[malcolmocean]

Hmm. I think my biggest milestone came when someone signed up for the free trial, didn't respond at all to the personal "how is the trial going?" message... didn't respond to my "btw, your trial is ending in a couple days... any questions?" message...

...and then their trial ended and they paid.

Even though I'd written a full software system at that point, the app was still fairly hands-on, and it wasn't until then that it was fully obvious that someone would pay for just the software. In retrospect this is a pretty big thing that it would have made sense to test much earlier somehow.

I'm pretty optimistic by nature, and Complice has felt promising since the beginning. I think it probably helped that while I had a vision/goal (= become ramen-profitable by graduation) I didn't spend too much time fretting about it. I just focused on making incremental improvements to the system (eg UX).

And this in many ways is the philosophy of Complice itself: stay oriented towards the big picture, but focus on what you can do today.