I will be launching the big one at the end of this month. It's different kind of review site called Review Signal. I work full time on it (including most weekends). I've been working on this project for ~1.5 years with a few small breaks. I outsource small things like PSD slicing/coding. I work with a talented designer on the UI.
It's not sustainable in the sense it's making money now, it's made a small amount off the beta but nowhere near livable. I've got other income sources and keep expenses to a minimum. Burnt through most of my cash building this and committing full time.
Motivation: joined Affinity Lab (coworking space in DC). I have a hard time getting work done outside that space now. Why I end up there til 1am on a saturday night. It surrounds me with awesome people who understand what I am doing and we help each other constantly. I don't think I've been there a day where I haven't been helped in some small or large way and helped someone in a small or large way. It plays a large part in what keeps me going.
Validation: I had a private beta in march, the same coworking space was a great place to start getting users. I also have been reaching out to people who I think would benefit from my service and having them try it. It has worked pretty well and the feedback really helped. I built a tool to help automate this process as much as possible. Which leads into...
Automation: love it. I've built a lot of tools to reduce the amount of time I spent doing things which are repetitive or semi-repetitive. As a solo founder everything is competing for my bandwidth. There is a lot of high value, repetitive things (hustling) which I think can be automated to some degree. I've built some infrastructure to help me do that. Trying to constantly watch myself and figure out where my time is best spent is important. However, this often conflicts with motivation: doing some valuable things suck. You need to find a balance or simply will yourself through, I don't have a good solution for this, yet.
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I will be launching the big one at the end of this month. It's different kind of review site called Review Signal. I work full time on it (including most weekends). I've been working on this project for ~1.5 years with a few small breaks. I outsource small things like PSD slicing/coding. I work with a talented designer on the UI.
It's not sustainable in the sense it's making money now, it's made a small amount off the beta but nowhere near livable. I've got other income sources and keep expenses to a minimum. Burnt through most of my cash building this and committing full time.
Motivation: joined Affinity Lab (coworking space in DC). I have a hard time getting work done outside that space now. Why I end up there til 1am on a saturday night. It surrounds me with awesome people who understand what I am doing and we help each other constantly. I don't think I've been there a day where I haven't been helped in some small or large way and helped someone in a small or large way. It plays a large part in what keeps me going.
Validation: I had a private beta in march, the same coworking space was a great place to start getting users. I also have been reaching out to people who I think would benefit from my service and having them try it. It has worked pretty well and the feedback really helped. I built a tool to help automate this process as much as possible. Which leads into...
Automation: love it. I've built a lot of tools to reduce the amount of time I spent doing things which are repetitive or semi-repetitive. As a solo founder everything is competing for my bandwidth. There is a lot of high value, repetitive things (hustling) which I think can be automated to some degree. I've built some infrastructure to help me do that. Trying to constantly watch myself and figure out where my time is best spent is important. However, this often conflicts with motivation: doing some valuable things suck. You need to find a balance or simply will yourself through, I don't have a good solution for this, yet.