One thing doing a project full time teaches you is that the problems with full-time tech work in a company aren't problems because you're working for somebody else, they're problems of working on anything for a long period of time, regardless of who owns it.

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. :)

> 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.

I’m making $200 a month off of it, and I live in San Francisco. Needless to say, I’m practically fully funding it out of my savings. It’s this, anyway, it was on the front page a few weeks ago: https://getaether.net

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...

How do you make money off that? I always wonder what gives people confidence to make something new and untested vs picking an existing in demand product and improving it, sell b2b to people who actually pay for services.. don’t mean to downplay your project, just curious why you didn’t go b2b route?

The design and engineering challenge was interesting (I’m a product designer and an engineer) - and I had come out of a job I had not liked very much.

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.

Researching Slack-Alternatives I actually at least subscribed to some newsletter of yours which arrived a few days ago.

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?

Interesting - that might have been something else because I don’t market this as a slack alternative, and I did not send a newsletter a few days ago either. I sent one yesterday though.

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.

Sounds really interesting. I just thought it's yet another slack/IRC, this time with p2p.

I just misjudged time and maybe timezones made it the day before yesterday for me :). I meant your recent newsletter.

> You still have a boss, the fact that it is you helps with fewer things than one would think.

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.

You trade one regular issue boss with the biggest, baddest boss there ever is, the Free Markets.

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 left the 9-5 grind many years ago for freelancing then consulting and now hoping my side project takes off. I could never go back to a full time employee thing, nope!!

Curious to know if you'll repay the seed, or if seeds are refunded assuming it was a friends and family round.

It's more complicated than that. I'm not the only founder and funds were raised from small investors w/ a SAFE.

Paying money back especially money collected from friends and family and not institutions and VCs is not "complicated." Their "investment" never had a chance to make money you projected and you went on to work on someone else's investment. Given these facts I am sure your investors would have preferred to invest in the company where you work now versus the one you left.

It's not family and friends, first of all.

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.