As much as I cringed when I saw the "Now what?".
I loved that post. So motivational. Mainstreet and Tout are simple but brillant ideas.
Keep up the good work man.
> I want to reduce the number of clients or simultaneous projects to TWO at most.
So, true. The thing most people don't realize about freelancing is that juggling projects is a massive context switch. And, it is very bad, to continue the juggling metaphor, to drop a client deliverable while juggling clients.
I liked the detailed look at what your values are and how that ties into your goals. After talking with some friends recently, I went through this exercise and it helped me come up with a logical set of short-term goals that will get me to where I want to be.
Tout has about 700 users, and about ~15 paid users @ $30, with a good number of people "waiting" for a lower priced solo plan. Braintrust has a higher number of users, but most of them are no longer active -- so I've stopped looking too hard until the re-launch.
Congrats on getting people to pay. The biggest surprise the first time that you create a product is how hard it is to even get anyone to use it frequently, let alone pay.
Right. I try to define and track atleast one metric that gauges how sticky and useful my products are. For Braintrust, I track # of edits, for Tout, I track # of emails sent.
This is amazingly interesting and inspiring for me. It's my intention to put out a simple web app every month or two this year. I've been piddling with programming languages for years and this year was my first year to put out anything public. Reading things like this excites me even though we come from completely different positions in life.
