On being a single founder for 7 years
Mark, nice project,but don't be scared that the product is not completely finished ... it will never be ...
your most important next steps are now get customers , get customers and get customers ....
so
- remove the "closed beta" tag
- have a graphic designer give it a 2013 layout
- put up an price page
- buy some adwords to start doing live user testing
- start optimizing the sales funnel
This is truly a case of should have launched quicker, if this is really about a business.
It sounds more like a guy has been wandering around the world, living what is surely a very interesting nomadic existence, hacking up a storm, rather than building a business though.
JavaScript like scripting language? Custom markup? Beta for 5 years? This doesn't sound like the path to profits to me.
I've noticed there seems to be two definitions of a solo founder.
1) Single hacker trying to build a business and the product at the same time by themselves. They do everything, by themselves.
2) A business where there is a single founder with all the equity. They have employees and those employees are paid with currency.
In the case of 1, I think it's a very hard road. Most software is built by more than one person, and most businesses must involve more than one person. You can of course make pretty good money off of freelancing, but building a business around a product is tough. Of course, not impossible.
In the case of 2, you need to be willing to "put your money where your mouth is" because you'll need to pay people. And even then, if you see any success and want to grow faster, you probably won't be the only shareholder for long. Jeff Bezos started Amazon alone, but they're a public company now so there are lots of shareholders. However, it is interesting to look at eg Sergei Brin's net worth as a ratio of Google's market cap versus the same for Bezos and Amazon. Not splitting equity in the beginning makes a big difference later on if everything goes according to plan (which it rarely does, but hey).
The OP probably falls into definition #1
"This whole time, I worked on the platform source code. I feature-creeped for at least 5 years. I didn't have much of a portfolio to show for it either. "
Congrats on persevering for that long but I almost think this is a case example of the downside to being a single founder...no one to rein in your feature creep time.
This is definitely inspiring, and it looks like Mark has developed a very viable SaaS platform if the right demographic is targeted.
With that being said, I would suggest that he seriously consider a pivot in his marketing strategy due to competition which has emerged during his product development; Webs, Weebly and Squarespace come to mind. I would say at this point, small brick and mortar businesses are the most viable market target for a product like this.
Additionally, it might be worth investing a small sum to recreate the UXD, or at minimum reduce the use of gradients and move toward a more simplistic approach graphically. The center gradient overload is almost migraine inducing.
Other than that, I truly hope he's successful with the amount of work and personal funds which he's put in.
Too complicated for an average user, too simple for a developer/designer...sorry, doesn't sound good for me. This said, in your shoes, I'd probably try to find a very specific niche, or maybe to turn into a service for instantly hot page creation, like 1 short-lived pages, or something like that...my 2 cents
I have to say that at least from standpoint, this seems to be pretty heroic (to use quite a strong word) and kind of inspiring! To be able to believe in and forge ahead working on something you believe in. Regardless of the end result my own sense is that the at the end of the day the writer Mark can really be proud of his accomplishment.
I tried it, but I get
Server Error in '/' Application. Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
I had to read this article in Opera using view-source... tldr but I'm assuming this guy failed and I'm not surprised based on his blog code being such an awful mess... better luck next time
it's nice to see something that could be left as a side project evolving into a functional and hopefully successful product. Good luck! Did you switch programming languages in the process?
Reminds me of a pic I sent my programmer friend after not seeing him for 6 months... http://oi47.tinypic.com/2utk9b7.jpg
