I am now very excited to go back to the 9-5 grind.
Once you realise that, you also figure out that doing your own thing doesn't inherently buy you a seat in Valhalla by the virtue of being your own boss. You still have a boss, the fact that it is you helps with fewer things than one would think.
At least you got funded. I'm still bootstrapped, spending my own money for the privilege. :)
The best move my founder and I ever made, by leaps and bounds, was to not take any outside investment. If you can manage your cash flow and not get over excited about rocket trajectory growth, bootstrapping has its benefits; for founders especially.
Basically, a passion product, something I want to see exist. It has the chance to sustain me eventually, but I think I’ll run out of savings long before it comes there, unless, I don’t know, I make a business version and sell B2B...
Honestly, I think that explains a lot of the side/full time projects here.
OTOH, if you’re looking for a ‘Slack, but for async discussion’ app for your startup, hit me up for the B2B pilot. I have not much time left on my savings, but I’m working towards launching a B2B version of the same app.
I think to make money you need to focus on B2B, but it seems like a tough market right now. Anyways you'd have to focus your landing page on that.
Privacy? meh. Compliance stuff and no US servers or any 3rd party servers you'd need to make contracts with? Yay!
The 6 Month content limit feels off for B2B.
How does it differ from slack usablility wise?
For the B2B version the content limit can be set as a compliance thing, to however many months you want, or be disabled completely.
Compliance is even better: I can run it on premises, in any server you own, or in any AWS region you want, with no dependencies, no third party contracts, and I can guarantee I will see none of your data, you hold the content encryption keys.
Business version will have its own landing page, with its own benefits, etc. For example, that version isn’t P2P. It’s also not a Slack alternative, in that it doesn’t do chat, but longer form communication. In practice that means it takes place of email groups at your company.
I just misjudged time and maybe timezones made it the day before yesterday for me :). I meant your recent newsletter.
Worse yet, you now need to satisfy customers.
Not that that's inherently bad. In hindsight, though, it certainly lets you appreciate the times when you had a boss and life was simpler.
It certainly lends credence to the saying that having to earn earn for a living is incremental indentured servitude, instead of buying your freedom outright, you pay for it in micro transactions and pay interest for the privilege.
It doesn’t matter who your immediate counterparty is, whether be it your boss or the board or the stock exchange, the ultimate counterparty is the market itself. Having a business I think just makes the transaction a little simpler, a little more obvious.
I haven't started working on anything else or for anyone else - I just no longer believe this venture is going to work out and thus have planned to exit. My co-founders don't agree with my assessment.
FWIW you should probably be using something like MJML rather than hand-coding HTML tables. (There are a few alternatives, that just happens to be the one we use.)
This is how it turned out with Salted:
https://mailsend.app/sendy-airlabs/w/qP3rC892jhLqY763Z0DTBnY...
Not too bad for a first try, I think. If anyone needs help with Salted, happy to take a look.
One of the reasons people do side projects is that they want to be free of other concerns that govern larger projects, like being able to make money, existing code, design or frameworks, or simply, existing paths of thought. But after the 80% point, the project has already created its own ways of thinking about certain problems, and that means you'll have to solve some problems suboptimally just to retain the existing body of problems being solved optimally.
Compromises. Boring-but-important bits, like designing, coding (HTML tables ahoy) and sending launch emails, which I did, the whole day yesterday.
I think as a society we fundamentally underestimate how much the average person yearns for freedom, all day, every day. Selling that freedom has its benefits, but it's not a free lunch.