Ventures than the rest, because it's not about what we're taking out of Happy Acorn Ventures, but what it is taking in. This disparity hints that there's an opportunity for revision.
Qualified Goals #
There are market sectors I'd really like to get into as well. I don't want to focus only on revenue and income with Happy Acorn Ventures--it started as an opportunity to work in a completely different space than tech (namely boardgames), and I'm looking forward to weighing the performance of different income streams and effort streams as well.