Our 10-Year Overnight Launch

What does it feel like to be pregnant for 10 years?

We’re obviously not qualified to answer that question in the traditional sense, but when it comes to carrying around an idea that refuses to go away, one that keeps growing and getting bigger, we might know a little something about it. We just gave birth to our own ninety-nine pound baby…

For the better part of a decade, we’ve been trying to figure out how to take OrangeBall’s Brand Bounce Bootcamp and make it accessible to more businesses. We knew our messaging process worked. We’d watched businesses use it to get clear on who they are, who they serve, what makes them different, and how to talk about all of it. We also knew there were thousands of businesses that could benefit from the process but would probably never hire an agency to take them through it.

Ten years ago, we tried to turn our Bootcamp into an online course. We developed content, recorded coaching videos, worked with coaches, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get this thing off the ground. We went to give birth…

Nothing happened.

The idea never went away, though. We still believed there was something there, so we kept nurturing it and holding onto it. We just hadn’t found the right way to bring it into the world, so we stayed pregnant.

Sometimes the idea arrives before the vehicle.

For years, we assumed the answer was education. If we could teach people the process we used inside Brand Bounce Bootcamp, they could work through it themselves. The problem was that eventually they still had to do the hardest part. They had to take everything they knew about their business and turn it into words. A course could teach them what a strong value proposition looked like, and give them the words and vocabulary they needed to talk about their business, but it couldn’t sit beside them and help them write.

AI changed all of that.

Suddenly, by tapping into the power of AI, we didn’t have to simply teach the process. We could build a tool that could learn about a business, walk someone through the thinking, and then help turn that thinking into actual marketing messages and content.

The idea we’d been pregnant with for a decade finally had somewhere to go.

Then we made $55.31.

We launched OrangeBall.ai in Nashville less than a month ago. After years of talking about this idea, building pieces of it, putting it away, picking it back up, and wondering what it could become, we finally put something into the world.

Our first two users signed up and started creating. Almost surprisingly, the first deposit from OrangeBall.ai hit our bank account: $55.31.

I don’t think we’ve ever had more fun making $55.

It was a ton of work. You could argue it took us 10 years to make that $55, which makes the hourly rate pretty bad, but that $55.31 represents something much bigger than revenue. Someone had used what we built, found value in it, and decided it was worth paying for. An idea that had existed in our heads, conversations, notebooks, videos, and half-finished attempts had finally birthed.

Some ideas need time.

A lot of us carry ideas like this. There’s a business we’ve thought about starting, a product we’d like to build, a book we want to write, or something else that keeps finding its way back into our thoughts. We’re pregnant with something. Sometimes we assume that because we haven’t acted on it yet, we missed our shot. Or, because we tried once and it didn’t work, the idea must not have been very good.

This experience launching OrangeBall.ai is teaching us something different. Sometimes a good idea shows up before the right way to execute it does. The timing might be wrong, or the technology might not exist yet. The business model might not make sense… right now. You might simply be missing one piece that turns an interesting idea into something people can actually use.

That doesn’t mean you should wait forever, endlessly polishing an idea that never takes its first breath. Eventually, you have to put something into the world and see what happens. Give birth to it and let it out. Let people use it, react to it, challenge it, and hopefully pay you something for it.

Your first version probably won’t be perfect, and your first deposit might only be $55.31. What we can tell you is this… There’s something incredibly satisfying about watching an idea you’ve carried for years finally start breathing on its own. Keep nurturing those ideas that refuse to leave you alone, watching for the opening that might finally make them possible. Just don’t spend your entire life pregnant with an idea that never gets the chance to breathe outside the womb.